I just hung up the phone with my Facebook rep and here are the latest updates for you…

1. Delivery Insights

Earlier this week Facebook introduced Delivery Insights, a new set of insights available in Ads Manager that tells advertisers how their ads are competing at auction and provides recommendations on how to tweak the ad to make it more competitive.

My Facebook rep told me that it should be rolling out in the coming weeks but there is no set roll out date at this time. You’ll be able to find it in the “Delivery” column in the campaign and ad set level, as well as in a standalone tab under “Tools.”

Delivery Insights identifies under-delivering ad sets, meaning ad sets that are set up to reach more people each day than they are actually reaching. Under-delivery is a sign that the ad could be tweaked to be more effective at winning more auctions, and Delivery Insights explains why the under-delivery is happening and highlights suggestions for specific actions the advertiser can take to make their ad more competitive at auction.

I know a lot of advertisers have been up in arms lately with a lack of ad delivery so I hope this gives us all more clarity on why a specific ad set / ad is not being delivered as expected. Keep checking Ads Manager over the next few weeks and let me know if you see it.

2. Audience Sharing (by invitation only)

We’ve been working closely with Facebook to use a little known feature that Facebook has made available to a select number of advertisers.

The audience sharing feature allows you to share audiences across ad accounts.

There are many ways that this could be used. In our case, we are using it as we create new pixels for a few of our web properties and we are testing it with a non-profit organization that wants to partner with businesses to extend the reach of their fund raising efforts.

If you have a Facebook ad rep and you have a good use case for audience sharing, then ask them if your ad account can be whitelisted for the feature.

Facebook has no plans, at the moment, to make this feature available to all advertisers as it could likely be easily abused.

 

3. Daily Budget Pacing

Daily budget pacing is a new feature that will roll out to 2% of advertisers by March 30th, 20% by April 4th and be fully rolled out to everyone via Power Editor in May. I believe this will REALLY help both small budget and big budget advertisers get better results from the Facebook advertising platform.

Below is Facebook’s explanation of how daily budget pacing works for you…

“Historically, when advertisers have chosen to create ads with daily budgets, we have attempted to spend exactly that daily budget amount each day. For example, if you set a daily budget of $10, we used to try to spend exactly $10 every day — even though we know that the opportunities to show ads to people on Facebook who’ll be the most valuable to you will vary from day to day. However, we’ve seen that trying to spend exactly the same amount every day often doesn’t produce the best results; for example, our tests show that allowing daily spend to vary slightly from day to day (based on the different opportunities to show ads each day) leads to equal or better cost per objective than spending exactly the same amount every day.

Since our goal is to maximize the value you get from each ad you create, we’ve started gradually testing a new approach where, if you prefer setting daily budgets instead of lifetime budgets, we’ll ask you to specify a daily *average* budget you’d like to apply to your ad set. Each day we’ll aim to spend, on average, the daily budget that you specify. Based on the different opportunities to show ads to people in your audience each day, on some days we’ll spend less, and one some days we’ll spend more. If your daily budget is $10, we may spend up to $12.50 on a given day. But in any calendar week (Sunday through Saturday), we won’t spend more than 7 times your daily budget. (And if you start running your ad in the middle of the week, we’ll prorate the total calendar week spend accordingly. For example, if you start running your ad on Wednesday and your daily budget is $10, we won’t go over $40 for the remainder of the calendar week, since there are four days from Wednesday through Saturday)”

Daily budget pacing will likely encourage advertisers to apply bigger budgets to ad sets because they know that Facebook will better optimize the budget available to them.

Facebook is now busy counting their money at the end of the first quarter of the year so we won’t likely see any major updates between now and April 15th. I’ll keep you posted if I hear anything. 🙂