The Skai 5: Five Ways Skai Helps Facebook Advertisers with Their Simplified Account Structures

A simplified account structure can help social advertisers keep their campaigns manageable. It’s also one of the recommendations in Facebook’s suggested guidelines on how marketers should approach advertising on its properties. In this post, learn how Skai Social can help clients to improve on this strategy.

Earlier this year, the Business team at Facebook released a new framework of best-practices called The Power 5.

From their Power 5 one sheet: 

“The days of advertisers manually hacking way to ad success are no more. Top advertisers are now leveraging a specific set of automated ad tactics to unlock new phases for growth. We call these tactics the ‘Power 5’ and when used together, they have the ability to transform direct-response ad performance, drive online sales, and scale efficiently across the Facebook family of apps.”

What Is the Facebook Power 5?

According to Facebook, the five best practices when advertising on their properties are:

1. Use Auto Advanced Matching to leverage the facebook pixel to know who you are reaching
2. A Simplified Account Structure with a minimal number of ads, ad sets and campaigns to make it easier to measure performance, optimize campaigns and reach your goals
3. Facebook recommends using their Campaign Budget Optimization to let them take the reins of all budget optimizations
4. With Automatic Placements, advertisers set their ads to appear in all Facebook/Instagram/Messenger placements which enables Facebook to deliver your ads wherever your product is most likely to be purchased
5. Dynamic Ads help you reach people who viewed specific pages or products on your website for increased relevancy

The benefits of a simplified account structure

Since the early days of paid search marketing—which Facebook’s advertising is modeled on—practitioners have built complex hierarchies in their campaign structure in order to offer the most “levers” when it comes to managing and optimizing an account. 

As an exaggerated example to help explain this point, imagine if all of your ads were in a single ad set. You wouldn’t have much control over your campaigns. What if you wanted certain ads to have one budget and other ads to have a different budget. You can’t do that when they’re all in a single campaign. 

With the launch of the Power 5 best practices framework, Facebook recommends that you basically do that—not necessarily all of your ads in a single ad set but definitely a much more simplified and less segmented account structure. Why? Because Facebook says that their optimization algorithms work better when they can pick and choose the right ad for each impression. With all of the ads together, it makes it easier for the system to do that and although the downside is less marketer control, the upside is hopefully better performance and more ROI.

Only time will tell if following Facebook’s recommendation of a simplified account structure will pay off for advertisers. But, for those marketers who are following this advice, Skai offers some unique features and functionality to help. 

Read this free report on the cross-channel impact of social advertising

5 Ways Skai can help with Facebook marketers moving to a simplified account structure

Skai has unique capabilities that make it easier and more effective for advertisers to decrease the amount of work and iterations needed to execute their campaigns. 

Some of the ways we can help with your campaign structure and management:

Facebook Simplified Account Structures with Skai #1 – Dynamic Overlays

To squeeze the most out of the creative investment, overlays can be used to add new visual and text elements to existing ads. In Skai Creative Manager, overlays can even be added as a bulk operation in order to quickly repurpose a slew of imagery. They can also be added to Dynamic Product Ads to easily advertise deals that change often without having to generate brand new creative.

“Overlays are especially valuable for retail and ecommerce marketers who often run promotions throughout the year,” says Tabing-Dalit. “Instead of your creative team or agency spending valuable time manually adding sales stickers to hundreds of image assets, you can completely automate that workflow.”

Facebook Simplified Account Structures with Skai #2 – Placement Asset Customization

Advertisers can customize the image or video creative they want to appear by placement, while still allowing our systems to optimize for the placement itself. Customizing creative by placements ensures that the ad will best match the viewing behavior for that placement, while still taking advantage of the efficiencies of multiple placements.

Only with Skai can you:

Customize all text fields per placement. When editing ads per placement, Ads Manager only allows you to pick one placement at a time to customize. This means if you want to update all of your Instagram placements to have the same image, or all Messenger placements to share the same copy, this would take updating Instagram stories, and newsfeed one at a time. Skai enables bulk edits to save you time and make leveraging PAC more efficient.

Edit multiple placements in bulk. Currently, in Facebook Ad’s Manager, you are only able to customize the Primary Text and Description. This is a big limitation for advertisers wanting to update the entire messaging per placement. Skai enables advertisers to update Primary text, link description and even headline per placement.

Copy text fields across placements. Copying text from one ad or placement to another is exclusively available within Skai. Making it possible to keep your copy consistent across placement throughout all of your ads and allows you to save time in the process.

Facebook Simplified Account Structures with Skai #3 – Audience Bid multipliers

This feature is unique to Skai and a great example of how we can support a simplified account structure. For example, on Facebook, advertisers are separating men and women into unique ad sets in order to bid differently against them based on their lifetime value. With Bid Multipliers on Skai, an advertiser can just open up one ad set that is targeting men and women, and apply unique bids to each. 

“Previously, advertisers had to choose between saving time by managing fewer Ad Sets or gaining greater control over their bidding strategy with more Ad Sets,” said Jonathan Liraz, Product Manager for Skai Social. “We’ve seen this come up time and again as a pain point and that’s why we’re so excited about the release of Audience Bid Multipliers. It’s the kind of feature that will have a powerfully positive impact on account structure and campaign management efficiency, providing that rare combination of a streamlined account with greater control.”

Facebook Simplified Account Structures with Skai #4 – Campaign Budget Optimizations 

In addition to supporting Facebook’s campaign budget optimization capability and providing additional lead time before the feature is mandated, Skai gives advertisers even more ways to scale their automated budget optimizations. 

Only with Skai can you:

Automate budgets and bids based on external signals. Since budgets are controlled at the campaign level with CBO, it’s important that optimizations are executed from this level as well. Leveraging industry-leading technology, Skai’s automated actions can trigger campaigns to adjust budgets, status, update creative or send alerts based on various rules and conditions. Think of automated actions as a layer on top of CBO. While CBO is optimizing your budget between ad sets, automated actions are leveraging weather, health and TV signals to help improve the relevancy of these optimizations.

Shift budgets across campaigns. As Skai continues to evolve the way Facebook advertisers accomplish their goals, we are also adding even better ways to optimize budgets. As campaign budget optimization maximizes performance for a single, determined campaign, Skai is on its way to enabling you to shift budgets from campaign to campaign, which is currently not a CBO capability. Stay tuned for more on how Skai’s Portfolio Optimizations will enhance CBO!

Facebook Simplified Account Structures with Skai #5 – bring in external data to optimize to what really matters

While Facebook’s algorithm can optimize and serve your ads to the right users in the right placement, this is based only on the data Facebook has (Facebook pixel, post engagements, etc). Your true north data (GA, DCM, Adobe Analytics, back end systems, other) may tell a different story, and you may want to consider that data as well when optimizing bids, budgets, targeting and creative. Use the Skai open platform to bring this external data into Skai and then use our tools (KPO, AA, Refresh Creative, bulk editing) to optimize against this data. This adds another layer of optimization, on top of how Facebook optimizes.

Ready to make your Facebook advertising accounts easier and more powerful?

Skai’s suite of marketing technologies helps advertisers to drive performance, stay productive, and stay sharp with the campaign insights to enable data-driven decision-making. 

With Skai Social, brands can engage social customers while achieving your branding and performance goals. Reach out today to schedule a quick and easy demo of any or all of our platforms to see how Skai can help your marketing organization shine.

Skai has a team of marketing professionals to help you leverage the best practices that work! Between onboarding teams, transitional services, strategists, and client success teams, Skai offers tailored support and technology that works for your business needs. For example, If your team needs 100 ad sets in order to properly track and implement your media, Skai will make creating and measuring those 100 ad sets easier than any other platform could. If you need to simplify your tracking, bidding and budgeting, Skai also has advanced technology to make accomplishing simplicity simple and scalable. 

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