In March of this year, Facebook made some changes to the way in which ad campaigns are managed; essentially providing for better campaign management via increased granularity. This allowed for significantly better A/B testing; one example being the ability to split mobile ads into a unique ad set separate from regular newsfeed ads, which proved to be exceptionally helpful. Eight months later, they’re at it again with a new update.
Advertising Update 2014
On August 13th, Patricia Lai posted news on the Facebook PMD about new changes in the structure of campaigns. Â For those who like to exercise as much control as possible over their campaigns, these will again be welcomed changes. Let’s take a closer look.
What You Should Know
The biggest change for the September 2014 update is highlighted in the picture above. You may remember back in March, Facebook updated the campaign structure as follows:
- Campaign: Objective
- Ad Set: Schedule and Budget
- Ad: Creative, Placement, Targeting and Bidding
The most notable change was the introduction of the ad set. For this update, Facebook will be reversing the roles of ads and ad sets.
With the new structure, it will look more like this:
- Campaign: Objective
- Ad Set: Schedule, Budget, Bidding, Targeting and Placement
- Ad: Creative
When Is The Change?
September 1st, the rollout will begin on Ads Manager, Ads Create Tool, and Power Editor. By mid-September the rollout should be complete and all advertisers will be able to start using the new structure on October 1st.
If you are an API developer, you will have at least 5 months to update your systems because they will need to work with the new system by January 2015 at the earliest.
Advertisers, if you are using Ads Manager, Ads Create Tool, or the Power Editor, then you will see this change soon. If you are using a third party tool, you may not notice the update until 2015.
As for your existing campaigns, you do not need to make any updates to them at this time. You can continue to run these until January. At that time, Facebook will have the option to migrate existing campaigns within the Ads Manager.
Major Hints For Coming Updates
“This will also pave the way for launching advanced delivery controls, audience management, and a campaign spend cap in the near future.”
It is very exciting to see this platform evolve. Hopefully these new advanced controls will prove to be another useful evolution.
What do you think about these new changes and the path that Facebook is on with their advertising platform? Will it become everything that Adwords isn’t, or just another platform that doesn’t live up to the hype? Let us know in the comments!