5 Things You MUST Know About Managing Large Facebook Ad Campaigns

The following is a guest post by Dennis Yu, whose company, BlitzLocal is one of the largest Facebook advertisers.

If you’re like us, you have dozens if not hundreds of Facebook campaigns– each with a couple dozen ads. And if you don’t have an automated tool to manage ads (believe me, it’s nice, but not necessary), then you have to have some tricks to keep things organized and under control.

Let me share a few with you:

• Get all your ads on one page: Do this by going here: http://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/?limit=2000. If you have more than 2,000 ads live, then you have a problem. But this sure beats having to page through a ton of stuff. If you’re editing an ad, open a new tab each time, else you’ll have to type that url in again, then select a new date range.
• Get all your offers into a single campaign: Don’t try to get fancy and have 8 different campaigns for the same offer. It will drive you nuts trying to figure out how much money you’re making and which ads are performing the best. Facebook doesn’t have the concept of an ad group, so keep it simple. Sure, you can work all kinds of subid tracking, but why make life complicated unnecessarily?
• If you do a ton of testing, you can have TWO campaigns for an offer: One is ultra high budget so you can get all the traffic you can, assuming you have nailed down profits there. But if the ads are not proven, then have a test campaign with a really small budget (under $50 a day)– that ensures that no ad runs away from you. Just imagine you mixed text and performance together– you could have one ad go out of control and burn $10k in one day on you. There’s no ad level budgeting, so the campaign option is the way to go.
• Make sure your affiliate networks and Facebook accounts are on the same time zone. Last thing you want is to think you’ve made a profit, when really your Facebook is set to Pacific Standard and affiliate network is Eastern Time. If your earnings are EST, then at midnight PST you’re showing zero spend and 3 hours worth of earnings– not a great situation to be fooling yourself into thinking you’re profitable. Of course, you can double-check by comparing CPCs and EPCs, if needed.
• Don’t refresh stats every 2 minutes: First off, you’re not going to notice anything significant. Second, it’s likely noise, since different networks update earnings at different frequencies. Third, you are so the details that you miss the big picture. I know it’s tempting to sit there and hit refresh across each screen, but resist the urge– you’re just wasting time. Check only a few times a day and use the time in-between to optimize ads, read industry blogs (like Bryn’s), and step away from your computer for a moment. That’s when the “magic” idea comes. Take long showers, too (just kidding). Inspiration is the topic for another blog post.

We could cover a bunch of smaller topics, such as how to rotate offers between networks or naming conventions for campaigns and subid tracking– but these 5 tricks will likely give you the biggest bang for the buck on your time, especially if you’re managing very large campaigns and doing Facebook ads for a living.

I hope you found this useful!

Tagged as: Facebook