• by Lauren Kade , October 28, 2013

If you're relatively new to Facebook Advertising, you may not have explored Facebook's Power Editor yet. Power Editor is a wonderful tool that allows you to make changes to your campaigns offline, so you can easily revert changes, or upload changes in bulk to the main interface. You do have to use Chrome to access Power Editor and install it like a Chrome app or extension, but once it's downloaded it looks just like another website. Simple and easy! So what makes it so special?

Campaign Management

You can easily manage campaigns in Power Editor. Add labels to certain campaigns to group them together by overall program or effort, so it's easier to find what you're looking for. Under the campaign view, you can easily change settings or budgets for more than one campaign at a time. Under the ads view, you can just as easily change the bids for multiple ads at a time, and duplicate ads. The latter is particularly useful if you're doing tests, just duplicate the first ad and make the change for whatever you're testing.

You can also see the most recent statistics for your campaigns directly in Power Editor. That is one way that Power Editor is different that AdWords Editor – you don't need to "download" all the recent changes or metrics, because Power Editor updates automatically. If you choose the "download" option in Power Editor, it replaces all of your accounts with whatever is in the interface. Therefore, any changes that you made in Power Editor that have not been uploaded yet will be lost, so be careful!

Audiences

Audiences are in my opinion the best part of Facebook Power Editor. They allow you to create both target audiences and custom audiences. Creating a target audience allows you to wade through all of Facebook's targeting options, and save a specific audience. That way, if you have sixteen ads that all need to be targeted to the same people, you don't have to find and enter all the targets sixteen times. Create a target audience, select that audience in each ad, and you're done!

Custom audiences let you take advantage of your current email files. You can upload email addresses, and Facebook will match those emails with Facebook users and create an audience of those specific people. If you're doing a lead acquisition campaign, you can use custom audiences as a suppression list, and suppress people on Facebook that you already have emails for. If you're looking for donations or an action, you can specifically target your ads to people you know are already receptive and involved with your brand.

New(ish) Facebook Ad Features

Permissions

Under Account Settings (in either Ads Manager or Power Editor) you can now give permission to other users to see your campaigns! This is great news for organizations where there are multiple people working on your Facebook Advertising. There are two levels of access – general user and report only. (the latter is a great option for people who want to see "what's going on" but not screw anything up accidentally).

Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is important to accurately see how your campaigns are doing, by a metric that matters more to your organization than clicks or impressions. Tracking conversions through Facebook is similar to other online advertising conversion tracking, whereby you put a specific code onto a page you want to track. In Facebook, you create a new conversion, name it, choose a type (is it a registration, a lead, a checkout?) and then get a pixel or code. Based on whatever you want to track, you put this new code on the confirmation page. So if they signed up for your email newsletters, put the code on the "thank you for signing up!" page they land on once their form was submitted. Facebook will then track what people saw that page, and match it back to who clicked on your Facebook ads.