New Facebook Ads Manager: A Complete Guide

[NOTE: The following is a guide to the latest updates to Facebook Ads Manager. Go here for a guide to Facebook Power Editor updates.]

When I logged into my Facebook Ads Manager today, I was pleasantly surprised that I was greeted with the new design…

The new Facebook Ads Manager is rolling out to everyone, and it looks pretty slick. It’s simplified and — once you get a hang of it — actually makes more sense than the previous setup.

Let’s take a closer look…

Custom Ad Reports Front and Center

In the past, very few advertisers used the custom ad reports. The default view of Ads Manager was a very top-level performance analysis. To get the good stuff, you needed to click the “Reports” link on the left.

But now, there is no “Reports” link. Why? Because the entire Ads Manager is now the Custom Ad Reports!

All of the old filtering and customizing that you could do with the old ad reports can be done within the main view. But there’s even more customizing buried within that we’ll get to later!

Top Nav

The new top navigation looks like this…

It includes a nice little graph showing what you’ve spent each of the past seven days as well as links to the following:

Manage Ads (Default)
Account Settings
Billing
Power Editor
Tools

These are all links that existed before, just in a new location.

Tools Dropdown

The “Tools” dropdown in the top nav includes the following:

Audiences
Audience Insights
App Ads Helper
Pixels
Pages
Advertiser Support

Much of this previously lived on the left hand column in a list of links. “Pixels” is very new — I saw it within the past week — and “App Ads Helper” is also something I haven’t seen before.

Pixels

If you select “Pixels,” you’ll get reports and graphs on the performance of your Website Custom Audience pixel by default. You can view activity by domain (default), URLs, device or events. To get event data, you’ll need to be using the new WCA pixels.

By default, you’re viewing Custom Audience Pixel performance. If you select Conversion Tracking Pixel, you’ll be redirected to the old Conversion Pixels page.

If you click the “Actions” dropdown at the top, you can select from the following:

Edit Pixel
View Pixel Code
Email Pixel Code
Share Pixel

You can share the pixel with another ad account, and that would be done through Business Manager. Here’s a really quick look at that process…

You would click either “Assign Ad Accounts” or “Assign Agency.”

All Campaigns Dropdown

By default within the main “Manage Ads” view of Ads Manager, you’ll see a report broken down by campaign. At the left you’ll see an “All Campaigns” dropdown…

You have the option to view results by…

This Account
All Campaigns
All Ad Sets
All Ads

By selecting “Account Activity,” you’ll get a report of all activity on your ad account — including things like ad approvals, ad rejections, ad creation, etc.

Filters

At the top right is a “Filters” dropdown. This is useful!

By default, nothing is filtered. But you can filter by any of the following information…

Delivery:

Active
Scheduled
Pending Review
Not Approved
Inactive
Not Delivering
Deleted

It will definitely be useful to focus only on what’s active, for example. I also don’t believe you could previously view deleted campaigns.

Objective:

Page Post Engagement
Page Likes
Clicks to Website
Website Conversions
App Installs
App Engagement
Local Awareness
Event Responses
Offer Claims
Video Views

This is awesome! In the past, I’ve always put the objective in the name of the campaign so that I could then create a manual filter to focus only on certain objectives. Now it’s built in!

Metrics:

Cost Per Result
Lifetime Spent
CPA
CPM
Frequency
Impressions
Reach
Results

This is also new!

For each of these, you can manually enter an amount to filter out for the following:

is greater than
is smaller than
is between
is not between

Settings:

Campaign Name

You can also create a new filter, similarly to how this was done before within the custom ad reports.

Dates

By default you will be viewing results during the past 30 days. But you’ll have the following options at the top right:

Lifetime
Today
Yesterday
Last 7 Days
Last 14 Days
Last 30 Days
This Month
Custom (choose start and end dates)

Columns

At the far right is a dropdown for “Columns.” This has many of the customizable options found in the prior Custom Ad Reports, but with a little bit more!

Column Presets:

Performance
Delivery
Engagement
Video Engagement
App Engagement
Performance and Clicks

The “Performance” preset is selected by default, focusing only on the columns related to performance — mainly your objective.

If you don’t want to use a preset, you can also click “Customize Columns” to customize which columns you see, just like you did previously with the old Custom Ad Reports.

New Facebook Ads Manager Customize Columns

ADD BREAKDOWN (By Delivery):

None (Default)
Age
Gender
Age and Gender
Country
Region
Placement
Placement and Device
Product ID

This is all the hugely valuable information that was previously found within the “Breakdown” dropdown in the Custom Ad Reports. From one ad set, you could have Facebook break down performance by any of these categories. It’s great!

ADD BREAKDOWN (By Time):

None (Default)
Day
Week
2 Weeks
Month

View rows of performance broken down by time period. Otherwise, you’ll get one row per campaign, ad set or ad for the entire period.

ADD BREAKDOWN (By Action):

None (Default)
Conversion Device
Destination
Video View Type
Carousel Card

Again, most of this was available within the old “Breakdowns” dropdown, though I believe “Carousel Card” is new.

Campaign, Ad Set or Ad: Performance

If you were to click on a campaign, ad set or ad, you’d get a similar view. By default, you’ll get a breakdown of performance, like above.

Performance focuses on Results (objective based) and Cost Per Result. There’s a nice little graph for this, too.

Under Performance, you can also view “People Reached.”

This breaks down Reach and Frequency over time.

Under “People Reached” is “Amount Spent.”

This allows you to see what you’ve spent for a given campaign, ad set or ad over time.

Under “Amount Spent” is “Custom.” Click that and you’ll have two dropdowns, by default for Actions and Impressions.

Both dropdowns contain the same options, allowing you to compare two different stats. The actions available will depend upon objective, but this is what you can choose from when the objective is Clicks to Website:

Results: Website Clicks
Results (cumulative): Website Clicks
Reach (cumulative)
Amount Spent
Amount Spent (cumulative)
Actions
Impressions
Impressions (cumulative)
Frequency
Cost Per Result
Cost Per 1,000 Impressions
Relevance Score

Campaign, Ad Set or Ad: Audience

As mentioned, the default view of a campaign, ad set or ad is a breakdown of Performance. But you can also select Audience. Here you’ll get a breakdown of several metrics by age and gender — including a nice bar graph.