I’ve been using FB Ads Manager for awhile now, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to make a post about it. On one hand, it’s probably the most essential tool for anyone doing Facebook PPC. On the other hand, it had a few issues like hanging and flat out not working at times. However, I just downloaded the latest version of FB Ads Manager and it fixes most of the major problems I have with it so I think I’m ready to give my full FB Ads Manager review.
There are many advantages to doing pay per click marketing with Facebook. There’s a ton of converting traffic to be had, both US and internationally. Creating ads is relatively simple, and if you know what you’re doing, you can get clicks for pretty cheap. Conversely though, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can also pay through the nose as well, lol. There’s also no Quality Scores to deal with so you can make really good money direct linking.
The key to succeeding with Facebook PPC is to test. For each Facebook campaign I setup, I’ll usually test 30-40 ads at a time, and I have friends who test even more than that. I’ll first test different images in one campaign and then test my ad copy in another Then I’ll combine the best ads from each tests which is when I’ll start to actually make money. If you have any experience with Facebook PPC, you already know that doing this is an extremely tedious process as the interface isn’t designed to create ads very quickly. This is made worse by the fact that the Facebook reviewers often have nothing better to do than randomly reject your ads so you may end up repeating the process several times as well.
This is where FB Ad Manager comes in. Instead of creating all my ads by hand, FB Ads Manager lets me create and submit my ads almost automatically. I just need to enter in my campaign and ad info once, and FB Ads Manager will do all the hard work of creating my campaign and submitting each individual ad. Honestly, when this thing is working right, it’s completely awesome. FB Ad Manager was developed by Jonny from 4houraffiliate.com. It is actually a Firefox extension, so of course you will need to be running Firefox to use it. To start using it, go to View > Sidebar > FB Ad Manager. You’ll see the extension open up a sidebar to the side of your browser window.
If you are experienced with creating Facebook ads, you should be easy enough to figure out what you need to fill out. What’s really cool though are the split testing features of the FB Ads Manager. If you want to split test your ad texts, just click the checkbox and hit the ‘Add Another Ad Text’ button for each variation you want to use. It’s the same deal if you want to split test Images, Gender, and Ages. I don’t recommend split testing too many variables at once though as it becomes too confusing to manage. Stick with one variable for each campaign.
FB Ad Manager is smart enough to append a different subid with each ad so you can track properly (you are using tracking right?). It also supports a flexible ad naming syntax so you can better organize your campaigns. Another cool feature is the ability to save your campaigns to a file so you can recreate them later. In the latest version of FB Ad Manager, these ads are saved in xml format which makes it easier to read and edit if you want.
I mentioned earlier that occasionally FB Ads Manager will stop working. This is mainly because there’s no official Facebook API to do this sort of thing. So whenever something in the Facebook ads interface changes, it has the potential to break the extension. Although annoying, Jonny is pretty quick with releasing updates to fix any breakages. The another main issue I had with FB Ad Manager is that it would occasionally hang in the middle of submitting. Previously when this happened, you would just have delete the ads it did create and restart the process from the beginning. However the new FB Ads Manager v8 now has the ability to restart from where you left off. This is much needed and a great feature to have.
If you want to make big money with Facebook, you honestly need to invest in Facebook Ads Manager. The price is a little steep at $200, but if you value your time then investing in an automation tool like this is well worth it. You get lifetime updates, you can install it on all your computers and Jonny is constantly fixing bugs and adding new features to the extension. I’ve been using FB Ads Manager for several months now and I can’t see myself going back to the old way of creating ads. Honestly, it’s just way too painful.
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Thanks, bought through your aff link. Great work getting page1 top ranking on GGL for this
August 20th, 2010