Focusing On “Objectives” Facebook Simplifies Ad Creation, Measurement

In June of this year, Facebook announced that it would overhaul and dramatically simplify the process of buying ads on the site to eliminate confusion. Today, Facebook is taking a major step in that direction. The company is announcing a redesign of its ad creation/buying and reporting tools.

Rather than asking users to select a particular an unit, the company now will provide a list of objectives and take marketers through a flow based on the objective selected. The following are the available marketing objectives:

There are no offline events (e.g. store visits, coupon redemptions) available at this point. However Facebook is clearly thinking about these scenarios for the future.

After the marketer selects an objective Facebook presents the appropriate ad type. Facebook ultimately places the ad where it believes it will best perform; however marketers can also choose where ads will appear:

As before, Facebook will place your ad where we see it performing best — whether it’s in mobile News Feed, desktop News Feed and/or on the right-hand column. However, knowing some advertisers want to tailor ads based on where they will appear, we’re now giving marketers the option to choose where their ad will be placed. 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. This means businesses can better tailor ad experiences based on where people will see their message.

Behind the scenes Facebook will optimize the ad and its exposure for whatever audience the marketer has defined. All the audience targeting parameters and options remain intact.

Users can upload multiple images and preview or test different creatives accordingly. Right now all ads will carry the same copy. (The Power Editor flow is very similar; however there is still the option to select ad types and to create multiple versions of the same ad with different copy.)

On the reporting side Facebook has also changed and updated the Ads Manager to more clearly reflect performance by ad objective:

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.

What this means is that marketers can test the performance of different Facebook ad types and see the cost and outcomes in a side-by-side comparison view. This more direct ROI focus will also do a better job of proving value to marketers, some of whom may still be uncertain or confused about whether their social media ads are delivering value.

About The Author

Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.