Do you advertise Facebook?
If so, you probably feel overwhelmed by all the work it takes to optimize your campaigns. Like me, you’re probably not a graphic designer or video editor.
You also might not be on the computer every day to track the results of your campaigns, boost your Facebook Page’s most engaging posts, or create new campaigns. However, this is the daily life of ad account managers, those who work on one or more advertising accounts.
The (big) problem with Facebook advertising is that you need to regularly update your ads to combat ad fatigue.
As a result, you find yourself monitoring the results of your campaigns on a day -to-day basis and setting up new advertisements (and therefore creating new images or videos to vary the pleasures).
Fortunately, there are dozens of free tools that will make this time-consuming job easier.
In this article, I’ll share the 7 tools I use most often to create beautiful Facebook ad images, attention-grabbing videos, and manage my campaigns even when I’m away from my computer. hand !
1) Canva
Canva is the first tool that I want to present to you.
It is a tool for creating visuals very appreciated by community managers. It allows you to create visuals suitable for social networks, but also for events, documents (eg ebooks) and other things.
The home page looks like this when you are logged in (registration is free).
As we want to create images for our Facebook ads, we have to go to the “Advertisements” section at the very bottom.
By clicking on “create a Facebook banner”, you will be redirected to a page that presents you with pre-designed templates for you with the right image format (1200 x 628 pixels).
(Note that Facebook now accepts square-format images for ads).
To resume the creation of my advertising image, I can choose one of Canva’s templates to start…
… Or create my own image.
I just made myself one!
I simply used one of the free photos available on Canva (there are over a million of them) and I added a rectangular shape that I colored in orange (the color of my site).
I then made the shape transparent and added some text within the shape.
It took me barely 3 minutes and you can do the same with their iOS or Android app if you prefer to work on a tablet or smartphone.
I love this tool, especially for these features:
- Magic resizing : you can easily resize an image you created in one or more formats (available in the paid plan).
- The addition of icons and stickers on the images (the most beautiful are paid for)
- Filters to make images more flashy!
In addition, Canva recently added a video creation and animation tool that I advise you to test!
Thanks to this new feature, you can easily do motion design with premade templates.
Like any video creation tool, there is a learning curve, but this one is relatively short for Canva which aims to make graphic designs simple.
In this article , the Moderator’s Blog gives you some tips for doing video editing on Canva!
To conclude on Canva, its ease of use makes it almost essential as everything is made easier for those who do not know how to use more powerful software like the Adobe suite.
2) Promo.com
1.7 seconds : This is the time a user spends on each piece of content on their Facebook News Feed on their phone.
On Facebook, you need to grab your target’s attention quickly (I think you already know that).
But did you know that videos attract 5 times more attention than still images? This is what emerges from Facebook’s “ Create to Convert ” study.
Creating advertising videos is not within everyone’s reach…
Fortunately, video creation tools have been born in recent years and have constantly evolved, which means that the barriers to entry into creation have diminished!
So I would like to introduce the Promo.com tool to you .
This tool claims to be the easiest marketing video creation tool in the world!
And it’s hard to prove them wrong.
At first glance, the tool seems extremely easy to use.
The principle is simple. You create your videos based on:
- Thousands of templates already available in Promo.com
- One or more premium video clips available in Promo.com and to which you add text and animations
Of course, you can adapt your video to the 3 most popular formats on social media:
- Slideshow (16:9)
- Carré (1:1)
- Vertical (9:16).
Here is a 30 second demo of this amazing tool:
You are probably wondering how many video templates and video clips are already available in Promo.com?
The answer will leave you speechless.
2500 video templates are already available in this huge library accessible via this link .
Search through the search bar or select from the predefined categories.
For example, in the “Real Estate” category, I quickly identified a sales video that could be useful to me in finding new sellers willing to entrust me with their property.
As for video clips and photos, Promo.com has more than 15 million. They come directly from Getty, Shutterstock, and other premium image and video libraries.
Promo.com exists in a free version, but it remains limited. It allows you to understand the tool and create some videos.
So, I admit that it is better to take the paid version.
The first plan (basic) starts at 24€/month if you pay annually. It gives you access to more than 5000 templates and an unlimited number of royalty-free video clips, which is why it’s worth it.
Of course, these software have quality templates for making advertising videos, but they will never replace a motion designer armed with the Adobe suite ?
3) The Facebook Ads Library
The Facebook Ads Library was created to promote transparency , by allowing users to see all advertising campaigns launched by a Facebook Page and key information about the Facebook Page, including the Page’s creation, the number of people who manage this Page and in which country they are located, etc.
Although the Facebook Ads Library was created with transparency in mind, it’s a great tool for getting a very accurate view of your competitors’ Facebook advertising strategy.
It is also very useful if you never have creative inspiration, but you know that success on Facebook ads depends above all on your creative content!
To access it, it is very simple.
Go to facebook.com/ads/library and find the Facebook Page of a competitor or brand that inspires you.
After clicking on the tab, you will be able to observe all the active advertisements of the Facebook Page of your choice, and even choose a country of diffusion.
In this example you can see that I only have 2 active ads ?
For an advertiser, it is a godsend to have such information on the competition (for free too).
Because, thanks to this information, you can know in a few minutes:
If your competitors advertise? And if most don’t, what could explain it?
If they do, how do they advertise?
It is rather the second question that interests us. When I look at ads on a Facebook Page, I like to ask myself these 3 questions:
1) What Facebook ad format do they use?
In other words, do they advertise with images, videos or carousels (multiple images)?
2) What are their hooks? Their advertising messages? The expressions and emojis they use?
It’s my favorite thing to watch.
I don’t know how many times I’ve found inspiration watching advertisements from a company that has nothing to do with what I do to write my teasers.
Sometimes a simple sentence or expression managed to unblock me when I ran out of ideas.
3) What are the offers they put forward?
This is a good starting point to find out if the competition is advertising to acquire prospects or customers (and by what means?), develop a community, boost a contest, etc.
4) How long has this ad been there?
To go further, I advise you to observe the ads of your competitors once a week and look at the ads that are there week after week, and those that disappear.
In general, an ad that has been running for several weeks is an ad that works (assuming the company knows what it is doing with its money ?).
I invite you to read this article from my blog to discover the other questions I ask myself when I observe the Ad Library of a Facebook advertiser!
4) The Facebook Ads Manager app
Are you the type of person who spends more time on your smartphone or tablet and less time on your computer?
Are you often on the road?
If so, know that Facebook has thought of you with the “Facebook Ads Manager” application available on iOS and Android!
It’s a bit more limited than Ads Manager on desktop, but I have to say it ‘s extremely intuitive for quickly creating campaigns or boosting your posts.
In addition, you can analyze the results of your campaigns at a glance.
On this campaign, I notice in an instant that my interactions campaign costs me 0.17€ per interaction with the publication.
I can also measure performance by:
It’s really very intuitive.
I can also choose to deactivate the entire campaign, a set of advertisements or an advertisement with one click. Even better, I can increase the budget of the campaigns/ad sets that give me the best results.
Note that you can do this for each Page or advertising account you manage (I thought of you consultants and social media managers !).
And that’s not all.
The creation of campaigns is also possible with the editor on mobile. Just follow the instructions and you can create a basic campaign or boost a post right from your phone.
Of course, you can use the images you created with the Canva app and the videos made with your Promo.com ?
I already know that Facebook advertising professionals will tell me that it’s much better to go directly through Facebook Ads Manager on desktop…
And I agree with you!
Imagine : You’re on the train (or in the car) and you realize that a post from your Page is doing particularly well. What are you going to do ?
Jump off the train and go back to the office to create your campaign?
No, of course !
Thanks to this app, you won’t need to go back to the office to launch your new campaign, you can do it directly from the app.
5) Google Analytics UTM Builder
Measuring the effectiveness of an advertising campaign has become more complex with the new GDPR regulations affecting cookies and the iOS 14 update.
Because of this, Ads Manager provides less certainty about the effectiveness of Facebook advertising campaigns.
For this reason, advertisers are increasingly using UTMs to get a view of traffic and conversions coming from an acquisition channel like Facebook.
As a reminder, a UTM parameter makes it possible to identify and track traffic coming from a digital campaign in the Google Analytics interface – or another tool of this type (Hubspot, Mixpanel, etc.).
Here is an example for a link with UTM tracking from an email marketing campaign.
The original link is:
The link with UTM parameters looks like this: /?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=faa-promo-noel
The question you’re probably asking yourself is like producing a link like this for multiple advertisements and doing it quickly?
Use a web-based UTM configuration tool!
The best known is of course the Google Analytics UTM parameter creation tool available through this link .
There’s also a Chrome extension that lets you go even faster.
Back to the tool.
Once there, copy and paste the URL that will be used in your ad.
In this example, you notice that I have configured 4 parameters out of the 5 available:
- Source : Facebook
- Medium : ads
- Campaign name: ma-campagne-marketing
- Campaign content : angle-xyz
You guessed it, I am doing an advertising campaign on Facebook for the campaign with the very original name “my-marketing-campaign” and with the “xyz” angle of approach for my advertising!
As soon as I have filled in the parameters, the Google Analytics tool sends me back the URL with my UTM parameters.
I just have to copy-paste the URL with UTM parameters and place it as a link in my advertisement.
Here’s an example for a campaign I ran:
I also take this opportunity to share with you a second tool integrated into your Ads Manager and which allows you to create dynamic UTMs from the naming conventions of your campaigns.
The tool is in the menu at the very bottom when you create an ad.
The advantage of this method is that you can use dynamic names based on your campaign, ad set, and ad.
Facebook will then autofill your campaign name with the name you gave your ad campaign in Ads Manager and the name you gave your ad.
This can save you a lot of time if you decide to tag each ad in your campaign differently.
To learn more about creating UTM parameters and how to analyze traffic from your Facebook ads in Google Analytics, I invite you to read this article from my blog!
6) Facebook Pixel Helper
Before writing this article, I first thought of 5 tools, but suddenly realized that there is another one that I use very often: Facebook Pixel Helper .
It is an extension on Google Chrome that identifies the Facebook pixel(s) installed on a website.
If you want to properly track the results of your Facebook ads and do retargeting, I strongly recommend that you install the Facebook pixel on your website.
This is a unique tracking code given to you by Facebook so you can track:
- Your website activity (number of pages visited, most visited pages, etc.)
- Specific actions on your website (e.g. a contact, a form filled out, a product added to the basket, a purchase, etc.)
I would love to tell you about it here, but I’ve already written a complete guide to the Facebook pixel.
In the article I tell you how to install the pixel yourself or how to send the instructions to your developer.
But how do you know if the pixel has been correctly installed?
This is where Facebook Pixel Helper comes in.
This extension allows you to know if a pixel is well installed on your site (or that of a competitor) and if it works correctly!
As soon as you add it to your Chrome browser, you will see a small widget appear in your toolbar. This is what will let you know if a pixel is installed or not on any site you visit.
Take this site for example.
As you can see in this screenshot, a pixel is properly installed. This is what the extension tells me with the message “One pixel found on …”.
You also see a yellow exclamation point next to the “Pageview” event (this means that the pixel fires as soon as a user loads a page on your site).
Do not pay attention to it, it does not necessarily mean that there is an error.
Worry instead when you see a red exclamation point appear like this:
With Pixel Helper, you can also check that important events for you are installed on the key pages of your site, for example when someone lands on a payment page to buy a product.
On this screenshot, you can see that the line of code “fbq (‘track’, ‘InitiateCheckout’)” is installed correctly. It is she who sends the information to Facebook when someone has initiated a payment as soon as this web page loads.
This is especially useful if you want to show an ad to people who have initiated a payment on your site, but have not purchased.
If this all seems a bit obscure to you, don’t worry, you’ll understand everything after reading my article on the Facebook pixel!
7) MerciApp
We end this article with a very important tool to avoid… spelling mistakes!
I know it sounds silly, but it’s grossly unprofessional to run ads with spelling, grammar, or syntax errors.
Believe me, we see it and even on the advertisements of recognized brands.
Recently, I discovered a great French software that integrates with my Google Chrome browser and detects all spelling, grammar and syntax errors when I write on a page in my Google Chrome browser.
This tool is called MerciApp and there is a free version.
In force?
An ultra-powerful algorithm that knows a lot of words, a lot of grammar rules and no less than 10,000 syntactic rules!
So much for the features.
Now, what does it look like in practice?
It is very simple.
Install the chrome extension .
Create an account on MerciApp and start using the extension to correct your next advertisements, like this one for example.
Depending on the errors and misspellings on your advertisements, you will see blue, orange or red lines appear to easily identify them and correct them thanks to MerciApp’s suggestions.
Don’t thank me for this find ?
Conclusion
Creating and managing Facebook ad campaigns is time-consuming work.
Luckily, creating images for your ads is made easy with Canva, available on desktop, smartphone, and tablet!
Today, advertisers must also use video , even if their creation is longer and more complex.
Tools to create videos, this is not what is missing, but the one I prefer is by far Promo.com.
I find it particularly interesting to start creating videos , especially if you have never learned how to make advertising videos.
Do you lack inspiration for the creatives of your advertisements? Head over to the Facebook Ads Library and type in the names of your competitors to see what their ads look like!
If you want to do all the creation of your campaign on your smartphone, all you have to do is download the Facebook Ads Manager app to carry your Ads Manager wherever you go ?
The last two tools I shared with you are no less important.
Facebook Pixel Helper allows you to check if your Facebook pixel is correctly configured on all pages of your website and in strategic places (eg thank you pages).
MerciApp helps you detect any spelling or grammar errors (still) present in your advertisements!
Thanks for reading this far!