VALUE POST: Understanding & Navigating Facebook's Business Manager for Running Ads

[JeffreyDaniel]

OK, so maybe some of you noticed FB recently updated the look and feel within the Business Manager. That inspired me to write this post: I just wanted to give a quick breakdown of the most important areas inside Facebook’s Business Manager and the actions that are most useful for running ads as a business.

I hope this information can help someone!

OK, so first...after clicking on the ‘Business Manager’ drop-down menu in the top left of the home screen, we see many options - so let’s start from the left:

Under “Plan”, you’ll see Audience Insights and Creative Hub.

Audience Insights allows you to create a target audience (or open a saved audience) and gives you demographic data on those individuals (pages they like, gender, relationship status, etc.). You can use this tool during initial research to help better understand your audience and to fine-tune your targeting.

The Creative Hub is an area where you can share/send ad campaigns to other members and/or clients.

Moving on to the right, we see the next column “Create & Manage”.

First is Business Manager - this gives you an overview of everything that’s going on...

Next is Ads Manager - this is where you’ll spend most of your time and it’s where you’ll create new campaigns & manage existing campaigns & ads.

Next is Commerce Manager, which I believe is new and I’ve never actually used personally, but it appears to be for E-Commerce stores to let people browse products while staying on FB - cool idea!

The rest of the options - to be honest, I never use (for example, the App Dashboard and the App Ads Helper is more for developers - and Automated Rules can be useful - but also restrictive since it blankets strict rules for ad behavior/optimization…)

Next column - “Measure & Report”

There can be some useful data/analysis information found here and you can explore them to better understand how your ads are performing, but to be honest, a lot of good starting data is inside your Ads Manager and there are better ways to track your ad KPIs/ROI (feel free to reach out if you’d like more info).

So you really only need to worry about the Events Manager for the most part. Specifically, the Pixels section and the Custom Conversions sections are super important. Make sure to install your pixel and create custom conversion events for your ads (again, feel free to reach out if you need guidance)

Next Column: “Assets”

So, I only ever use the Audiences section (which I use very often). But basically the Images and Videos section allows you to see all the images/videos you have and uploaded.

The Catalogs section can definitely be useful, especially if you have an E-Commerce store, because you can track which specific products your customers are viewing on your external site (provided you have your pixel set up). But again, I’ve never actually used this function. And finally, Brand Safety - never used it before...

So finally, the “Settings” column. I think this section is rather self explanatory, but it’s where you can pay for your ads, add new cards/payment options, change your settings, etc.

So, if you’re new, you’ll want to just focus on these areas for starters:

Audiences

Pixel & Custom Conversions

Ads Manager

Settings

(& maybe Audience Insights if you need some inspiration for a new target audience)

OK, I hope this helps anyone that’s ever felt overwhelmed or a bit lost by the amount of options and how to know which ones to useful or where to focus first!

Let me know if this was helpful in the comments!

Cheers!