All The New Facebook Ad Updates You Should Know (2018)

There’s a lot of news coming from Facebook as of late.

And if you happen to use the platform for advertising, you’ll want to pay attention.

Here’s what you need to know about Facebook’s latest ad updates, policies, and features.

1. New Ad Type: Dynamic Creative Facebook Ads

The next step in ad evolution is here with Facebook’s new Dynamic Creative Ads.

The new feature is available in the Quick Creation section, and allows advertisers to automatically test and deliver the best combination of creative assets.

Those assets include images, titles, CTAs, descriptions, videos, etc. By running different combinations across audiences, Facebook will find the combo that performs best for your audience.

So remember all that A/B testing you used to have to do? Well, this is Facebook’s way of taking the heavy lifting out of your hands while delivering you optimal results.

This dynamic testing seems to be the new trend in digital advertising, with Google recently releasing a similar responsive ad format.

While this is a still a new feature, advertisers have already seen success.

Wordstream, for example, ran a test using a dynamic creative ad as well as an ad with the same targeting, but as an unchanging ad.

The results? The dynamic creative ad generated 60% more conversions, with a 55% lower cost-per-conversion. Additionally, the dynamic creative ad saw a CPM of 12% cheaper, but the frequency the ad was shown was 45% higher than its static counterpart.

Set Up Your Dynamic Creative Facebook Ad

To get started with your dynamic creative ad, login to Facebook and navigate to your ads manager.

You can’t use the dynamic creative type with an ad set already running, so you’ll need to create a new ad set. Dynamic creative ads are only available for the following ad objectives: traffic, conversions, and app installs.

Once in your Ads manager, click the +Create button (note that this must be done through the Quick Creation section).

First up, you’ll be asked to name your campaign. No change there.

Next, select a buying type. You have two options: Auction or Reach and Frequency. Auction lets you bid at the lowest possible price to reach your audience, while reach and frequency asks you to pay a fixed price to reach your audience.

Then, choose your champaign objective from the three listed above. This will, of course, depend on your business and what you’re hoping to achieve through these ads.

This next part – at the ad set level –  is where you’ll opt-in for Dynamic Creative. Between the Conversion and Budget & Tiles section you’ll find a section titled Dynamic Creative. Make sure this is toggled on to activate the function.

After that, you can set your budget and schedule as usual and click through to the audience and targeting options.

As you likely know by now, Facebook excels when it comes to audience targeting. If you’ve run ads on Facebook before, you probably have an idea of the types of parameters that best connect you to your audience.

Do note that some of the targeting options have been eliminated as of late, due to Facebook’s phasing out its Partner Categories. More on that and how it affects advertisers in this article.

Once you’ve chosen your targeting methods, you’ll need to select your ad placement. You can choose to advertise on: Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger.

To experiment with the best placements possible, you can select Automatic Placement.

Then, you can begin creating your ad and adding text, images, etc. Note that with Dynamic Creative, the total number of assets you can have is 30 (photos, titles, links, CTA, descriptions, formats, etc.)

As you choose your creatives, remember that each needs to work well each other, as Facebook will randomize the variation to get the best fit.

When you’ve added all the creations you want to be included, you can preview different variations of your ad by selecting the Preview Ad button.

After that, you’re ready to go.

2. Facebook Ads: Analytics Tracking

Facebook has always offered Analytics.

But, perhaps to appease businesses in light of the recent user-centric algorithm updates, it recently added new features to help companies better understand how people interact with their sites and apps.

One of the big ones introduced by Facebook was Journeys, which allows advertisers to “see omni-channel data and reporting, giving you a holistic view of the different interactions people have with your business before converting, making a purchase or subscribing,” Facebook said in a blog post.

By aggregating this information, the hope is that advertisers will be better able to understand the impact of the different channels people are using, and more accurately identify which behaviors lead to conversions.

Do keep in mind that with the recent crackdown on privacy controls, businesses will only have access to anonymous, aggregate information. That means you won’t be receiving personalized data like email addresses or phone numbers.

The new features announced at Facebook’s recent F8 Conference, are:

• • Custom Insights – advertisers can also now add custom events to their Analytics, tailored their business goals. These custom insights are designed to give answers to questions like:
    • Which product or item categories are correlated with higher retention or usage frequency?
    • Which products are your best sellers overall or with a specific audience?
    • Which sections of your app or website are correlated with higher purchases for a user segment?
    • Which promo codes or payment methods are correlated with higher average transaction sizes?
  • Auto-detected Funnels – leverage machine-learning algorithms to identify the paths most frequently used across apps and websites. Facebook said, “This enables you to identify friction in your marketing and product experience and uncover opportunities to optimize for conversions faster.”
  • Funnel Conversion Insights – now advertisers can create their own funnels related to their business, and Facebook will gather insights on which segments are most likely to convert in order to help you find relevant optimization opportunities.
  • A New Mobile App – the app will allow advertisers to easily view key metrics and reports, check automated insights, and receive notifications when changes occur. Advertisers will also be able to create custom views for their most important metrics like revenue, active users, etc., as well as add any funnels or segments they’ve created in Facebook web analytics.

3. Increased Authenticity for Pages

Increased privacy also means increased transparency.

To that end, Facebook is now requiring that individuals who manage Facebook business pages with large numbers of followers must be verified.

Those who don’t clear the verification process won’t be able to post – and won’t be able to run ads.

The change is designed to prevent page administers from using fake accounts and increase accountability for advertisers.

While this won’t have much effect on legitimate advertisers with legitimate accounts; in fact, it’s likely to improve the relationship between users and Pages by creating more trust.

But it isn’t uncommon for companies to use fake accounts to manage Business Pages, rather than their own personal accounts. If that’s you, it’s time to disable the fake account and turn your Page over to someone with a verifiable personal account.

4. Increased Transparency for Facebook Ads

The push towards privacy control goes hand-in-hand with the latest political controversy Facebook’s faced.

The first step was taken last October, when Facebook announced that only authorized advertisers would be able to run electoral ads on the platform.

Now, they’re extending by requiring anyone that wants to run “issue ads” – such as any political topics that are being debated across the country.

Additionally, Facebook’s testing a feature that will let users see all of the ads a business is running on their Page, regardless of if they’re even in the target audience and appear in a users news feed.

And this one is far-reaching. It applies not just to those running political ads, but all advertiser Pages on Facebook.

Going forward, that means that advertisers have to be conscious of all the ads in their library, and the effect they could have on their target audience and the brand’s own reputation.

This is currently being tested in Canada, and feedback has been minimal. Again, if you practice clean, legitimate ad practices, this likely won’t have any major effects on your ad campaigns.

5. Facebook Ads: New Messenger Augmented Reality

Now for some better news.

Facebook also announced a new AR integration for its Messenger platform, which will allow businesses to “leverage the Camera Effects Platform to easily integrate AR into their Messenger experience, bringing the virtual and physical worlds one step closer together.”

If you’ve ever purchased (or used) a Snapchat filter, you’ll have some idea of this already.

For example, if a customer asks you question in your Messenger bot, you can prompt them to open their camera, where they’ll receive an overlay of your product captured in their normal camera screen.

Brands using this include Nike (virtual shoes), Sephora (virtual makeup effects), ASUS, and Kia.

The idea is that those who aren’t quite sold on a product will have a way of virtually trying it on, and sharing it with friends and family for feedback if they so choose.

As of now, the tools will be free to use.

So what does this have to do with advertising, you might ask? Well, if brands are investing in the creation of these AR effects, you can bet they’ll invest a little in making sure their customers can see them.

Facebook intel predicts that brands will tend to buy ads on both Messenger and Facebook to push consumers towards the new AR experience.

Wrapping Up the Facebook Ad Updates

New formats, new policies, new effects…oh my.

If you advertise on Facebook, the above could be game-changers.

Which updates are you most excited about?