Are you creating an ad and seeing all these switches, toggles and buttons and wondering which ones should you use and which ones should you avoid? Today we’re gonna walk through nine Facebook Ads Manager features. Plus at the end, we’ll share with you our favourite type of Ad Objective. This one can make all the difference if you’re not already using it.
Accessing Your Campaign
Let’s start here with an orientation of where we’re headed in this tutorial. We’ll show you some Facebook Ads Manager features at the Campaign level, at the Ad Set level and at the Ad level. To get to your Campaign level go to business.facebook.com/adsmanager.
If you’re not in the right account, go ahead and click your little pull-down right here and select the account that you want to be inside of.
Let’s start at Campaign settings. We went ahead and set up an example Campaign, but if you need to set up your own Campaign, you’re gonna click Create right here on the left and the dialog box will walk you through setting up a new Campaign.
To get into your Campaign, you’re gonna click this little Edit button right here at your Campaign level.
A/B Test Feature
The first little feature that we get asked a lot about is the A/B Test feature. If you have a limited budget or a shorter timeframe, you can do your own manual testing process. Click over here and learn how to do your own manual testing! If you have a bigger budget, the A/B Test feature is something you could definitely play with. To get started with it, you’re simply going to click the button that says Get Started.
Campaign Budget Optimisation
The next feature that is usually defaulted to on is the Campaign Budget Optimisation. This is a feature that is both famous and infamous on Facebook. Some people love it and some people hate it. Which camp do you fall into? For the sake of this test we’ll be leaving this button on.
Campaign Budget Optimisation basically sets the budget at the Campaign level versus the Ad Set level. You might have, let’s say three, four or five Ad Sets inside of your Campaign. If you have this little button toggled on, Facebook is going to disperse that budget that you set at the Campaign level across all of your Ad Sets. Some Ad Sets may get a lot more of your budget and other Ad Sets may get less. So if you’re doing a bunch of audience testing or if you have a lot of Ad Sets that you wanna test, Campaign Budget Optimisation may not be your best friend. If you want to test, let’s say four or five audiences that you already know are real winners for you, then this is a great place to turn on Campaign Budget Optimisation. It can have the impact of really optimising your results and getting you the lowest cost per result possible.
Accessing Your Ad Set
Now let’s move into the Ad Set and turn on some features there. You can navigate to the Ad Set by clicking New Ad Set on the left-hand menu or right in the middle of the top menu.
You can also navigate to your Ad Set by clicking the blue hyperlink at your Campaign level or checking the little box at the side and then clicking your Ad Set tab in the middle. Lots of ways to get into your Ad Sets.
Lookalike Expansion
At your Ad Set level, if you are using Lookalikes then you might have noticed this little feature. It is this little button that appears right below your Custom Audience that says, Lookalike Expansion. It allows Facebook to dynamically expand your audience and it has the potential to achieve wonders for your ad costs. So click it and give it a try!
Detailed Targeting Expansion
Another button that people often ask me about is the Detailed Targeting Expansion. If you’re targeting an audience in your Detailed Targeting and you click this little button right here below, this will expand the audience to other people who might also be interested in your ads.
For both of these expansion buttons what we recommend is doing one audience with the expansion turned on and one audience or Ad Set with the expansion turned off. Then you can compare apples to apples and see how these little buttons are working for you.
Automatic Placements
Now, once we scroll down in the Ad Set, you’ll see Auto Placements versus Manual Placements. We always recommend doing the Auto Placements. Some people think that they wanna do Manual Placements because maybe they don’t have an Instagram account. The good news is you don’t have to have an Instagram account to run ads on Instagram. In fact, a good portion of your budget when you select Auto Placements is going to Instagram! So even if you didn’t know you were doing Instagram ads, you’re automatically doing them when you select Auto Placements.
Dynamic Creative
At your Ad Set level, right under the Conversion box, you’re gonna see this little feature called Dynamic Creative. It’s honestly one of the best Facebook Ads Manager features. So we’ll toggle that on and show you exactly how to use it.
So what Dynamic Creative does is make different combinations of your Ad Creative and deliver them to people who historically love images or love videos or love GIFs or love long copy or short copy and it allows Facebook to really customise this for each individual, which is pretty awesome.
In order to use this you’re gonna toggle the button on and then at the Ad level, this is where you can add in all of your creative elements. The first thing that you’re going to do is select your images, videos and GIFs. You can select existing assets or you can upload new ones. You can have a maximum of 10 videos, images, GIFs and slideshows.
The next thing that you can add in are your text variations and how this feature works best is when you’re just adding in a couple variations of your winning copy. If you have not gone through a manual testing process yet with your copy, imagery and headlines, we highly recommend doing that.
The next thing that you’re going to add in are a couple of your top performing headlines and multiple descriptions (if any), that is the little line of text that lives right below the Headline.
Next is the Call to Actions. You can click on the little pull down menu to get all of the options and select the ones which are most applicable to your ads.
Optimise Creative Per Person
The next feature is actually related to Dynamic Creative. So it’s this little toggle button right here, which allows you to optimise all of these Creative Elements for each individual person. If you’re using Dynamic Creative go ahead and toggle this little button on. This again, it’s just allowing Facebook to combine all of these elements into a really individualised experience for each individual person who sees your ads.
Optimise Text Per Person
As you scroll down at the Ad level, right under the description you’re going to see this little feature called Optimised text per person. Hover over the optimised texts per person, click Edit and then simply toggle that on. This is going to allow your text to kinda swap between fields. So your headline could become your primary copy, for example.
This is a really smart tool but don’t worry, it’s only gonna draw from copy that you have already written and that you’ve already selected to go into your ad. We’ve seen that the results are really good. So go ahead and flip that on and see how it does for you!
Before we get into my last tip, we assure you that you can layer all of these together. Anything that we’ve mentioned that is good to turn on, just turn it on and see how it does.
The Best Facebook Ad Objective
The final thing that we wanna take you through is our favourite type of Ad Objective.
At the Campaign level you’re gonna see three columns with different objective types. My favourite type hands down are Conversion Ads. These ads are the most powerful type of ads that you can run that really tell Facebook to optimise for emails or phone numbers, credit card transactions (if you have an e-commerce storefront) but it does come with a couple of setup steps. You’ll need to install the Pixel on your website and first verify your domain and do a few little housekeeping tasks.But if you’re up for it, we highly recommend that the majority of your budget gets spent on Conversion Ads!
