The new Facebook Ad Inspect Tool is a welcome addition to all the useful tools you already have in the Ad Creator panel. It comes in response to demands from marketers to have access to more benchmark data to help them optimise their bids and ad budgets.
What the Facebook Ad Inspect Tool Actually Does?
This new category of insights will help you understand how your Facebook ads perform in relation to:
- The auction competition level
- The frequency of delivery to your selected audience
- Overlapping audiences in different bids
- Significant edit history.
Why is this new Facebook Ad Inspect Tool important to you? After so many insights, so many metrics now you have to worry about four new ones. The issue is – if you want to spend your ad budget effectively, you should worry about these four aspects.
So let us go in depth with the explanations for you. But first of all, let us help you find this new tool.
Identifying the New Tool for Facebook Ads
Facebook usually makes sure that marketers do not have to lose time finding the tools they need to create and deliver ads. In this instance, all you have to do is access the Campaigns section of your Meta Business account.
Once you click on the campaign, hover with the mouse over the ad set you want to analyse. The mouse cursor will turn into a magnifying glass with the word “inspect” beside it. Click on the Inspect button and you will access the four functions of the Facebook Ad Inspect Tool.
A Closer Look at the Facebook Ad Inspect Tool
First of all, you need to know what kinds of ads can be analysed with the new tool. At the present, the Facebook Ad Inspect Tool is available only for ads with the following objectives:
- App installs
- Lead generation
- Traffic
- Conversions.
Now let us explain what each of the four functions actually does:
1. Auction Competition
As you know, Facebook advertising works on a bidding system. Each marketer sets a budget (a bid) and a computerised algorithm decides who wins the bid, i.e. whose ads are shown to the audience.
The issue is that when the competition is very high, your only chance to get your ads delivered is to raise the bid. This may lead to a satisfactory level of conversions, but the cost of conversion may be very high. In fact, so high, that you actually lose money for each conversion.
Therefore the Auction Competition function of the Facebook Ad Inspect Tool is extremely useful. It allows you to see the competition level for running ads and allows you to make adjustments (audience, ad delivery times, objective, etc.) so that your ad set faces lower competition.
2. Audience Saturation
Are your ads performing poorly? One of the reasons may be the high frequency with which they are delivered. If a Facebook user sees the same ad over and over again, they may mark it as “spam”, “irrelevant” or “repetitive”. Thus, Facebook will stop showing them that ad.
In the Audience Saturation panel of the Facebook Ad Inspect Tool, you can see the frequency of delivery and the CPA (cost per action) in the same chart. Thus, when you note a correlation between high CPA and high delivery frequency, you know why your ads are not performing well.
3. Auction Overlap
There are situations when you are running different ad sets at the same time. For instance, you promote various special offers – but to the same audiences. What happens in this case? Well, in some ways, you become your own competitor. The Facebook algorithm compares bids from ALL the ads as if they are separate entities. And then the winner is decided, sometimes to the detriment of your own ads.
With Auction Overlap, you can see to what extent your ads compete against one another and you can take action. The simplest way out of this issue is to change audiences or delivery times.
4. Significant Edit History
Facebook may work automatically in approving and delivering ads, but it still needs time to analyse them and establish bid winners. If you start making changes to ad sets, you will prolong the time needed for your ads to start running.
In this section of the Facebook Ad Inspect Tool, you will see the ads with the largest number of edits. By looking at what you had to change for each ad, you will learn how to improve your ad creation skills and avoid so many changes in the future.