Facebook Updates Ad Manager for Real-Time Analytics

By Rick Mulready • edited by Jason Fell • Jun 27, 2013

Holistic Hybrid

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If you’ve been frustrated by the lack of actionable reporting data that’s available for Facebook ads, the social-media company says improvements are on the way. Facebook is rolling out updates to its reporting capabilities found in Ads Manager, the interface that allows you to view, manage and optimize your advertising campaigns.

The updates are aimed at helping advertisers measure the effectiveness of their campaign in real-time, Facebook says in a blog post announcing the changes and offers more flexibility and customization of the available data. Among the changes, we’ll now be able to measure reach and frequency across any date range for an ad, campaign, or ad account. The performance of an ad, campaign and account can now also be broken out by such factors as age, gender, country and where the ad actually ran on Facebook.

Much of this data was already available in Ads Manager but with these updates, marketers will have an easier time accessing and customizing the metrics that are most important to their campaigns. The opportunity to see real-time data is the big win with this announcement. This on-the-fly insight is something that’s long been overdue and should help advertisers see better returns as they’ll now be able to more fluidly optimize their campaigns.

For instance, discount travel site Priceline.com has been testing the new features and has reportedly already been able to reduce the number of reports they have to pull by 50 percent and are now able to quickly interpret campaign results and develop ad-hoc reports with the metrics and dimensions most relevant to them.

The wait for these updates will continue a little while longer as Facebook said they’d be rolled out globally over the next few weeks. Earlier this month, Facebook said it was dramatically scaling back the number of advertising options it offers to marketers in an attempt to simplify the ad-buying process.