The New Opportunities Tab on Facebook

New Opportunities on Facebook

As a marketer who works in the back-end of Facebook Ads Manager daily, I was a little surprised to see a new tab suddenly appear between “Account Overview” and “Campaigns.” This tab is labeled “Opportunities” and houses two sections, one for Recommendations and another for Success Stories. So what is this sneaky new tab and how can you best utilize it?

Under the Recommendations section, which is where you’re immediately directed after clicking on the Opportunities tab, you will find active campaigns Facebook is recommending you apply campaign budget optimization too. It appears Facebook is really trying to push the new Campaign Budget Optimization feature that recently rolled out! Curious how it works? Read the information below to see if it could be the right fit for you.

Okay, so let’s break it down. Say you were planning on running 3 separate traffic ads for landing pages views at $10 each. With Campaign Budget Optimization you would input a $30 lifetime value and update the 3 ad sets/ ads under one campaign. Facebook will then distribute the budget to whichever ad is yielding the most landing page views until the $30 is spent.

According to Facebook, optimizing at the campaign level is beneficial for many reasons:

• It simplifies campaign management requiring less budget tracking & manual re-allocating to top performers

• It de-duplicates audiences. If an ad set has a lot of audience overlap with another ad set, that budget can still be spent

• Avoid Re-starting the “Learning Phase” so your campaigns can run at the optimized level longer vs having to re-calibrate when budget is manually added

• Efficiently Spend Across Audiences. Campaign budget optimization helps find opportunities at the lowest cost across all ad sets and their different target audiences

Essentially if you have more flexible metrics, and are looking for “the best results possible” this is a great way to save time!

Now on to the “Success Stories” section at the bottom, which definitely looks exciting with colorful images and popular name brands popping out at you! Here you are able to see how other advertisers are having high-level success on Facebook. You can narrow down the results by business size, objective, industry, Facebook product, and region.

Once you click into an individual success story you are given information on the company’s back story, campaign objectives, metrics, and which facebook features they have had success with.

So how can all this new information actually be applied in a useful way? We have a few ideas!

• Pull information on which Facebook features seem to be the most useful for the types of clients you work on and test one or two of their strategies
• Take a peek at what some of the large, well known “enterprise” companies are doing to see if there is anything you can implement on a smaller scale
• Compile a few success stories in the same vertical as your current clients and use it to bulk up a competitor analysis report
• Check out which Objectives seem to be seeing the most overall success and keep that in mind when building out new campaigns and budgets

Overall, this new Opportunities Tab seems to be Facebook’s way of encouraging the features they are optimizing for from video views to campaign optimization. At the very least it is cool to be able to peek into the minds of top advertisers and gain new ideas about how best to run your own campaigns!