Earlier this week, Facebook announced the redesign of its ad buying and reporting tools.
In its new avatar, the ad buying process starts with a simple question — what’s your advertising objective? The tools recommend an appropriate ad based on that objective, and then help determine how these ads performed against the objective specified.
Facebook has been aggressively streamlining advertising options in recent times. In July, Facebook removed online offers, sponsored results, and question ads. In August and September, Facebook allowed marketers to upload one image size that would work for all types of ads on Facebook, and started offering a preview of how they would appear across Facebook.
Facebook places ad where it sees it performing best — whether it’s in mobile News Feed, desktop News Feed and/or on the right-hand column. However, the latest update allows marketers the option to choose where their ad appears. For example, a marketer looking to drive traffic to their website can now place a desktop ad with a link to their full desktop site, and a separate mobile ad that links to their mobile site.
The Ads Manager tool is also updated to map results directly to the objective that marketers chose when they created their ad. Ads Manager will now show the objective, the number of times the objective was met, and the cost per stated objective.
For instance, if an advertiser wanted its ad campaign to drive Website Conversions, now we will show how many Website Conversions the ad campaign drove.
The new features are available via all ad creation tools, including the Ads Create Tool, Power Editor, and the API.
The objective-based ad buying and reporting is a useful change. More often than not, businesses don’t want to choose an ad unit, but want to meet an objective like Clicks to Website, Website Conversions, Page Post Engagement, Page Likes, App Installs, App Engagement, In-store Offer claims, Event Responses, et al. The new system would help marketers to focus on what matters to them most: driving results for their business.