Best Resources for Facebook Ads Professionals

Facebook advertising offers a straight-forward and effective way for businesses to reach a wider audience, providing greater visibility and impact of advertising campaigns. So much so that for 89% of marketers, it’s the most popular social media platform for advertising.

But reach isn’t the only factor to consider in implementing a successful campaign, it’s important to understand past performance to better design and optimise your marketing efforts for the future. By using any of the Facebook ad resources available, you can deep dive into key campaign metrics, understand what drives their success, helping to identify actionable insights and increase ROI.

Here are a number of options available that can help boost your ad performance and supercharge your campaigns:

Facebook Ads Manager

Facebook Ads Manager is the default advertising tool within the Facebook platform itself and its a great start point to get familiar with how their ads are performing. It’s free to use and the core features are very user-friendly, with similar navigation to Facebook.

There are a wide variety of metrics available, even allowing you to re-adjust your marketing strategy based on the result and provide visibility across all the Facebook ads you manage in one place. However it can be complex to explore more detailed ad metrics, and while it’s easy to add an individual employee, it’s hard work to set up for a large company. In most cases you’ll likely want something that can provide more detailed analysis and reporting. Luckily there are a wide variety of ready made dashboards and tools available to help with this.

Facebook Ads Reporting Dashboard

Another way to deep dive into your Facebook ad performance is by using a dashboard like the Facebook Ads Reporting dashboard shown above. This allows you to explore key performance metrics at both a daily and campaign level, as well as audience demographic breakdown and generate high level reporting that can be shared with stakeholders. The report uses a Google Sheets connector, which if you haven’t used it before, you can find our in-depth guide on how to connect Facebook to Google Data Studio here. The dashboard is a one-off cost of $80. It’s easy to use and offers a great next step in understanding your ad campaign performance.

Multichannel Digital Marketing Reporting

For those running ad campaigns across multiple platforms, you may want a more advanced dashboard to analyse your Facebook ad performance. The tool shown here offers in-depth reporting on your marketing efforts across multiple media sources, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. The platform provides detailed breakdowns of advertising spending, performance and ROI, as well as offering wider analytics such as website traffic, SEO performance and other social media engagement metrics.

While this product is more expensive, costing $399 as a one-off payment, that price does come with significantly more features and functionality, providing a complete view of all your marketing efforts in one place.

Hootsuite Ads

Hootsuite is another popular choice that centralises social media management into one dashboard from across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Like the previous options, it offers a wide range of useful analytics and customisable reporting to explore your advertising efforts and performance. It also includes features to create and schedule future Facebook ads, and to review the performance of paid vs. organic content.

There is a cost for that level of functionality, $99 a month for a single user with up to 10 social media accounts or $249 a month for a team of three users. As a result this platform is probably best suited to larger companies who will really benefit from the centralised multichannel analysis and planning capabilities.

Specialized Reporting Templates

There are also a number of tools available with a more specific focus that might be a real area of interest for your ads. For example this Porter Metrics report, provides an overview of Facebook ad performance at different times of the day and week, allowing you to work out exactly when the best time is to schedule your ads.

Another option is this competitor analysis report, which gives you detailed analysis of your competitors on Facebook, including a breakdown of their content, how well their audience is responding to it and tracking their key metrics. Both of these reports are free and easy to use and the templates can be downloaded directly from Porter Metrics Vendor Page.

Running a successful Facebook ad campaign can be incredibly impactful for your business. An important part of that is understanding what went well in past campaigns and how to optimise your advertising efforts to make the most efficient use of your time and resources.

There are a number of options available to dive into Facebook ad performance analytics, ranging from the free to use default Facebook’s Ads Manager to increasingly in-depth and bespoke options, depending on your budget and your needs. If you’re still unsure which of the platforms is the best fit for you, you can also find some more dashboard options here.