Facebook Hidden Secrets
Introduction
Learn about a few Facebook tools you may not be aware of and how to use them to your advantage! While there are many tools outside of Facebook that can help you run a successful advertising campaign on Facebook, there are tools that can help increase competitiveness, creativity, and social proof all within Facebook itself.
Page Transparency
The first is tool is Facebook’s Ad Library, where you can find all the active ads running on Facebook. This was implemented also with the purpose of offering” additional information about ads about social issues, elections or politics, including spend, reach and funding entities.” From the ad library, you can search advertisers, including yourself and other brands, to see their active ads. (Source)
Another way to access an advertiser’s ad library is going to their Page directly and scrolling to the section on Page Transparency. Clicking “See All” should open to a pop up where you can see a link to “Go to Ad Library.”
Within the ad library, the active ads should show you the headline, description, the final url, and main image or video assets running per ad. In addition, it’ll show you whether if there are multiple versions of the ad itself, post id, and what platforms it is running on. It will not show you the engagements in the ad library itself for that post.
As a competitive research tool, Facebook Ad Library allows you to see what deals your competitors are offering in their Facebook paid ads. Or another competitive insight you can glean is understanding what your competitors consider their unique selling points are. A unique selling point is what makes a product or service better than competitors.
While your ads should be focused on testing your own unique selling points, you can be inspired creatively by what other brands are doing with their creatives. For example, are your competitors using social proof within their ad copy? Is a brand you are inspired by, utilizing a strong Call to Action that is applicable to your business?
As a result, using the ad library to the fullest can help you understand some best practices for Facebook ads that can take your own ads to the next level creatively and competitively.
Post Ids
Now that we have a tool to make our ads better creatively and competitively, our new ads should have strong social engagements. This strong social engagement with the comments and likes provide social proof, which is very powerful as it provides trust through other customers (Source). Let us say, however, that we want to have a new campaign but have the same ad assets and copy. In creating a new campaign, we can copy the ad in the Facebook Ad Manager and keep the box checked to “keep existing engagement.” I have unfortunately though seen that it doesn’t always actually keep the existing engagements making us lose all that time-earned social proof.
To prevent this instead of duplicating the ad, create a new ad, but use the post ID of the ad itself. In order to do so, find the post ID of the utilized ad by going to the ad you want to duplicate and seeing the post using “Facebook Post with Comments.” The URL of the post should look something like this - https://www.facebook.com/[page_id]/posts/[post_id] with the IDs within the bracket being a long integer of numbers, so the last part of the URL should be the post ID to use.
Now that you have the post ID, when creating a new ad under ad setup, click “Use Existing Post”. Going to the Ad Creative Section shows a link to “Enter Post ID” where you can enter that ID and now your social proof stays with you.
If there are any hiccups in this process, such as not being able to find a post ID due to running a Placement Asset Customization, there are workarounds. A Placement Asset Customization allows you to customize the size of the image based on each placement, which makes it difficult to find the post ID when built. A workaround is to create a basic ad using a post ID then change the new ad to use Placement Asset Customization, which should keep the engagement metrics.
Overall though, the above steps should work for the majority of ads - from static to carousels to video assets and let you keep your social proof on the ad itself. The most important step though is to follow the golden rule of digital advertisement - test. I would A/B test creating an ad using all the social proof versus a new ad with all the same creative to see whether or not the social proof is aiding your campaign.
Conclusion
I am hopeful that you have reached the end of this post having learned something new. To summarize, the Ad Library is a great tool to find new creative ideas and analyze competitor campaigns. Utilizing Post Ids, within the ads can help retain social proof.