Social Media Ads

Social Media Ads is a tool for dedicated paid social specialists working with ads on Facebook, Instagram, FB Messenger, and FB Audience Network. 

• Create ad campaigns, ad sets, and ads for Facebook and Instagram
• Monitor the performance of your ads and receive notifications when it falls
• Find weak and strong points of your social ad campaigns and optimize them
• Export your ads into a CSV file

Why Should You Use This Tool?

The friendly interface and the Social Media Ads tool’s convenient notifications will help you save time and money by running and managing Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns from one place. Without struggling with complicated settings, keeping up to date with their efficiency, and taking timely action on the poorly performing elements

Setting Up a Campaign

To create a new campaign, click the “Create” button and adjust your campaign’s settings. By default, the name of the campaign/ad set/ad will be generated automatically; however, you can edit these to your liking.

• Objective: reach, traffic, or conversions.
• Campaign level: campaign (the budget will be distributed between all ad sets within the campaign based on their performance) or ad set (the budget will be distributed between the ads within the set).
• Budget: daily or lifetime set in the currency selected for your ad account.
• Bidding strategy: lowest cost (getting the lowest possible cost per optimized event, selected by default and fits the most campaigns) or bid cap (bidding not more than the amount you set).
• Schedule: by default the campaign starts right after it is set, so you can skip this option or fill in start and end dates of the campaign if you want to run it on specific dates.

Then adjust your ad sets, choose the placements (devices, platforms, and formats), and start creating the ads.

For each ad you need to specify the Facebook and Instagram pages to which your ads will be attributed, the URL of the website they’ll point to and add the text and the image (these sections can be filled automatically based on the data from your website’s URL if you add it first). On the right, you’ll be able to see the preview of your ad.

After you are done with the ads and the campaign settings, hit the “Publish” button and your campaign will be launched.

Launch an ad campaign

Campaigns Tab

The list of your campaigns is displayed on the main page of the Campaigns tab in Social Media Ads tool. To take a closer look at each campaign, click its link.

You’ll be taken to the campaign dashboard, where you’ll find all the information about each specific campaign, such as campaign name, its budget spent, cost per click, the resulting traffic and reach, and the more detailed data for each ad within this campaign (status, budget, number of results, cost per result, impressions, reach, etc depending on your campaign settings). 

To broaden the amount of displayed data click the “Table settings” button and put the tick against the names of the datasets you would like to see.

To view historical data change the time period by clicking the button in the upper right corner of your screen.

The Social Media Ads tool shows the status of each ad (On Review, Active, Rejected, or Finished). Check on the campaigns that are highlighted, as these contain either low-performing or rejected ads. 

Hover over the warning sign to learn more about the exact issues in the ad’s performance such as declining reach or too high cost of the click. 

You can also filter the ads by their status or the presence of performance issues. If you want to focus on the campaigns that are running right now, choose “current”, and you will see only active ads.

There are dozens of factors that can cause the poor performance of your Facebook or Instagram Ads. Check the recommendations from the Semrush Paid Social Team on how to tackle the most common of them.

You can quickly edit the campaign to eliminate the reasons for the underperformance you find. Click on the “pencil” sign to change the campaign, ad set or ad.

If you want to edit the specific ad, click on the campaign link to get the campaign dashboard, choose to edit any ad,  and change its targeting, placements, budget, bid strategy, start/end date the way you see it right.

Performance Report

The Performance Report highlights in detail the weak and strong points of your social ad campaigns so you could optimize them. You will see a complete picture of troubled spots to be fixed, and the most effective growth points to be honed. The report is intended to optimize the ads that are currently running, so it processes only your active ads.

Charts

The charts give an overview of your ad account. You can see how each active ad, ad set, and the whole campaign perform: how many results they bring and how much each result costs. 

Select any of 46 metric you’d like to consider as a result (Purchases, Trials, Link clicks, etc.).

For a more complete picture, there’s an option to enter your desired target cost (KPI) for each metric. By default, it is set to the median value of all ads that bring that result.

Use the visual representation to spot weak points: ads that bring many and cheap results, that bring too few and expensive results, or that don’t bring any results but have spent too much money already.

This will allow you to take further action on ads: scale high-performing ads (e.g. increase their budget), or fix ineffective ads (e.g. change creative, change targeting, work on a landing page, or turn them off).

You can also customize the chart using the filters:

• Select a specific date range to see the data;
• Whether you want to analyze Ads, Ad sets, or Campaigns;
• Choose one campaign or see the data for all campaigns.

Clicking on an ad will give more details on it. Such as:

• If there are any specific performance issues highlighted by our tool;
• Daily trend of the selected metric and money spent;
• Additional metrics;
• For campaigns: how active ad sets are performing in this campaign. 
• For ad sets and ads: how active ads are performing in this ad set.

You can also see the ad from the chart on the campaigns list to analyze it in the usual way (e.g. compare with other campaigns, add any additional metrics, etc.)

Ads That Need User’s Attention

All the ads, ad sets, and campaigns along with the issues found are displayed in two lists sorted by importance:

• ‘Scale these ad’ – good, possibly ready to improve.
• ‘Fix these ads’ – bad, possibly need to be fixed.

The best- and the worst-performing ads are collected at the top of the corresponding lists, so better start with them.

In order to let you take action with these ads, each of them has a button ‘Fix’ with quick presets: Edit budget, Edit creative, Edit audience, Edit conversion event, Edit placements. You can also see additional information about each ad, the same as from the charts.