Ten Useful Facebook Ad Tools That Can Skyrocket Your Social Media Marketing

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The world of advertising on Facebook is a lot more than just Promoted Posts and the ad tool provided by the social media. Unfortunately, very little advertisers have been explored deeper on how to maximise their Facebook ads.

If you are still doing the same old Promoted Posts on Facebook, now it’s time to incorporate some additional tools on your Facebook marketing strategy. When fully maximised, Facebook ad can be a great way to gain success. Hence, in today’s post we will share ten terrific Facebook ad tools that you can use to maximise your marketing plan:

1. Power Editor

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Every Facebook advertising list needs to start here. If you aren’t using Power Editor or a tool that utilizes the Facebook ads API, you are missing out on powerful functionality. Basically, it is a free browser plugin and bulk Facebook ad editor. While it’s not particularly user friendly, all of the new features are rolled out to Power Editor and the ads API first. If you want the new bells and whistles, you need to use Power Editor.

2. Partner Categories

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Facebook interest targeting is limited. When you target users based on interests, you are hoping that users are thorough, accurate and current regarding what they share on their profiles. However, Partner Categories allow you to do so much more. Facebook partnered with three data mining companies (Acxiom, Epsilon and Datalogix). These companies have collected mounds and mounds of data related to buying histories and lifestyles. The result is that you can create Facebook ads that are more relevant than ever before.

3. FBX

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What is FBX? Simply put, it is a Facebook ad retargeting. Let’s say that people were on your website. They read a blog post related to Facebook ads. When you return to Facebook, you could serve them an ad related to one of your products.

While FBX has been around for a while for the big brands, the little guys can use it now, too. FBX is where Facebook ad targeting really shines. Ads no longer need to be unrelated and annoying. They can be for products and services that you’ve proven to care about.

4. Conversion Tracking

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Have you heard about how hard it is to measure the ROI in social media? Not anymore if you use Conversion Tracking.

With the help of an offsite pixel, Facebook can track whether your ad led to a specific conversion: a purchase, lead, form completion or something else. In fact, Facebook can even optimize your ad to show it to people most likely to perform that action.

You will then be able to view the performance of your ads, free of distracting information like unrelated clicks. You can then calculate how much you spent on the ad and how many conversions were generated. Thus, you just measured the ROI of your Facebook advertising efforts.

5. Conversion Specs

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When you promote a post that you published to your Facebook Page, by default it is optimized for engagement. However, what if you want a specific type of engagement? That’s where Conversion Specs come into play.

Most Facebook ads utilize Optimize CPM bidding. Facebook optimizes your ad, serving it to those most likely to perform your desired action. That could be liking your Page or, like in the example above, engagement with your content. With Conversion Specs, you can manually change how your ad is optimized. You can then have Facebook optimize for link clicks, photo views, video plays or some other type of action.

6. Custom Audiences

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You can target your customers and email subscribers in Facebook ads, and you don’t even need a Facebook Page to do it. Custom Audiences allow you to upload a list of email addresses, phone numbers or Facebook UIDs. Facebook then matches those up to users whom you can target in ads. You can target your customers who aren’t currently Facebook Fans, encouraging them to like your Page. The possibilities are vast. If you have a decent sized email list and you aren’t using Custom Audiences, you’re missing out.

The result of this tool, if done correctly, is extremely relevant advertising.

7. Similar Audiences

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Let’s assume that you have a modest sized email list. You’ve tried Custom Audiences, but you get limited results because you exhaust that audience so quickly.

However. with Similar Audiences tool, you need no worry anymore. Once you’ve created a Custom Audience, you can tell Facebook to create new audiences similar to that one. Facebook looks at the characteristics of the users in that audience and can then generate a list based on similarity (the top 1% of users similar to those users) or reach (the top 5%).

While other marketers are scrambling to figure out the proper targeting to reach their ideal audience, you can quickly and easily find a large group of users similar to those who have already proven to buy from you.

8. Saved Audiences

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Successful advertisers test their performances all the time. They create many different ad variations based on placement, imagery, copy, targeting and bidding to find what works and what doesn’t. This can be a time wasting process, unless you create Saved Audiences.

You can save audiences based on:

  • Geography
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Precise Interests
  • Broad Categories
  • Partner Categories
  • Connections
  • Custom Audiences
  • Relationship
  • Language
  • Education
  • Workplace

That’s a whole lot of targeting. It can take a ton of time. But you likely have a handful of targeting combinations that you use repeatedly.

Once you save an audience in Power Editor, you can select all of your targeting with one click of a button in the future.

9. Domain Sponsored Stories

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If you own a website and want to drive traffic to it, Domain Sponsored Stories allow you to turn user interactions with your domain into an ad. This is not at all related to a Facebook Page. User X’s friend shared a link to ABC.com. You own ABC.com. This sharing can then be resurfaced later.

Friends trust other friends, thus making this type of advertising incredibly effective.

10. Dark Post

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Let’s say you shared a post to your Facebook Page. But you wanted to create multiple versions of that post and turn those posts into Facebook ads. You could do this with Dark Posts.

Dark, or unpublished, posts allow you to promote posts that were never published to your Timeline. This is especially helpful for split testing purposes. Create four versions of a post targeted at various groups, but don’t clutter up your Timeline in the process.