Facebook is making some tweaks to its tools for managing ads that should give advertisers more data — and make it easier for them to act on that data.
Ads Manager has a more streamlined layout that Facebook says is meant to highlight performance data, giving advertisers the ability to see how ads are doing in the same workplace where they create and edit those ads.
Facebook’s enhancements are aimed at giving it an edge over its primary competitor for ad dollars: Google.
“Google has been the unchallenged leader for some time, with perhaps 30 percent of global digital ad revenue,” said John Koetsier, VP of research for VB Insight, VentureBeat’s research practice. “Facebook is much smaller, at maybe 10 percent, but it’s accelerating while Google is decelerating.”
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The new Ads Manager homepage shows your account’s total ad spend over the previous week. You’ll be able to drill down into a campaign, set of ads, or single ad, and you’ll see a page with a graph showing performance, audience, and results. You can adjust date ranges and set filters to zero in on how the ad is performing with various subsets of the demographics you’ve targeted. And you’ll be able to save reports — and email them to your team — at specified intervals.
The idea is to put data about ads as close as possible to the place where you create and edit those ads.
Here’s a before and after showing how Ads Manager has changed.
Above: Facebook Ads Manager — the old version.
Above: Facebook’s Ads Manager — the new version, as of June 2015.
For big advertisers, Power Editor offers the ability to create and track a lot of ads simultaneously. This tool has also been upgraded with a larger layout for creating ads, and some enhancements to its bulk editing and search capabilities (see screenshot below).
“Facebook upgrading Ads Manager is just one piece of Facebook making it easier for advertisers — especially larger advertisers — to keep shoveling money into the Facebook marketing machine,” Koetsier said.
“We’ve been working closely with marketers and agencies of all sizes to understand what they need to improve the process of buying, optimizing, and managing their ad campaigns. These significant upgrades to Ads Manager and Power Editor reflect our commitment to drive measurable business objectives,” said Facebook’s Matt Idema, the director of ads product marketing, in a statement provided by a Facebook spokesperson.
Above: Facebook’s improved Power Editor offers better search and batch-editing tools for big advertisers.
