Facebook Launches Campaign Planner Ad Tool

For those businesses on Facebook with their own Business Manager accounts, they will now have access to a tool called Campaign Planner.

The new Campaign Planner allows business owners and associates to construct media plans and share them with clients and co-workers. The official Facebook word on the new product says that it is “a standalone tool for media planners to draft, compare, and share media plans using reach and frequency buying across Facebook and Instagram.” Despite that wide reach into those social media giants, the basic setup of a Campaign Planner account is simple.

First, business owners will need to make sure they have a Business Manager account, which they can use to manage individuals’ access to Facebook pages and ad accounts. Managers can make sure that only select people have access to the pages they need to see. Furthermore, when used correctly, the Business Manager can give users access to ad accounts and business information without forcing those users to be friends with their co-workers. It keeps personal and working life separate.

Campaign Planner users can then access this new tool in their Ads Manager or Power Editor and search through their “All Tools” menu for the “Plan” option. From there, the field descriptions largely take care of themselves.

After naming a first campaign, users can define their budget for an ad campaign and enter their goal of how many users they want to reach. These fields dynamically interact with one another, so when an initial budget and reach are set, an increase in the budget, for instance, will force a change in how many members it can reach. The proportion between the two values remains the same as when it was initially set.

Users can then tell Campaign Planner their expected frequency of ad showings – such as twice a week – and set the target audience for this future campaign, such as under-50 males who live on the U.S. east coast. This is also the time to set expected device placement, such as mobile or desktop.

All of this action will be similar to creating a new ad campaign, so it should feel familiar. But at this point in the process, Campaign Planner begins to change the status quo by allowing users to create more than one plan and compare their effects. Users can adjust their target audience, for instance, to see how a similar campaign would otherwise affect a different set of viewers. This is also the part in the process where users can share their findings with clients and co-workers. All the hard work put into creating and comparing campaigns will instantly reach the most influential people in the business.

At this time, it appears Campaign Planner is limited in its ability to predict the effect of specific campaign objectives. The normal set of objectives includes goals such as increasing clicks to a website or gaining more mobile app installs. Campaign Planner is a new tool, so this shortcoming could lead to expansion in future months as its gains popularity.