Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has redesigned its ad buying and reporting tools to reflect a more objective-based buying and reporting approach. Essentially, the goal is to let advertisers state their objectives, and deliver on that accordingly, rather than advertisers having to determine which units to spend their dollars on, and hope for the best.
This comes after Facebook’s efforts to simplify its ad products this year, which involved the elimination of certain units, such as online offers, sponsored results and question ads.
Also in line with this strategy, the company recently enabled advertisers to choose a single image size for their ads to be used for all types of ads across the social network.
“Businesses told us that when creating an ad, they didn’t want to choose an ad unit — they wanted to meet an objective. We spoke with marketers of all types and sizes to uncover the objectives that matter most to them,” the company says in a post on its Facebook for Business site.
These objectives include: clicks, conversions, page post engagement, page likes, app installs, app engagement, in-store offer claims and event responses.
So now, Facebook asks the advertiser right up front what the objective is, and then suggests an appropriate ad type.
“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,” Facebook says. “However, knowing some advertisers want to tailor ads based on placement, we’re now giving 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. This means businesses can better tailor ad experiences based on where people will see their message.”
The Ads Manager tool has been updated to map ad results directly to the stated objective, so you can easily see if it’s meeting that particular goal.
Facebook has already started rolling out the changes, and the roll-out will continue over the coming weeks.
