Facebook Gives Its 2 Million Advertisers A Useful New App

Facebook recently released the Facebook Ad Manager app to give Facebook advertisers a way to manage and monitor ads on the go. With the app, you can create new ads, edit and manage existing ads, and keep up with important performance data. It makes sense that Facebook is beginning to offer mobile versions of these tools, since mobile ads account for over half of their earnings in the fourth quarter of 2014. There also should be high demand for an on-the-go Facebook ad service since it seems like just about everyone is advertising on this social media giant these days. In fact, Facebook has about 2 million advertisers. According to Facebook, small businesses account for 1 million of them. The mobile app will probably come in handy for the small business employees who are charged with managing social efforts like Facebook ads in addition to their regular daily responsibilities (which often don't involve sitting in front of a desktop computer all day).

In addition to the basic functions of app creation, editing and tracking, the Facebook Ad Manager app can provide push notifications to give you important updates about your ad in real time.

When you enter the app, you land on a home screen that displays all of your ad campaigns by name. These may include ads or promoted page posts. Each campaign listing shows a thumbnail image, status of the campaign (active or inactive) and a top-line metric (usually clicks for ad campaigns and engagements - things like "Likes" and comments for promoted posts).

At the top of the screen, you can easily change the view to show ad sets or individual ads rather than the default campaigns listing. A simple drop down menu from the right-hand corner also allows you to filter each of these categories as shown below.

You can then select a campaign, ad set, or ad to take a closer look at performance metrics and budget/spend information. 

Facebook did a nice job with this app, all-in-all. However, I would recommend sticking to desktop for initial setup of campaigns and for any in-depth reporting. The app serves as a nice compliment to desktop tools for post-setup management and maintenance. First-time Facebook advertisers should also begin in a desktop browser until they are comfortable with the basic functionality and structure of Facebook ads and how campaigns, ad sets, and ads relate to each other. Otherwise, navigating through the app could be confusing.

As someone who has used the desktop Facebook advertising tools in the past, I find this to be a very usable and simple app with all of the necessary features I would expect. I highly recommend that any Facebook advertiser give it a try with your next campaign!