This series of articles is to explore the advertising ecology of Facebook from the perspective of Facebook ADS. However, As a system in front of advertisers, Facebook ADS has limitations. For example, the core modules of the advertising system, such as page space and bidding, will not be introduced in detail.
In the series of articles, the first analysis of Facebook ADS from the tool level, tool level of abstraction and dimension are relatively high; Then from the user, account, resources and advertising structure module level of four aspects, module level is moderate, helpful to clarify the system context; Finally from the version, bid, relevance and other functional level analysis, the functional level is more detailed, can intuitively feel the details of the design.
Here are some of the tools used in Facebook ADS: Adsmanager, The Markting API for creating/managing ads, the Markting API for building automated marketing campaigns, and the Business Manager platform for large advertisers to manage resources.
Tool level analysis
Then, this paper will analyze Facebook ADS from four aspects of users, accounts, resources and advertising structure.
In this paper, the structure
The user
Users who can manage other modules are called users. There are four types of users involved in Facebook ADS, including individual users, business organization users, system users and developer users. There are great differences among different users.
Individual users and business organization users for resource management. Individual users refer to individual Facebook accounts. Individual users are the core of Facebook’s account system, and individual users can manage their business organization users, home pages, and advertising accounts. A commercial organization user refers to a commercial organization that can be created by an individual user. A commercial user can manage resources such as the home page and advertising account in the organization, as well as members such as individual users and system users.
System users and developer users have a strong relationship with the use of the Marketing API. A system user can only provide tokens to the Marketing API. A system user can manage the accounts and resources that the Marketing API can access through the system user. Developer users who have access to the Marketing API, their own tokens with higher permissions, and sandbox tokens dedicated to the Marketing API. The developer user is connected to the individual user, and the individual user can create their own developer user account.
account
Pay attention to the difference between users and accounts in this system. The user level is higher than the account level. The account is a kind of existence of similar resources and is managed by users.
An AD that the user sees
A home page, like a Renren page, is an entity that advertises ads, like the Facebook Messenger page above. The home page is created by individual users or users of commercial organizations. Users of commercial organizations can also claim the home page or manage the home page, which can be assigned to users or partners (i.e. other users of commercial organizations) for use. It also allows you to manage your followers, comments on your ads, and so on, since an AD on Facebook is like a post.
Advertising account, is used to directly create and manage advertising, advertising account is the most core point, because all resources are in the creation of advertising will be used, so the advertising account has the rights of resources is very key. Advertising account can be created by itself, advertising account is owned by a personal user, can join the advertising account to a commercial organization, and then by the commercial organization assigned to the members of the organization (individual users, system users, etc.), in order to share some advertising accounts to the use of people in the organization.
Advertising account management interface in commercial management platform
Applications, advertising applications to promote applications is essential, the application under the developer account, Android and Apple can be the same application. Developers who plug the SDK into their apps can return install data and pixel data to Facebook. Developers can use the app with their own AD accounts (individual users under the same email account), or share the app with other AD accounts. At the same time, developers can also add the app to their own business organizations, which then allocate the app to the members of the organization (individual users, system users, etc.). The permissions of applications shared in different ways are different.
Application management interface in business management platform
Instagram account, same as home page, but only for Instagram. Businesses can add Instagram accounts and assign them to users. Instagram was acquired by Facebook. As a result, Instagram and Facebook did not communicate with each other at the beginning. The Instagram account was set up separately when advertising was created. At the same time, as long as the Facebook home page generates a PBIA, it can also place ads in Instagram. This PBIA is an Instagram account cloned from the Facebook home page, but it is visually consistent, and other functions cannot be used. The goal is to let regular users see the Instagram AD without wondering about the Instagram account, without the advertiser maintaining the cloned account.
resources
Audiences, ideas and directories are called resources, and audiences are mainly managed by advertising accounts, but some may also involve commercial organization users. Of course, there are many other resources besides these three.
The audience, namely the audience group, can generate the audience by uploading the original data, application events, lookalike and so on, and then select or exclude the audience in the positioning, so as to include or exclude a certain audience in the advertising, and achieve the purpose of improving the effect or saving the cost. Facebook audiences are divided into custom audiences and similar audiences. “Saved audiences” are not real audiences, so they are not included. Each category has different subcategories, for example, custom audiences include application event audiences and offline event audiences. And events are a resource, and they involve pixels and so on, and we’ll talk about that later. The audience belongs to the advertising account, but also can share the audience with other advertising accounts or commercial organization users, commercial organization users can manage the audience shared with other advertising accounts.
Customize the type of audience
Creativity, the idea of the theme of the advertisement that the user sees, for example, the idea in the picture below includes message, picture, Call to Action, link (in the case of the app is the download address). Creativity, which is an AD account only, is used only when creating an AD. Creative ideas are relatively easy to create and often used in advertising, so there is no way to share them with advertising accounts or commercial organizations. There are many different types of ideas on Facebook, and the different types are slightly different in different formats.
Fields of a certain kind of idea
Catalogue, refers to the catalogue of goods, used for dynamic advertising, boutique column and other types of advertising, is for e-commerce, tourism and other goods of the customer industry solution. Advertisers use dynamic advertising and catalogs to promote related products across entire catalogs and automatically show ads for thousands of products to targeted audiences. A directory is a structured data file that contains a list of products to advertise. Each line contains all the information needed to create a dynamic AD. The commodity information base is dynamically uploaded data used to keep the catalogue up to date. Directories can be created and managed under both advertising accounts and commercial organization users, who can assign directories to their users.
Dynamic AD creation steps
Advertising structure
There are many types of ads on Facebook. In addition to regular ads and dynamic ads, regular ads also have sub-categories, including local ads, app ads, and so on. Regular ads are a little different from dynamic ads because of the presence of a catalog and the different mechanisms for generating ideas and optimizing ads. However, the general advertising sub-classification is used in different scenarios, and the basic setting fields are consistent, which can be clearly felt when the advertising interface is created through Marketing API calls. From the product design level, the design of different scenarios is consistent, and the field or value can be expanded to meet the requirements of new scenarios. If the scenarios are greatly different (such as dynamic advertising), small changes can be made to meet the requirements.
The three-tier structure of advertising
Although there are various types of ads on Facebook, the structure of the ads is basically unchanged, which is a three-level structure of AD series, AD group and AD, which is basically universal around the world. An AD account contains multiple AD series, an AD series contains multiple AD groups, and an AD group contains multiple ads.
The main content of each level structure
An AD series is used to identify an AD target (app installs, product sales, etc.) and contains one or more AD groups. Helps optimize and measure effectiveness for each advertising target.
An AD group contains one or more ads. At this level, you need to set the advertising group’s budget, schedule, target audience, and so on. Create an AD group for each target audience and set a bid, then the underlying ads will target the same audience at the same bid. This helps to control AD spending for each audience group, determine the timing of the AD, and get metrics for how the AD is reaching each audience group.
Advertising includes advertising ideas. Create multiple ads in each AD group to help optimize your ads for different images, links, videos, text, or space.
Why tertiary structure and not primary structure? In essence, advertising should consider the target, strategy and material. In a release, the release target changes less, the release strategy changes moderate, the release material changes more, then in the design of the advertising structure should take into account the advertisers/agents in the release and management efficiency, improve the release and management efficiency can directly increase consumption, directly improve the company’s earnings. Therefore, the three-level structure of advertising series-advertising group-advertising corresponds to the target, strategy and material, which is convenient to create, test and analyze in advertising.
After analyzing the advertising structure, this paper ends here. This article can only be regarded as the Facebook ADS advertising platform opened a small corner, the most basic context highlights. The Facebook ADS platform supports a $40 billion (2017) ecosystem with one system. The platform is a fascinating and excellent commercial and toB product, from the docking between different systems to the setting of a certain field. Anyone in the face of such a complex system inevitably confused, although this series of articles is to see the leopard, but also hope to be able to wade out a way, we can in-depth analysis and reference.
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