New Facebook Ads Manager: A Complete Guide

[NOTE: The following is a guide to the latest updates to Facebook Ads Manager. Go here for a guide to Facebook Power Editor updates.]

When I logged into my Facebook Ads Manager today, I was pleasantly surprised that I was greeted with the new design…

The new Facebook Ads Manager is rolling out to everyone, and it looks pretty slick. It’s simplified and — once you get a hang of it — actually makes more sense than the previous setup.

Let’s take a closer look…

The new Facebook Ads Manager is rolling out globally! Here’s everything you need to know…

CLICK TO TWEET

Custom Ad Reports Front and Center

In the past, very few advertisers used the custom ad reports. The default view of Ads Manager was a very top-level performance analysis. To get the good stuff, you needed to click the “Reports” link on the left.

But now, there is no “Reports” link. Why? Because the entire Ads Manager is now the Custom Ad Reports!

All of the old filtering and customizing that you could do with the old ad reports can be done within the main view. But there’s even more customizing buried within that we’ll get to later!

Top Nav

The new top navigation looks like this…

It includes a nice little graph showing what you’ve spent each of the past seven days as well as links to the following:

• Manage Ads (Default)
• Account Settings
• Billing
• Power Editor
• Tools

These are all links that existed before, just in a new location.

Tools Dropdown

The “Tools” dropdown in the top nav includes the following:

• Audiences
• Audience Insights
• App Ads Helper
• Pixels
• Pages
• Advertiser Support

Much of this previously lived on the left hand column in a list of links. “Pixels” is very new — I saw it within the past week — and “App Ads Helper” is also something I haven’t seen before.

Pixels

If you select “Pixels,” you’ll get reports and graphs on the performance of your Website Custom Audience pixel by default. You can view activity by domain (default), URLs, device or events. To get event data, you’ll need to be using the new WCA pixels.

By default, you’re viewing Custom Audience Pixel performance. If you select Conversion Tracking Pixel, you’ll be redirected to the old Conversion Pixels page.

If you click the “Actions” dropdown at the top, you can select from the following:

• Edit Pixel
• View Pixel Code
• Email Pixel Code
• Share Pixel

You can share the pixel with another ad account, and that would be done through Business Manager. Here’s a really quick look at that process…

You would click either “Assign Ad Accounts” or “Assign Agency.”

All Campaigns Dropdown

By default within the main “Manage Ads” view of Ads Manager, you’ll see a report broken down by campaign. At the left you’ll see an “All Campaigns” dropdown…

You have the option to view results by…

• This Account
• All Campaigns
• All Ad Sets
• All Ads

By selecting “Account Activity,” you’ll get a report of all activity on your ad account — including things like ad approvals, ad rejections, ad creation, etc.

Filters

At the top right is a “Filters” dropdown. This is useful!

By default, nothing is filtered. But you can filter by any of the following information…

Delivery:

• Active
• Scheduled
• Pending Review
• Not Approved
• Inactive
• Not Delivering
• Deleted

It will definitely be useful to focus only on what’s active, for example. I also don’t believe you could previously view deleted campaigns.

Objective:

• Page Post Engagement
• Page Likes
• Clicks to Website
• Website Conversions
• App Installs
• App Engagement
• Local Awareness
• Event Responses
• Offer Claims
• Video Views

This is awesome! In the past, I’ve always put the objective in the name of the campaign so that I could then create a manual filter to focus only on certain objectives. Now it’s built in!

Metrics:

• Cost Per Result
• Lifetime Spent
• CPA
• CPM
• Frequency
• Impressions
• Reach
• Results

This is also new!

For each of these, you can manually enter an amount to filter out for the following:

• is greater than
• is smaller than
• is between
• is not between

Settings:

• Campaign Name

You can also create a new filter, similarly to how this was done before within the custom ad reports.

Dates

By default you will be viewing results during the past 30 days. But you’ll have the following options at the top right:

• Lifetime
• Today
• Yesterday
• Last 7 Days
• Last 14 Days
• Last 30 Days
• This Month
• Custom (choose start and end dates)

Columns

At the far right is a dropdown for “Columns.” This has many of the customizable options found in the prior Custom Ad Reports, but with a little bit more!

Column Presets:

• Performance
• Delivery
• Engagement
• Video Engagement
• App Engagement
• Performance and Clicks

The “Performance” preset is selected by default, focusing only on the columns related to performance — mainly your objective.

If you don’t want to use a preset, you can also click “Customize Columns” to customize which columns you see, just like you did previously with the old Custom Ad Reports.

ADD BREAKDOWN (By Delivery):

• None (Default)
• Age
• Gender
• Age and Gender
• Country
• Region
• Placement
• Placement and Device
• Product ID

This is all the hugely valuable information that was previously found within the “Breakdown” dropdown in the Custom Ad Reports. From one ad set, you could have Facebook break down performance by any of these categories. It’s great!

ADD BREAKDOWN (By Time):

• None (Default)
• Day
• Week
• 2 Weeks
• Month

View rows of performance broken down by time period. Otherwise, you’ll get one row per campaign, ad set or ad for the entire period.

ADD BREAKDOWN (By Action):

• None (Default)
• Conversion Device
• Destination
• Video View Type
• Carousel Card

Again, most of this was available within the old “Breakdowns” dropdown, though I believe “Carousel Card” is new.

Campaign, Ad Set or Ad: Performance

If you were to click on a campaign, ad set or ad, you’d get a similar view. By default, you’ll get a breakdown of performance, like above.

Performance focuses on Results (objective based) and Cost Per Result. There’s a nice little graph for this, too.

Under Performance, you can also view “People Reached.”

This breaks down Reach and Frequency over time.

Under “People Reached” is “Amount Spent.”

This allows you to see what you’ve spent for a given campaign, ad set or ad over time.

Under “Amount Spent” is “Custom.” Click that and you’ll have two dropdowns, by default for Actions and Impressions.

Both dropdowns contain the same options, allowing you to compare two different stats. The actions available will depend upon objective, but this is what you can choose from when the objective is Clicks to Website:

• Results: Website Clicks
• Results (cumulative): Website Clicks
• Reach (cumulative)
• Amount Spent
• Amount Spent (cumulative)
• Actions
• Impressions
• Impressions (cumulative)
• Frequency
• Cost Per Result
• Cost Per 1,000 Impressions
• Relevance Score

Campaign, Ad Set or Ad: Audience

As mentioned, the default view of a campaign, ad set or ad is a breakdown of Performance. But you can also select Audience. Here you’ll get a breakdown of several metrics by age and gender — including a nice bar graph.

By default you’ll see a breakdown of results for your objective and reach by audience, but there are two dropdowns which each contain these options:

• Results: Website Clicks (in the image above)
• Amount Spent
• Reach
• Impressions

Campaign, Ad Set or Ad: Placement

In addition to Performance and Audience, you can also view a breakdown by Placement.

In this case, Facebook will break down this same information by placement:

• Results: Website Clicks (based on objective)
• Amount Spent
• Reach
• Impressions

Placements include:

• Desktop News Feed
• Desktop Right Column
• Mobile News Feed
• Audience Network

You can also choose from either All Placements or Mobile Breakdown. If Mobile Breakdown is selected, you’ll see distribution by device.

Your Turn

What do you think of the new Facebook Ads Manager?

The Psychology of Facebook: Why We Like, Share, Comment

Whenever I hop onto Facebook to do something specific—find a link I saved for later or see what’s happening on Buffer’s Facebook page, perhaps—something strange happens.

Despite my best intentions to stay on track and accomplish my goal, I get sucked in. Suddenly I’m checking my own notifications, looking at what’s been recently posted and generally forgetting why I came to Facebook in the first place.

This isn’t entirely by accident. There is science and psychology that explains why so many of us are glued to Facebook.

Researchers have discovered trends in the way that we perform every major action on Facebook—liking, posting, sharing, commenting and even lurking.

And there’s a ton of psychology involved in what makes Facebook so attractive in the first place. Here’s a look at the psychology of Facebook: what makes us like, post, share and keep coming back for more.

Why we love Facebook so much: It taps the brain’s pleasure center

Lots of studies have worked toward figuring out what exactly goes on in our brains when we’re participating in social media—specifically, Facebook.

A recent one discovered a strong connection between Facebook and the brain’s reward center, called the nucleus accumbens. This area processes rewarding feelings about things like food, sex, money and social acceptance.

When we get positive feedback on Facebook, the feeling lights up this part of our brain. The greater the intensity of our Facebook use, the greater the reward.

Another fascinating study recorded physiological reactions like pupil dilation in volunteers as they looked at their Facebook accounts to find that browsing Facebook can evoke what they call flow state, the feeling you get when you’re totally and happily engrossed in a project or new skill.

Why we “like:” Identity, empathy and practicality

Perhaps the most easily recognized currency of Facebook is the “like.”

According to Facebook:

“Like” is a way to give positive feedback or to connect with things you care about on Facebook. You can like content that your friends post to give them feedback or like a Page that you want to connect with on Facebook.

When the Pew Research Center surveyed thousands of Americans about their social media lives, they discovered that 44% of Facebook users “like” content posted by their friends at least once a day, with 29% doing so several times per day.

So what makes us like, or not like, a particular status, photo or page? Is there a method to liking? Here are some reasons why we like:

It’s a quick and easy nod

Maybe the easiest way to figure out what the like means to us is to stop using it. That’s what Elan Morgan did in a 2-week experiment she chronicled on Medium. Here’s what she discovered:

“The Like is the wordless nod of support in a loud room. It’s the easiest of yesses, I-agrees, and me-toos. I actually felt pangs of guilt over not liking some updates, as though the absence of my particular Like would translate as a disapproval or a withholding of affection. I felt as though my ability to communicate had been somehow hobbled. The Like function has saved me so much comment-typing over the years that I likely could have written a very quippy, War-and-Peace-length novel by now.”

To affirm something about ourselves

One element of Facebook that we may not realize is how often we use the Like to affirm something about ourselves. In a study of more than 58,000 peoplewho made their likes public through a Facebook app, researchers discovered that Likes could predict a number of identification traits that users had not disclosed:

“Feeding people’s “likes” into an algorithm, information hidden in the lists of favorites predicted whether someone was white or African American with 95% accuracy, whether they were a gay male with 88% accuracy, and even identified participants as a Democrat or Republican with 85% accuracy.  The ‘likes’ list predicted gender with 93% accuracy and age could be reliably determined 75% of the time.”

To express virtual empathy

And sometimes we like in order to show solidarity or unity with a friend or acquaintance and their way of thinking. Social media can be a way of gaining “virtual empathy”—and that empathy can have real-world implications.

A study reported in Psychology Today showed that spending more time using social networks and engaging in instant message chats predicted more ability to be virtual empathic and that virtual empathy was a good indicator of being able to express real-world empathy.

Because it’s practical/we’ll get something in return

When it comes to how we choose to like brands and companies, the motivation is a bit simpler. A Syncapse study found that most people seem to make these decision based on practical reasons, like wanting to receive coupons and regular updates from companies they like.

Whereas our reasons for not liking a brand focus on privacy and quality of the social media experience:

Marketing takeaway: Likes are the penny of social media currency—spend them freely if you like, but don’t expect too much in return.

Why we comment

The answer to this one may seem kinda obvious—we comment when we have something to say!

One interesting things about receiving comments is how our brains reacts to those as compared to likes. Moira Burke, who is studying 1,200 Facebook users in an ongoing experiment, has found that personal messages are more satisfying to receivers than the one-click communication of likes. She calls them “composed communication:”

“People who received composed communication became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change in loneliness,” she said…. Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. “People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,” Burke says.

Elan Morgan, mentioned earlier for her experiment in quitting likes for 2 weeks, found an additional benefit to prioritizing commenting over “Liking”—it effectively retrained the Facebook algorithm to give her more of the content she wanted.

“Now that I am commenting more on Facebook and not clicking Like on anything at all, my feed has relaxed and become more conversational. It’s like all the shouty attention-getters were ushered out of the room as soon as I stopped incidentally asking for those kinds of updates by using the Like function.”

Marketing takeaway: Comments are a powerful emotional driver. Make the most of them by engaging often with your Facebook community and replying to fans’ comments to keep the conversation going.

Why we post status updates

A Pew Research study shows that although users “like” their friends’ content and comment on photos relatively frequently, most don’t change their own status that often.

• 10% of Facebook users change or update their own status on Facebook on a daily basis
• 4% updating their status several times per day
• 25% of Facebook users say that they never change or update their own Facebook status

This makes sense, given that the same study showed that “oversharing” was one of Facebook’s biggest annoyances for users:

So why do many of us take the time to update our status on Facebook? What is the motivation, and what are we hoping to get out of the experience? Here’s the science behind posting to Facebook.

Posting makes us feel connected

Researchers at the University of Arizona monitored a group of students and tracked their “loneliness levels” while posting Facebook status updates. The study found that when students updated their Facebook statuses more often, they reported lower levels of loneliness:

This was true even if no one liked or commented on their posts! Researcher link the drop in loneliness to an increase in feeling more socially connected.

On the other hand, when people see their social media statuses are not being engaged with as much as their peers, they can begin to feel like they don’t belong, as seen in this experiment.

What stops us from posting? A self-censoring study

Now that we know why we post, what do we know about when we don’t post? Researchers at Facebook conducted a study on self-censorship (that is, the posts you write and never actually publish).

Over 17 days, they tracked the activity of 3.9 million users and saw 71 percent of users type out at least one status or comment they decided not to submit. On average, users changed their mind about 4.52 statuses and 3.2 comments.

These charts show the number of censored (in red) and published (in blue) comments and posts during the study, and where on Facebook they were made.

Researchers theorize that people are more likely to self-censor when they feel their audience is hard to define. Facebook audiences tend to be quite diverse which makes it hard to appeal to everyone. Users were less likely to censor their comments on someone else’s post because the audience was more concrete.

Marketing takeaway: People engage the most of Facebook when they feel connected to one another and understood by their audience. It’s a bonus if they think they’ll get a response in return. Can you create those conditions on your brand’s Facebook page?

Why we share: A guide to more shareable content

The New York Times did an awesome study on why we share a few years ago that remains one of the most informative on the topic of social media sharing. This study identified five major drivers for sharing:

• To bring valuable and entertaining content to one another. 49% of respondents say sharing allows them to inform others of products they care about and potentially change opinions or encourage action.
• To define ourselves to others.  68% of respondents said they share to give others a better sense of who they are and what they care about.
• To grow and nourish our relationships. 78% of respondents said they share information online because it enables them to stay connected to people they may not otherwise stay in touch with
• For self-fulfillment. 69% said they share information because it allows them to feel more involved in the world.
• To get the word out about causes they care about.  84% of respondents share because it is a good way to support causes or issues they care about.

Our friends at CoSchedule put all this into an easy-to-remember infographic:

Another worldwide poll by Ipsos offers some similar findings, noting that around the globe, people seek primarily:

• to share interesting things (61%)
• to share important things (43%)
• to share funny things (43%)
• to let others know what I believe in and who I really am (37%)
• to recommend a product, service, movie, book, etc (30%)
• to add my support to a cause, an organization or a belief (29%)
• to share unique things (26%)
• to let others know what I’m doing (22%)
• to add to a thread or conversation (20%)
• to show I’m in the know (10%)

Here’s a cool country-by-country breakdown:

One more thing we know about what gets shared: High-share content tends totrigger a high-arousal emotion, like amusement, fear or anger, as opposed to a low-arousal emotion like sadness or contentment.

Marketing takeaway: For content that racks up the shares, tap into one of these urges.

• Create really entertaining or very useful content that will help your audience gain social status by looking smart, cool or “in the know”
• Create content that helps your audience share more of themselves with others. You can use your brand as a rallying point and identifier or simply help them share a message that taps into who they really are
• Create content that helps your audience engage with one another and interact together

One last note: What happens when we lurk and don’t participate

Is there a darker side to Facebook? Some of the studies I uncovered worried that Facebook could be making us more lonely, or isolated, or jealous of all the seemingly-perfect lives we see there. This down side of Facebook seems to emerge mostly when we become passive viewers of Facebook and not a part of the experience.

A 2010 study from Carnegie Mellon found that, when people engaged on Facebook—posting, messaging, Liking, etc.—their feelings of general social capital increased, while loneliness decreased. But when the study participants simply lurked, Facebook acted in the opposite way, increasing their sense of loneliness and isolation.

According to researcher Moira Burke, lurking on Facebook correlates to an increase in depression. “If two women each talk to their friends the same amount of time, but one of them spends more time reading about friends on Facebook as well, the one reading tends to grow slightly more depressed,”Burke says.

Do these findings ring true to you?

It turns out there is psychology behind almost every element of the Facebook experience—and researchers can’t seem to get enough of studying our habits there.