Facebook is rolling out a new version of its Ads Manager interface that will streamline campaign creation, management and measurement for self-serve advertisers.
The new Ads Manager will roll out to an initial group of advertisers Wednesday, with plans to migrate all advertisers by early next year, AdExchanger has learned.
For any company courting SMBs, as Facebook is, Google’s AdWords platform is the golden example. And indeed, many of the enhancements to Ads Manager take a page from Google’s AdWords playbook.
The rollout replaces at least three tools – Ads Create, Ads Manager and Ads Reporting – with a unified dashboard, which Facebook believes will reduce confusion and inefficiencies around campaign assets and data. Juggling separate tools can lead to latency and confusion, and the problems are compounded when a business runs multiple campaigns.
Additionally the revamp adds features that will be familiar to search marketers – such as bulk editing of campaigns, suggestions for ad creative and unified measurement breakdowns of audience data by age, country and gender.
SMBs account for about 50% of Facebook’s advertising revenue, Nanigan’s SVP of marketing, Dan Slagen, said during a SunTrust Internet & Digital Media Conference in April. And Facebook said in June that it now has more than 30 million small business users with active pages, but it declined to say how many of those were paid advertisers. Converting them to its paid media offering will require offering tools that are simple, robust and, above all, effective.
At the same time, Facebook does not want to use its more robust self-serve offering to choke off its marketing partner ecosystem, which is still an important driver of ad spend growth. The company is emphasizing that its Power Editor and PMD ecosystem are the best options for advanced advertisers.
At first, the consolidated Ads Manager will be available only to new advertisers. Existing advertisers will continue to work in the current Ads Manager product until Facebook decides to move all its ad clients over, which it expects to do by early next year.
“Based on direct feedback from our advertisers, we’re beginning to test a new version of our Ads Manager to better help them achieve their business goals on Facebook,” a company spokesperson confirmed. “The new Ads Manager provides a single interface for ad creation, management and reporting. It’s rebuilt to be faster, easier to use and offer more guidance to advertisers when they need it.”
