Meet Facebook’s latest business darling: the Campaign Planner.
Gone are the days of jumping through the hoops by building out a full paid ad campaign without reach data: this new, user-friendly interface update makes life much easier for media planners who want to get a feel for how many impressions they earn for a particular audience and budget.
Why should you care about Facebook's Campaign Planner?
Great question. Campaign Planner is just one in a long string of recent Facebook updates. Facebook tends to alternate their product upgrades, and there are two big types:
Complexity and Data Focused: These are excellent upgrades and essential to retaining enterprise-level customers. Stringing together new functionality with existing data collections enables enterprise clients to stay on the forefront of technology and advertising.
Improved User Experience and Simplicity: These updates benefit a much broader base of Facebook advertising customers. With Facebook’s wealth of audience segmentation and targeting capabilities, the UX is crucial to ensure that their tools are usable and easily understood by a broad group of users.
These two separate types of updates are both essential to Facebook’s continued innovation and success. They are evidence for two important aspects of using Facebook as one of your paid advertising resources: They will never stop improving and they don’t forget about the millions of small businesses that depend on them for a curated fan base.
Facebook: Good Listeners
Facebook is really good and really fast at releasing new products and features to support remarketing. No matter how large your business is, they aren’t going to forget about you. And they’re always listening to users to find ways to improve their product and UX.
In Q4 last year, Facebook saw 44% of of ad spend on their platform coming from small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Even though Facebook doesn’t break out advertisers by market segment or spend, we estimate that at the very least, a million of the company’s 3 million advertisers qualify as SMBs.
By alternating between complex data-focused upgrades and making their user experience as seamless and smooth as possible (like this upgrade), Facebook has generally kept paid advertising customers happy and busy utilizing these new capabilities. Remarketing is one of the hottest trends in marketing today, so by their continual release of cutting edge tools and features, Facebook again and again proves its worth as a valuable partner to businesses.
Back to the new feature. Campaign Planner. What is this thing?
Campaign Planner: Getting reach and frequency estimates
The campaign planner provides four key insights after creating a plan:
Audience reach
Frequency per person
Placement distribution
Spend per day
The data is similar to what advertisers are used to seeing in the Ads Manager but displayed in a much more digestible way.
Have you ever wondered what an additional $10K in budget would yield? Or how reach would be impacted by narrowing the age range? These types of questions can easily be answered by using the versioning feature from the campaign planner. In just a click you’ll be able to compare metrics for two different audiences.
Sharing media plans with others
A nifty feature that came with this release is the ability to share a media plan with coworkers or clients. The plan can be shared via a link or email and the advertiser can select which details to include (note that for small campaign plans the spend per day details might not be available).
TL;DR
The Campaign Planner update is mainly useful for companies advertising for brand awareness, an excellent use for building top-funnel leads. If you aren’t a media planner or the chief implementer of a paid ad campaign for this platform, you might never even see it. But if you are, it’ll save you a lot of time and headache getting people on board with your plans. Facebook itself will benefit from more advertisers using their services because the process is now more helpful and transparent from the beginning.
Does this new feature affect your day-to-day? Let us know how in the comments below, or connect with Silverback Strategies on Facebook and Twitter today.