Who doesn’t love a good marketing tool? Utilizing tools can:
- Save you time
- Provide quick insights
- Improve campaign performance
- Automate repetitive tasks
While we haven’t found the ultimate Facebook advertising tool that meets all of our needs and desires, we do have a solid list of tools that we keep handy. This is by no means a complete list, but rather a roundup of Hanapin’s favorite Facebook tools.
Facebook Planning & Research Tools
1. Facebook Campaign Planner – For campaign planning, we’re really enjoying Facebook’s new Campaign Planner. This tool is extremely helpful for answering questions concerning budgeting and reach, which allows us to set performance expectations even before we start building the campaign.
2. Google Analytics – A Google tool to help my Facebook ads? Definitely! We use Google Analytics to analyze website traffic coming from Facebook. This data lends us a better understanding about the audience that’s already visiting. We look for audience trends like demographics, interests, device, geographic location, etc. We’re really looking for anything that can shape our future audience targeting.
3. Facebook Audience Insights – We’ve already written about how to use Audience Insights to segment your audience, find new audiences, and create personas. It’s a powerful tool that combines Facebook native data and third party providers (Datalogix, Acxiom, Epsilon, BlueKai) to help marketers uncover deep insights about their audience. Combining Facebook Audience Insights with Google Analytics provides many data points that can easily be connected into a full buyer persona.
Facebook Creative Tools
1. AdEspresso’s Ad Gallery – This is definitely one of our favorite tools and it’s free to use! I’m constantly screenshotting ads from my News Feed to build my own library, but that requires a lot of time and effort. The Ad Gallery does a lot of this work for you. It’s great for searching across industries, objectives, and ad types. We also use it to get inspired and find creative ways to craft our images and messaging. While you’re over there, be sure to check out their platform.
2. Moat – Moat isn’t solely a Facebook tool. They’re really built to show brand’s display ads. Here’s an example of Geico’s display ads. However, it’s a great tool for understanding what your competitor’s messaging and images may look like on Facebook. Most brands run similar looking ads across platforms, so by using Moat we can get a better idea of their Facebook ads. Again, we also use them to get creative ideas for designing ads.
3. Facebook Text Overlay Tool – If you’re running Facebook ads, you should have this tool bookmarked. Because they’re allowing images with 20% text to run this is the best way to ensure that your ads are getting maximum potential audience reach. Just upload your images into this grid tool and Facebook will rate images as OK, Low, Medium or High, depending on how much text is in the image. It’s better to know now rather than when you launch your ad and see suffering performance metrics.
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4. AdParlor’s Mockup Generator – Personally, this is one my favorite tools. In fact, they were one of the first companies named to Facebook’s performance marketing platform. The Mockup Generator is a fabulous way to design Facebook ads without ever going into Facebook. Simply input your ad information and download the mockups. Great for client presentations, strategy decks, and Facebook ad reports.
5. CoSchedule’s Headline Grader – Want to write better headlines? This free tool from CoSchedule analyzes your headline then scores your overall quality and rates its ability to result in social shares, increased traffic, and SEO value. Remember, this is an algorithm and isn’t always perfect. But if you’re looking for a way to objectively rate your headlines or ad copy, this could be the tool for you.
6. Adobe Creative Cloud Express – This Adobe tool is perfect for creating stunning videos and animated images for potential Facebook ads. It only takes a few minutes to get started, plus they have an iOS app to create stunning images on the go. They also have an inspiration gallery full of images and videos to spark your next big idea.
Facebook Optimization Tools
1. Oribi – I doubt too many of you have heard of Oribi. Well, you’re in luck, because this free (for now) tool delivers powerful Facebook Ad analytics in the blink of an eye. According to their website, “you can analyze an unlimited number of ad accounts with an unlimited number of users, all free of a charge. Current capabilities of the product will remain free, including ad sets analysis, active ad sets trends, and email reports.” This means you no longer have to download a report into Excel, analyze the data and then try to make pretty charts to visually display the metrics. Now you can quickly snap a few screenshots and uncover actionable insights within a few minutes of logging in. And for those who love Excel spreadsheets, you still have the option to export the data from the platform. You can thank me later!
2. Facebook Ads Manager App – For those marketers on the go, or those who can’t live without their phone, this could be a great solution. I think it’s a great app to use when you need to make smaller changes and you’re not near your computer. It’s been a real lifesaver when I’ve been away from my computer and needed to make a quick budget change or pause some ads. Give it a try, as I haven’t seen many account managers using it. It’s available on iPhone and Android devices.
3. Acquisio Social – If you’re familiar with Acquisio, you might already know about their advertising tools. If you’re not, Acquisio has a social advertising tool that can manage and organize your Facebook and Instagram ads. The real benefits are their ability to test hundreds of ad variants, gain quick performance insights, and get optimization suggestions to improve performance. It’s a great tool that could potentially save you a lot of time. Again, while you’re over there, check out their reporting capabilities.
4. Facebook Power Editor – Facebook really is doing a pretty good job of creating very specific tools to help marketers get the most out of their campaigns. While there’s always room for improvement, we absolutely love the Power Editor, especially the new interface update. Ads Manager is great for small tweaks, but for full campaign builds, marketers should utilize Power Editor because the process is simpler and more efficient. We even wrote about a few Power Editor features that are often overlooked by account managers.
Facebook Reporting Tools
1. SuperMetrics – We love this tool because of its ability to pull data from the majority of advertising channels right into Google Sheets. With this Google Sheets add-on, we track our Facebook ads reach, frequency, and CPC over time. This allows us to better understand when ad fatigue is setting in and it’s time to update creative at scale.
2. Facebook Ads Reporting Tool – In my opinion, the Facebook ads tools is totally underutilized. We really like how the tool lets us save selected Ads Manager columns as a report and then schedule that report either daily, weekly, or monthly. It’s perfect for those weekly reports when you don’t have an automated tool or you’re using a dynamic spreadsheet to populate charts/reports.
If you couldn’t tell, we’re big fans of using Facebook Ad tools. Check out our favorite tools to save time, improve performance, and automate repetitive tasks. What are your favorite Facebook tools? We’re always on the lookout for new and better tools so please let us know if we should add any by reaching out on Twitter @jdprater or @ppchero.
