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A Tour: Facebook Rolls Out Changes to Ad Sets and Ads

Jon Loomer

Back in August, Facebook announced that they would soon be making structural changes to campaigns. Those changes are now rolling out!

The purpose of this post is to not only help you understand those changes, but to show you exactly what is happening. In addition to moving things around, there is some new functionality that you need to be aware of.

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Overview: The Change to Ad Sets and Ads

In the past, the roles of campaigns, ad sets and ads were broken down as follows:

Going forward, they will work like this:

By making this structural change, advertisers will now be forced to keep all ads within an ad set focused on a single audience. This will help optimization as well as help advertisers make informed decisions about what is working and what isn’t.

Let’s say that you regularly target fans and website visitors with your ads. You should create two ad sets, one for fans and one for website visitors. Then you should create any ad variations within those ad sets.

Beyond the structural changes, I wanted to give you an idea of what all of this looks like. Previously, ad sets looked like this in Power Editor…

Now they look like this (with some variations based on objective)…

Note that the “Estimated Daily Reach” is not currently working. A likely early bug. You’ll see where you can find that in a minute.

Now let’s take a closer look at each section.

Top Bar

At the top of an ad set, you’ll see the following information:

Budget & Schedule

You shouldn’t see anything particularly new here. Budgeting and scheduling was set in the ad set previously, so nothing more than a few minor cosmetic changes were made.

If you change to lifetime budgeting, you can take advantage of dayparting and run your ads on particular days or at particular times.

Audience

Here is where the changes really begin. By default, you’ll see that the ad set above is defaulted to be shown to everyone in the United States over the age of 18. Click the “Edit Audience” button and you’ll get a dialog that looks like this…

You’ll be able to edit any of the following:

As you can see in the image above, this is where you’ll be able to see the potential audience size — at least temporarily.

You’ll notice that there isn’t a text box created for Excluded Custom Audiences. It’s still possible, it’s just not overly obvious. This matches the experience in the ad create tool.

Once you select an audience, there’s a drop-down menu to choose and exclude it…

By default, you’ll be targeting “All” connections (those who are and aren’t connected to you). This helps streamline the process. But if you choose the “Advanced Connection Targeting” radio button, you’ll see the following…

There isn’t anything new here, it just may be displayed a little bit differently and in a new location.

Placement

Selecting placement of your advertising looks just as it did before. It’s simply been moved from ad sets to ads.

Just a reminder that “Partner Mobile Apps” refers to the new Facebook Audience Network. If this is selected, your ads will also be shown in participating mobile applications. The previews for those ads will continue to show on the right within the ads view.

You can choose the mobile devices you’d like to target by clicking on the “All Mobile Devices” drop-down…

Optimization & Pricing

This is where the biggest changes were made. Facebook is simplifying the bidding process:

In our ad creation interfaces, we’ll no longer describe the OCPM (optimized CPM) bid type with the term “OCPM”. Instead, we’re describing how Facebook can “Optimize for” your objective. We’ll default to this option in the Ads Create Tool and in Power Editor. The optimization hasn’t changed; we are just describing it more explicitly.

We’re eliminating the multiple objectives (ex: clicks, reach, social and actions) manual bidding option in Power Editor. This will not impact already configured or running ads with this bid type and it will continue to be available through the API. Additionally, for some objectives, we’re offering a new option to “Optimize for” daily unique reach.

Following is what it looks like when you click the “Optimize for” drop-down for an ad set with an objective of Clicks to Website…

As you can see, you’ll have the following options:

So to reiterate Facebook’s quote above, oCPM is not going away — simply the way they label it.

If you use the Clicks to Website objective, you’ll have the following pricing options:

The second option (set the target amount you want to pay…) replaces the former “manual bidding” option that was within Optimization & Pricing before. Note that when you select the “target amount” option, Facebook says the following:

Your ad will be delivered to people who are likely to convert for less than your bid. While this is uncommon, your cost per app engagement may exceed your bid.

The Daily Unique Reach option is Facebook’s entry into frequency bidding. If you’re afraid you’re showing your ad too frequently to users, you can make sure you only show it to users once per day.

Optimization & Pricing Options by Objective

Here’s an overview of the options depending on your objective…

Page Likes

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Post Engagement

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Clicks to Website

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Website Conversions

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Event Responses

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Offer Claims

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Video Views

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Desktop App Engagement

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Desktop App Installs

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Mobile App Engagement

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Mobile App Installs

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Local Awareness

Optimize For:

Pricing:

Ads

As you can see above, very little has changed. My guess is that Facebook kept the look and feel the same as before to avoid confusion. Where you’ll no longer be able to make changes at the ad level, Facebook provides a clarifying note.

In the Audience step…

And in Optimization & Pricing…

You have to assume that these will eventually go away as they just take up space right now.

A Few Notes on Changes

Here are a few things you should know…

1. This is a rollout. If you haven’t seen these changes yet, you will soon.

2. The delivery and performance of existence ads will not be affected.

3. You may migrate current campaigns to the new structure.

4. You will not be forced to migrate old campaigns to the new structure until January of 2015.

Your Turn

Do you have these changes yet? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

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