Facebook Courts Small Business Dollars With Easy Social Ad Campaign Creation

Facebook says it’s testing a redesign of its ad creator tool that will give more guidance to advertisers as they build their campaigns — specifically by helping them find the right mix of Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories to achieve their stated objectives.

You can see a screenshot of the new workflow below. (Yes, it’s a looooong screenshot, but that means you can see the whole thing.) As shown, the small businesses and other advertisers who use Facebook’s self-serve tool start out by specifying what they’re hoping to accomplish with a given campaign, whether it’s specifically getting more Page likes or promoting Page posts (they can also take a more nuanced approach by choosing “advanced options”). Once advertisers have identified their goal, the ad creator will recommend a combination of ads and Sponsored Stories to achieve that objective.

Connecting Facebook ads to specific goals has been a theme of Facebook’s ad products for several months now. The company says that in May, it introduced features that helped advertisers measure the performance of ads based on their stated objectives. Now Facebook is integrating that idea into the campaign creation process, making it easier for advertisers to take a smarter, more integrated approach to their entire campaign — and also encouraging them to try out different ad types.

Facebook says the change is only affecting the ad creator interface, not the ads API. Other new features include a preview that shows how Sponsored Stories will actually appear in a user’s newsfeed.

If this interface is a hit with advertisers, it also seems like Facebook could use these features to introduce new ad units in the future.

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