Hot on the heels of their announcement that 2 million businesses are now advertising on Facebook, the social giant released a new Ads Manager App for iOS.
You may have already been using Facebook’s mobile Ads Manager site, which was released last summer. However, when it was released, advertisers were limited to pausing or resuming campaigns, editing budgets and schedules, viewing insights and responding to alerts through the mobile site.
Interestingly, Google AdWords just launched a mobile app for Android last week – one that’s currently only available in Canada. Yes, you read that right. It’s rolling out globally soon, but my Canadian compatriots get the first look at the extensively featured AdWords app.
Google has somewhere in the range of 3.5 million advertisers (not an official stat – just my best guess) and we’ve just learned Facebook has reached about half that number. It makes total sense that they’re both clamoring to get super functional mobile apps into the hands of their increasingly mobile advertisers.
What Does the Facebook Ads Manager App Do?
In addition to the Ads Manager mobile site features, the new Ads Manager app also enables you to:
- Track ad performance
- Create ads and edit existing ones
- Receive push notifications
Designed for small and medium-sized business, the app gives much-needed control over ad campaigns for on-the-go marketers. One awesome new feature is the ability to create ads using photos from your phone, or from existing Page posts. If you don’t get all the way through the creation of your ad in one session, you can now save it as a draft and come back to it later.
In editing, you can edit text, change your images out, and adjust your audience targeting, budget and schedule.
Push notifications will inform advertisers when ads are expiring, how they’re performing and when they’re near the end of their allotted budget.
Mobile-Optimized Isn’t Just for Ad Viewers
In Facebook’s last quarterly earnings report, we learned that of the 890 million daily active users on the social network, the vast majority – 745 million – are accessing the site via a mobile device.
It frankly made no sense to this point that you were tied to a desktop if you were managing ad campaigns. The mobile site just didn’t offer enough control and you couldn’t even use it to create new ads.
Consider this, too – every month, 1.39 billion people use Facebook, 1.19 billion of them on mobile, and 526 million users are mobile-only users. Facebook’s two million advertisers are also Facebook users and make up almost a fifth of the people using Facebook on a mobile device every month. It was a huge pain for these people, many of them small and medium-sized businesses, to properly optimize and manage their campaigns from a desktop application.
This is an exciting addition to any small business marketer’s arsenal. Unfortunately, Twitter hasn’t yet offered their advertisers an ads app, which is pretty crazy considering a full 80% of their users are active on mobile.
Who Can Use Facebook’s Ads Manager App?
iOS users, for starters – specifically those with iOS7 or later. The app is compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch and is optimized for iPhone 5, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
The Ads Manager app for Android is in progress and will be released this year, according to Facebook’s product launch announcement.
Right now, it’s only available to advertisers in the United States, though it’s rolling out internationally in the coming weeks.