„Promote Post” – What Is It and What Does It Offer?
If you want your Facebook fanpage to fulfill its purpose and your content to actively engage your audience, organic actions alone won’t be enough. To build a community around your brand, paid actions will be necessary. Here, Meta offers you a very simple solution: a quick click on “Promote Post” under the content you want to boost and show to a broader audience. This is undoubtedly the fastest and least complicated option, but how does it work in practice?
Features of “Promote Post”:
- The main advantage is its ease of use! After clicking the button under the post, all optimizations are set up literally on one page, where all the steps are displayed. You can choose a call-to-action (CTA) for the specific post, such as “Buy Now” or “See More.” You have the option to set a budget, campaign duration, and choose where the ad will be displayed. However, you cannot schedule it for the future, meaning it will start showing immediately after being published.
- Of course, with “Promote Post” you can also select the advertising objective and target audience. Let me elaborate on these two aspects, as there are some differences compared to the Ads Manager. Regarding the advertising objective, the system automatically suggests selecting one based on the settings configuration. It’s better not to rely on this automatic choice – it’s preferable to define your goals yourself. When setting up an ad using the “Promote Post” button, you can choose one of the following objectiv#
Advertising goals that can be selected when advertising using the 'Boost Post’ button.
Source: 'Create Ads’ tab in the Page Management option on your Facebook fanpage.
They differ from those available in the Ads Manager and, objectively speaking, offer fewer options (see the further part of the article).
- Targeting in this option is now less limited than it used to be. In addition to the standard audience selection based on interests, age, or gender, you can also choose from saved custom audiences and lookalike audiences, but only if these groups have been previously created in the Ads Manager. Therefore, if no advanced activities have been conducted on the account and you do not have the aforementioned groups created in your resources, you are left with only the option of reaching a more general audience.
- When creating a campaign by clicking 'Boost Post,’ you gain access to limited statistics only. Why? Because the panel available on the fanpage shows significantly fewer data. It mainly displays reach, the number of actions taken, and the cost per specific action, as shown below:
Ads manager – Why use it?
Ads Manager is Meta’s more advanced option for creating campaigns. It is a completely separate panel divided into three sections (Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads). At each stage of campaign creation, you need to configure specific options in each of these tabs. These are more complex and include many additional elements that make the campaigns even better optimized.
Capabilities of Ads Manager:
Ads Manager is more complex than traditional post promotion but offers many more possibilities. First, when you start configuring, you can choose whether you want to spend your budget on a total or daily basis. The total budget will be optimally distributed by the advertising system throughout the campaign’s duration, while the daily budget allows the system to spend only a specified amount per day. Another difference is the ability to set a campaign start date—you can schedule a campaign and its later launch. As for the choice of placement options for displaying the campaign, both panels offer very similar settings.
It’s worth looking at the differences in advertising objectives. In the case of Ads Manager, they are more specific: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, Sales. Many of these are not available in the „Boost Post” option. Most importantly, only in Ads Manager will a sales campaign be properly optimized due to the specific Sales objective. Remember that the campaign goal determines its results.
When it comes to Ads Manager, targeting capabilities are more advanced. When creating audience groups, you have the option to use, for example, data available thanks to a pixel installed on your website and create remarketing groups, as well as lookalike audiences, i.e., groups of similar audiences.
Ads Manager = detailed data. The number of metrics in the Ads Manager panel is enormous. It often happens that a large portion of them is not even used in the daily optimization of activities. By creating a campaign with this tool, you will be able to determine the metrics of interest to you based on specific advertising goals, and even create your own.
What works better? A comparison
Below, you’ll find a comparison of the two methods of advertising on Meta, which will help you evaluate which one best suits the needs of your business.
Own elaboration based on Meta tools.
Can you already see what’s best for you? As a specialist in this field, I can confidently tell you that in most cases, Ads Manager will work better. However, if you don’t plan on conducting more advanced activities or don’t have such extensive knowledge, the simplified advertising version will suffice. However, it’s worth thinking ahead and getting acquainted with Ads Manager—if only to compare the capabilities these tools offer.
Key Takeaways
- Define your goals. Only then will you know which tool is right for you. If your goals are more advanced, consider Ads Manager.
- Determine who you want to target your ads to and whether the basic options will suffice. Do you want to use remarketing groups and lookalikes? Then go for Ads Manager.
- If you want to plan your campaigns, the answer is also Ads Manager—only it provides such an option.
- The issue of campaign statistics is very important. With metrics, you can draw conclusions and properly optimize campaigns. Ads Manager allows you to analyze a large amount of data.
