Meet Objective-Based Ad Buys: Facebook's New Consultative Ad Dashboard

When I created my first Facebook ad ever, I had no clue what I was doing. I picked target demos at random (The more people who see my ad, the better!) and barely considered the difference between CPM and CPC. All I knew was that my boss asked me to make a Facebook ad -- now -- and it was my duty to get it up as fast as possible. No goals, no objectives, no metrics even entered my thought process.

And I know I'm not the only person who has been confused by Facebook advertising -- heck, we've even written a whole ebook trying to quell some of that confusion. I'm not surprised that people are so concerned about getting their Facebook ads right -- their budgets and jobs are on the line if those ads don't drive positive business results. 

Luckily, now, it's going to be a lot easier for the average marketer like myself to advertise on Facebook. 

Today, Facebook announced a brand new way for marketers to create and measure ads. Now, people can create and measure ads all based on one goal, which Facebook deems "objective-based ad buying and reporting." I know that's a lot of jargon in one sentence, so let me break down how the new tool works. 

Objective-Based Ad Buying: Decoded

Basically, when you go to create a new ad, you'll be asked about which objective you want to accomplish with your Facebook ads. You can choose among these:

• Clicks to Website
• Website Conversions
• Page Post Engagement
• Page Likes
• App Installs
• App Engagement
• In-store Offer claims
• Event Responses

Then, based on your objective, Facebook makes recommendations on which types of ads you should create to meet that objective. Facebook gives an example of a Page post link ad that could be recommended to drive clicks to your website, for instance.

After you select your objective and ads you want to run, Facebook's Ads Manager will display the chosen objective, the number of times it was met, and the cost per stated objective.

Basically, Facebook's new tool turns it into a consultative resource for marketers so you can optimize and assess your ads' business impact from the get-go. Pretty sweet, huh?

According to Facebook, this update should be live, but at the time of publishing, we haven't seen this roll out to our accounts. So keep checking back to see if you have the new layout soon.

Why Marketers Should Care

Cool! So now Facebook is helping you set up goals and track your success -- this seems like a no-brainer news story. This means all of us marketers can sit back and let the social network drive our ad campaigns ... right? 

Wrong. While this new feature is exciting and helpful, we can't take our hands off the wheel just yet. Be careful not to extrapolate the advertising data to the rest of your marketing activities. For example, if you are using multiple data sources, you might find that Facebook's Ads Manager metrics show that links drive clicks while your Facebook Page organic posts' links don't. So be sure that you're supplementing the objective-based ad data with other information to get a robust picture of your marketing's success. 

Besides that one caveat, this update seems like a very helpful feature that will help Facebook Advertisers create ads the inbound way -- something that we can't help but celebrate. 

What do you think of this update? How would you use this new feature in your marketing? Leave your ideas in the comments below!