The Facebook Ads platform is constantly being tweaked. The idea is to make changes and improvement that help advertisers get more from the platform, but it can be hard to keep up and may lead to some updates going unnoticed.

In this post, I want to share a few things that might be easy to miss, but could have a big impact on performance and measurement for your advertising campaigns.

1. Audience building

The audience you select for your advert targeting is crucial to your success, no matter what your objective is. Facebook has a number of features designed to help you with that – one of those is their interest and demographic targeting.

You can select a potential audience based on the topics they have shown an interest in, such as rival brands or a hobby. You can also view demographic elements, including whether users are parents, recently married or hundreds of other options.

Crucially, there is an option below this input section that allows you to exclude or narrow the size of the audience based on the same options. This is incredibly effective when trying to refine audiences down to a small subset of people, which can help avoid spending money on reaching users who would never be interested in your messaging.

2. Device placements

In the placement section of Facebook’s Ad platform, you will also find the option to target users according to the mobile operating system (OS) they are using. It can be effective when promoting products or mobile applications that are more relevant to the users of a specific OS.

If you have detailed demographic audiences to target then you might know they have a preference towards one type of device as well.

3. Pin drop for closer radius

This one can be incredibly useful, especially for local advertising campaigns.

If you need to advertise to a certain location, you will likely find that once you have entered this information you are presented with quite a wide radius area. In many cases, this can be much higher than you would like.

Facebook allows you to manually drop a pin on the map – you can find this option at the bottom right of the map itself. If you drop a pin on the exact location you need, this will select coordinates for you and unlock the ability to target within a much closer radius, right down to 1km.

4. Carousel auto order

A carousel advert is an ad format on Facebook that allows you to have multiple images in a row, or carousel. Carousel adverts are great for getting across lots of information in the same space as a single-image click advert. However, a lot of carousel adverts tend to follow an order or story as they go from left to right.

While you are creating the advert, you might not notice a check box that is ticked as a default setting. You can find the box above the image upload section of your ad and its label reads: Automatically show the best-performing cards first’.

If you leave this box checked, Facebook will reorder your carousel for you, which may possibly render your carefully made advert nonsensical. So, if you need your image and ad to stay in order, make sure you uncheck this box.

5. Save an audience

You can save audiences that you’ve created, which is a real time-saver time if you want to regularly reuse the audience. You can do this in the audiences in the ad set section of Ads Manager – it’s a button under the connections section.

6. URL tracking

Adding extra tracking to your URLs is an often overlooked element of setting up a digital marketing campaign. This simple bit of text will allow you to analyse and monitor not only where your clicks are coming from but also which post, individual piece of content, the target audience and much more. URL tracking allows you to learn more about what works for your business. For a detailed look at how it works, read our blog post on how you can use URL tracking to get more data from your advertising campaigns.

Get in touch

There is a whole book to be written on setting up and managing social media advertising campaigns. We've been doing just that with our clients for many years and we are always happy to help. If you have any questions or an exciting challenge you think we can get our teeth into, just get in touch.

6 useful features you might have missed in Facebook Ads