Digital marketing can be very time consuming. Advertising across multiple channels and devices can consume all your bandwidth if you let it. That’s why you need to take advantage of every time saving tool and feature you can. Facebook has really grown and allowed users to automate and mass edit their campaigns in recent months. Utilizing these four features in Facebook will allow you to focus more on areas that really matter in your account, like creative!
Campaign Budget Optimization
This is a really useful feature available at the campaign level to help advertisers spend budget efficiently without having to dive into every single ad set all the time. So instead of giving each ad set a separate budget you give the campaign a single budget. From there, Facebook’s algorithms are going to find the best ad set(s) to spend your budget on. These algorithms update your budget in real time.
Here’s an example. Say you have two ad sets in a campaign each with a $200 daily budget. Ad Set 1 has great performance and consistently maxes out its daily spend while exceeding goals (ROAS, Cost/Conv, etc). Ad Set 2, despite having a $200 daily budget, struggles to utilize its full daily budget and does not convert as well as Ad Set 1. In fact, Ad Set 2 routinely only spends $50/day despite being given $200/day. We now have $150 in unspent daily budget that potentially could have and should have gone to Ad Set 1 which could have netted more results. With budget optimization enabled, Facebook would automatically stop spending on Ad Set 2 once the algorithms detected it not getting results efficiently and redistributed that spend to Ad Set 1 who performs really well. All this would be done in real time without manually adjusting bids at the ad set level.
To set up budget optimization, just edit one of your campaigns and toggle the setting to on. Here you can set your daily budget and still use a campaign spend limit should need be.
Automated Bidding
Historically, advertisers are accustomed to hearing all about cost per clicks and the bids associated with them. Updating those bids manually is becoming a thing of the past. Automation utilizing hyper complex algorithms is the future. Using your precious time to manually update bids is a time sink. Machine learning is going to bid for you much more efficiently in real time. If you are still using manual bidding in Facebook this is one setting you should definitely test. Try utilizing lowest cost as a bid strategy and allow Facebook to find the correct bids. You could find great success and it could help save time.
Automated Rules
Automated rules are a saving grace in Facebook. Especially if you have a large account with many campaigns, ad sets, and ads. It can be a pain keeping tracking of cost/conv here, frequency there, ROAS in another place, and then adjusting things based off those metrics. With automated rules set in place, Facebook will take care of those adjustments for you. Ever needed to decrease a budget because your cost/conversion got too high? Well automated rules can take care of that for you, even at 2am when you are sleeping. How about scheduling one set of ads in an ad set to turn off at a scheduled time/date and immediately have other ads start running? Automated rules can do that. Just select whatever you want the rule applied to, click on the drop down box for rules, and create a new rule.
Bulk Edits
Facebook has the ability to do bulk edits. No I’m not talking about selecting 5 ad sets and updating their budgets at the same time. I’m talking about uploading Excel files to make mass changes. By using this feature you can edit ad copy, URLs, etc…across different campaigns and ad sets. Very similar to how you might do so for Adwords (excuse me, I mean Google Ads).
First go into you campaigns/ad sets/ads and select what you want to edit. The click the button highlighted in the picture below and export selected. This will download an excel file that contains many different fields. Simply change what you want to update in the excel file and then upload it back to Facebook using the Import section of the dropdown. This method is a very easy way to update 200 URLs in one go for example.
Conclusion
These four tools should be something you are using or at least testing if you are advertising in Facebook. They can help save a lot of time and increase performance with automation. More time in your day means focusing on more important things like creative, answering client emails, or working on next quarters budgets.