Wednesday, October 27, 2021
Many people think that Facebook Ads Manager is the only Facebook Ad tool you need. But did you know that there are a host of other Facebook Ads tools that can help you improve your ad spend ROI?
Especially if you are a large company or are simultaneously running multiple ads campaigns or have a larger agency and work with a lot of clients, keeping track of your Facebook ads as part of your Facebook marketing can be a challenge. After all, there will be a wide variety of campaigns and each of these require careful planning and execution. Here are some Facebook Ads tools that can really make your job easier – and improve your bottom line.
Do you have a large team that you coordinate with? One way to make this easier is with an ad management platform. Depending on the program, you can share many of the tasks with others. At the same time, the security of your business financial information is maintained. Here are some examples:
This is the default advertising management tool within Facebook itself. The tool also works on Messenger and Instagram, since Facebook owns these brands. At the heart of the tool is its analytics: Facebook will give you a wide variety of metrics that tell you how effective the current social media sites campaign is. Another aspect of this tool is that it allows you to create the ads in a user-friendly manner straightforward enough for even first-time users. Lastly, Facebook Ads Manager allows you to retarget and adjust your Facebook marketing strategy to secure a more promising audience.
In case you didn’t know, Facebook is investing a lot into helping you use their tools more effectively. Check out their Facebook Blueprint for FREE Facebook training to help even an experienced user!
Facebook Ads Manager is still a very complex tool to completely master, but Facebook has been working hard to make it simpler. For those companies who felt Facebook Ads were too complex or didn’t have the robust Facebook features they were looking for, a number of private companies developed Facebook Ads tools that were in many ways more robust. If you are spending over a few thousand dollars a month on Facebook Ads, you owe it to yourself to check out the following platforms:
For firms with multiple social media managers, Qwaya is a great program. That’s because the platform accommodates more than one user on the same account. Like Facebook’s proprietary manager, you can create future campaigns themselves in-program. Analytics are provided, but not just Facebook’s own numbers. Instead, your Google analytics information is included. Qwaya will help you bid for advertising space, and decide when to put a campaign on hold. Another feature is that you can save ads off-platform with URL creation. They’ll let you schedule ads, and even provide training, allowing you to complete the entire process of creating a new campaign from a single area.
One of the cool things about using Qwaya is that you can save time and money by running simulations based on sample audiences before posting anything.
Pricing is tiered: If you’re the only user, it’s $149 per month. Other tiers are $249 for 5 users, and $349 for 10 users.
Prefer to work with an ad manager that collaborates with other advertising vendors? If so, then AdEspresso might be a great choice. That’s because they are an advertising partner with Facebook and Instagram, but they also work with Google-based services. This provides you a greater amount of flexibility on where you place your AdEspresso-managed ads and can improve your design experience.
AdEspresso specializes in PPC priced ads. You can determine how much to bid for Facebook and Instagram space. But before you get to that point, check out AdEspresso’s A/B testing. This feature is great, because it helps you decide what advertising approaches are most likely to succeed before the first dime is paid to the advertising vender. An added plus: AdEspresso helps you collaborate, not just with your team, but your clients as well. One of the great things about AdEspresso is how easy it is to use for a business owner.
Pricing: starts at $58 per month based on your monthly spend instead of the size of your team. Those who spend more, pay more.
Running an enterprise-level agency? Have really large businesses for clients? If so, then Hootsuite Ads might be the best choice. Why? Well, AdEspresso was bought by Hootsuite back in 2017, and it is really meant for small and medium-sized businesses. Hootsuite Ads, on the other hand, was turned into the option for larger businesses. The difference is significant: Hootsuite Ads is less self-service than its smaller-business counterpart. They also have better security features, and a full range of ad planning and execution tools. Lastly, the platform is intended to support all kinds of advertising.
Pricing: starts at $29 per month, and is based on the number of social profiles you’re managing and how many people use the account.
Want really good analytics to help measure campaign success? That’s the strength of Adstage, which claims to help you manage advertisements all in one place. Like other tools, they will also help you talk to clients about how their ad campaign is performing. This management tool also works with Google Sheets to organize data, and has relationships with the different advertising providers to help improve the return on investment you’ll get from each ad placement.
Pricing: includes both monthly and annual-billing rates starting at $119 per month billed annually, and $149 on a month-to-month contract. Tiers are based on the amount of monthly ad spend.
Running a small business? That’s the strength of Wordstream’s Social Ads tool. The aim of this service is to get 60% more leads while spending 10% less on advertising. How is this done? By spending the money more efficiently. Another distinctive feature of this service is that they work with both Bing ads and other platforms, so they’re quite a bit less “territorial” than other programs. Of course, they do many of the things other programs do, so you’ll want to be careful and avoid unnecessary duplication.
Wordstream also provides you individual advice and coaching from them for an added fee. No need to bring in another consultant.
Pricing: depends on what you want. They price based on monthly spend and what consulting services you choose to purchase. If you buy 3 months at a time, the minimal price is $299 per month.
Pagemodo is known for being a Facebook contests and app provider, but did you know they also have a simplified Facebook Ad tool? Their design tools are user-friendly, they provide simplified targeting, and their analytics are actionable.
But that’s not all. For advertisers that want to make a fan or company Facebook page really pop, Pagemodo is a great tool. They have a variety of templates and branding options to help your Facebook Ads stand out, even if you only want to use them as a Facebook Ads creator tool. But that’s not all: Pagemodo also has a plethora of tools to help your Facebook page get more likes and follows. Need I say more?
Pricing: Starts at only $6.25 per month if paid annually.
Facebook Ads Retargeting
Let’s face it: most of the time potential buyers don’t purchase something the first time they see an advertisement for a product or service. In order to get a greater ROI, consider a quality retargeting campaign. Here are some resources to help, in addition to launching retargeting campaigns inside Facebook Ads Manager or leveraging some of the other Facebook Ads tools mentioned above.
AdRoll is a great way to turn great first impressions into the sales you need. At the heart of retargeting campaigns is the browser cookie: place a cookie on their browser, and show your ads on other websites. AdRoll claims that they have relationships with a large variety of ad vendors, giving you many different options on where to place those ads above and beyond Facebook. Central to AdRoll is their AI approach: computers decide what ads to place, and where to place them. Just give AdRoll a budget, and it goes to work.
Pricing: AdRoll is free to start, with additional featured plans starting at a mere $9 (Essentials plan) and $19 (Growth plan) per month.
Losing a lot of smartphone and tablet users? Perfect Audience does retargeting for more than just desktops. In fact, they specifically mention their ability to retarget the same customer, no matter which of their devices they’re using at any given time. They’re able to do this retargeting through more than just your main website, as well. For example, they can connect with your customers through Facebook, Twitter, and Shopify ads. This service is very versatile, so you can reach a wide variety of customers with your brand message and improve your ads performance.
Pricing: is “pay as you go.” New customers get a free trial worth 14 days’ service or $100 ad spend, whichever comes first.
Facebook Ads Automation
If we’re honest with ourselves, we will admit that too much time with analytics reports can really keep us from doing other things. Unfortunately, placing ads individually all of the time is tedious. You can reduce the time spent on ad management with automation services. Here are some good ones:
In a nutshell, Connectio’s automation tool uses Facebook’s own AI functions to help you make more money with Facebook ads. For example, the tool can target underperforming ads for deletion. They also help you save time on ads management by telling you what’s wrong with your campaign. Since they use Facebook infrastructure, this tool works only on Facebook. Then again, given the number of Facebook ads you place every week, that’s a big percentage of your advertising budget.
A cool feature of Connectio is that this Facebook tool can break your Facebook contact list into customer groups.
Pricing: Not available online.
For those trying to automate more than just Facebook ads, RevealBot is a great option. In addition to the Facebook platforms, RevealBot works with Snapchat and Google. Basically, the idea behind a RevealBot-moderated campaign is to spend less money on non-performing advertisements. They do this by helping you generate a set of rules for the ads. For example, ads generating a lower-than-desired click through rate can be delisted, and a new one put up that conforms to your ideals. This frees you up to plan more campaigns, or to fine-tune that awesome new advertisement, and allows ad spend to be allocated more efficiently.
Because RevealBot is so sophisticated in its functionality, it can provide robust automated reporting on what works and what doesn’t that will delight you.
Pricing: is based on your monthly ad spend, and starts at $99 per month. There’s a free 14-day trial available, and 2 months free per year with an annual subscription.
How does full automation sound? That’s the idea behind Smartly.io. The way it works, is that you create your ads and then test them with Smartly’s software to figure out what’s likely to work. Then, you set it and forget it. Almost. Actually, you set the budget, and indicate what you want Smartly to do. Their services include Pinterest ads, so there’s some flexibility here. Then, you watch and wait for results. As with its competitors, the idea is to save up time that can be used for more creative aspects of your job.
Pricing: This one isn’t cheap. The minimum price is $2500 per month if you spend less than $50,000 per month on advertising. Then, it’s a percentage of your spend, between 3 and 5%, depending on your budget.
Facebook Ads Creation
All of this talk about how to manage your ads and save time for fun stuff is worthless if you can’t create the ads in the first place. Here are some tools to help with this important task.
The Facebook ads library is an interesting tool, because it is designed for transparency rather than utility. Nevertheless, it can be an extremely useful tool, because it offers a searchable database from which to determine which ads are currently being run on Facebook. Using this tool, you can successfully determine which ads are common, which ads are unusual, and more. It can function as a market research tool in that respect, as well as an idea generator for services and products that fit within your industry or niche.
Researching the advertising campaign of your biggest competitor (or competitors) stands out among your other marketing tools. Facebook ads library is one of the simplest and most effective Facebook advertising tools currently available, as it allows you to evaluate social media accounts’ advertising campaigns and determine how you can capitalize on the work and techniques of others.
Canva is a great graphic design tool. With its various features, Canva allows you to create company logos, advertising flyers, social media stories, and more. They have a huge collection of clip art available to premium users. You can also use the software for photo editing, and even create advertising goodies like infographics. Need to distribute something offline? Canva has a printing service, as well.
Pricing: there are both paid and free options. Pay for the pro version annually for $9.95 per month.
Sometimes, the stock photography and clip art in your other programs aren’t enough. When that happens, Unsplash is a great place to find every type of stock photography. Their licenses allow commercial use, derivatives, and other goodies. Best of all, it’s free! Really. I was always a user of a few different stock photo sites until I standardized by using Unsplash on this blog and all of my presentations from the advice of branding guru D.P. Knudten. I haven’t looked back.
Facebook Ads Reporting
Facebook ads reporting allows you to use the social media platform to create custom reports to specific audiences. In a vein similar to Google analytics, ads reporting is one of the manager tools that makes it easy to create custom audiences for social media management reports. This is one of the more important Facebook advertising tools, because it allows you to distribute different pieces of data to different people on your team. Some departments or team members, for instance, are involved in the customer journey aspect of a business, while others are tasked with bringing in potential customers.
Using Facebook advertising tools like reporting allows you to create customizable dashboards, schedule reports, and differentiate the data on those reports to make sure your team is working as cohesively and effectively as possible. Reporting is one more automation tool to add to your advertising and analytics tools arsenal, in order to cut down on the amount of time you spend poring through ad campaigns and conducting your own analyses.
Additional tools can help you complete your advertising tool and campaign evaluations to determine how well you are reaching your target audience. AdsReport is specifically designed for social media marketing through Facebook, as it is used entirely to evaluate the social media ads you run through Facebook. Developed as a powerful tool to take the place of Facebook’s own in-house analytics tool, AgoraPulse allows you to evaluate your ads campaign performance without investing a great deal of time or money. AgoraPulse is an effective social media strategy tool for people who want to focus their marketing campaigns on Facebook and are in search of marketing software that makes evaluating existing campaigns easy and straightforward.
What are your favorite Facebook ads tools? Let us know in the comments.
Hero photo by Will Francis on Unsplash