If you were seated next to a digital marketer in agency land last week you’ve probably heard some Gordon Ramsay-esque insults thrown at Facebook’s ad-buying tools. Fear not as there are some tasty optimisations and new features coming to the platform.
“Move fast and break things” quipped Mark Zuckerberg to his original development team in the early days of Facebook. Facebook’s incredible pace of development is a testament to this mantra and it’s this attitude that has seen the company revolutionise how the world connects at such a rapid pace. For us marketers however, (especially us Facebook ad specialists) it’s never a smooth ride. Learning, testing and breaking is your everyday and the platform has seen some major bugs recently with the introduction of these new updates.
RIP Power Editor
Last week Facebook announced Power Editor will be rolled into Ads Manager to create a more powerful and comprehensive tool for marketers. This is a big win for marketers and agency owners as there was increasing levels of over-lap between the two tools and preferences were split between marketers.
Power Editor lovers will not see much of a change apart from the new name and Ads Manager users will see some more powerful tools come into their world. Power Editor has been around since 2009 and the merging will see a far more consistent approach to the world’s most used self-serve ad-buying tool. Changes have begun rolling out and are likely to be staggered across various ad accounts over the next week.
Facebook eyes off dying print catalogue revenue
As a part of the sweeping changes announced this Tuesday, Facebook has revamped the ‘Collection Ads’ feature to help print catalogues live on in the mobile era.
Facebook has been testing its new lifestyle templates with 12 retailers. The templates are designed to provide retailers with the beauty and intrigue of a traditional catalogue coupled with interactivity (click to buy options) and powerful user targeting.
Facebook stated the new lifestyle templates are aimed at helping print catalogue marketers in “bringing the richness of their catalogue creative to mobile.” It’s a clear play at grabbing some of the revenue that once poured into the printed catalogue industry. If Facebook can convince some of the old-school marketers to spend the time and budget to properly trial the new ad formats it’s likely to be on a winner.
Is it a Facebook ad or an Instagram story? Maybe both.
Instagram Stories has seen some incredible success since its launch just on 12 months ago. One of its biggest victories was arguably the shine it took off Snapchat’s stellar growth. Instagram stories has been used by around 50% of business accounts in the past month according to a Facebook spokesperson.
One of the big pushes by Facebook is ramping up the advertising options on Instagram. The platform is rolling out the option to allow marketers to turn their Instagram stories into Facebook ads and vice versa.
This gives marketers a raft of creative tools like stickers, drawing options and filters to help create posts that may disguise better as organic content in user’s feeds as they’ll look less, well ad-like.
This comes with a word of warning for the lazy marketers out there. The good digital marketers know it pays to spend time customising your content to fit the feed in which it’s viewed. The ‘rinse and repeat’ approach across platforms has never been the best strategy out there for engagement but the savvy marketers will make the new features work well.
The new features might add to the continual learning process and buggy performance of Ads Manager for Facebook marketers but there is no doubt with each update comes more power and potential in the world’s biggest social network.
What ad format are you seeing the most traction with? Let me know in the comments.
By James Towers, founding partner & lead Facebook strategist at 16K Agency – Stockholm, Sweden & Melbourne, Australia