How to Use Facebook Power Editor: A Detailed Guide

What Is Power Editor?

The most powerful way to target your ideal audience on Facebook is with Facebook ads.

But clicking the “Boost Post” button and using the self-serve ad tool only scratches the surface. If you want to thrive and direct profits with your Facebook ads, you need to use Power Editor.

Use Power Editor to have full control over your Facebook advertising.

Power Editor is a free browser plugin created by Facebook that lets you bulk-edit your ads. It was initially created as a Chrome plugin. Although it does sporadically work in other browsers, you’ll likely want to use the Chrome browser when working with Power Editor.

Go to Facebook.com/powereditor to test your browser or install the plugin.

But Power Editor is much more than just a bulk ad editor. It has many advantages over Facebook’s self-serve ad tool used by the vast majority of Facebook advertisers.

Here are the benefits of using Power Editor for your Facebook ads.

#1: Get Access to Latest Features

Partner Categories is a feature available within Power Editor.

When Facebook rolls out new advanced features, they’re sent first to the Facebook ads API (which goes to third-party tools) and Power Editor. As a result, marketers using Power Editor tend to get these features well before those who use the self-serve ad tool exclusively.

Here are some examples of features you can currently find in Power Editor, but not in the self-serve ad tool:

Partner Categories: Facebook has partnered with three data-mining companies (Axciom, Datalogix and Epsilon) that collect mounds of data on users related to purchase history and lifestyle. Facebook uses this data to let advertisers do some powerful ad targeting with more than 500 categories.

Here’s a sampling of the targeting you can do with the help of Partner Categories:

• Household size of 6 (8,842,800 users)
• Upscale department store credit card user (34,618,400 users)
• Home office supply purchases (2,638,300 users)
• Aftermarket vehicle purchase over 48 months ago (11,952,800 users)
• Baby food and products buyers (10,497,100 users)
• Casino vacations (4,242,000 users)
• Dog owner (12,643,500 users)
• Fitness buyers—runners (5,950,600 users)
• Teacher/educator (223,000 users)
• Donate to veteran causes (7,016,400 users)

While Precise Interest and Broad Category targeting are dependent on users keeping their profiles updated, Partner Category targeting is based on a user’s actual buying history and completion of surveys.

Lookalike Audiences: Facebook’s recent rollout of Custom Audiences to the self-serve ad tool lets advertisers upload their customer lists into Facebook to target those users with ads.

Power Editor’s Lookalike Audiences builds a similar list of Facebook users based on your customer list.

Create an audience you can target with ads similar to your offline customer list.

This can be useful for advertisers with small customer lists that are quickly exhausted. Facebook will review your customer list and find either the top 1% (focused on similarity) or 5% (focused on reach) of users similar to those customers whom you can then target with advertising.

Saved Audiences (or Saved Target Groups): A successful Facebook ad takes time to create because you enter all of the relevant targeting parameters. This could include the following:

• Countries/States/Cities
• Gender
• Precise Interests
• Broad Categories
• Partner Categories
• Connections (Fans, Not Fans, Friends of Fans)
• Custom Audiences/Excluded Audiences
• Relationships and Relationship Interests
• Languages
• Education
• Workplaces

That’s a lot of information and it’s a pain to re-enter this every time you create a new ad within the self-serve ad tool.

Within Power Editor, all you need to do is create a Saved Audience (also known as a Saved Target Group). Once you create a Saved Audience, you save a lot of time in the ad-creation process.

Create a Saved Audience to save time!

While on the Audience tab, simply select your Saved Audience and Facebook will automatically prefill all of the necessary fields for you (more on this when we step through creating ads later).

Domain Sponsored Stories: This is a powerful tool that not nearly enough advertisers know about. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your website.

Whenever a user shares a link to your website, a story is created. If you set up a Domain Sponsored Story, Facebook will then turn that share into an ad.

Create Domain Sponsored Stories to leverage sharing from your website.

This is not connected in any way to your Facebook Page. The shining star of the ad is your friend and the link to your website. As a result, it’s more effective than a Page Post Sponsored Story at driving traffic to your website.

Conversion Specs: You’ll read more about this in a bit, but Conversion Specs allow you to get very granular within your ad bidding. You can optimize for specific actions like link clicks, video plays or post stories instead of relying on Facebook default optimization.

Others: This is constantly evolving. At one point, features like Conversion Tracking and Custom Audiences were available within Power Editor, but not the self-serve ad tool. If you want to get the cool features first, you need to use Power Editor!

#2: Control Ad Placement

Aside from new features, another reason to use Power Editor over the self-serve ad tool is the control you gain over placement of your ads.

Power Editor provides full control over the placement of your Facebook ads.

Within Power Editor, you can target the appearance of your ads as follows:

• All Placements
• Desktop Only (Right-hand column and news feed)
• All News Feed (desktop and mobile)
• Desktop News Feed Only
• Mobile News Feed Only

Let’s take it a step further. Say you want to target mobile devices, but only particular mobile devices. This can be helpful when promoting an iPhone app, for example.

Target specific mobile devices with Power Editor.

You have the ability to target specific devices (feature phones only, Android phones only or iOS devices only) and even drill down into the models of those phones and OS versions.

If you use the new Facebook ads reports, you can quickly determine which placements are providing the best bang for your buck so you can optimize accordingly.

#3: Optimize Your Ad Bidding

Here’s more about the ability to use a feature within Power Editor that I mentioned earlier called Conversion Specs. This Conversion Specs feature is not available in the self-serve ad tool. You need the Power Editor to use it. Let’s dig into what that means.

Note that within Facebook’s self-serve ad tool, you can only bid based on Optimized CPM (optimized for a specific action), CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions), CPC (cost per click) and Optimized CPC (optimized for clicks).

Within Power Editor, you can do the following:

• CPC (cost per click)
• CPM (cost per thousand impressions)
• Optimized CPM (optimized for a specific action)

In addition, within this Optimized CPM, you can choose from using default bids or manually set up bids to optimize for any of the following:

• Clicks
• Reach
• Social
• Actions

This is where it really gets fun. You can use either the default conversion specs or manually set up conversion specs.

You see, by default your ad is optimized for getting more Page likes if that’s your goal or for getting more engagement if you’re promoting a post.

But what if you want to optimize for something else? In the image below is an example of an ad that’s automatically optimized for engagement.

Optimize for specific actions by manually setting up Conversion Specs in Power Editor.

As you can see, the action type is “post_engagement.” You can edit this to optimize for another type of action.

Here are examples of codes you can enter to optimize for something other than general post engagement:

• comment (post comments)
• like (post likes)
• link_click (clicks on links leading to an external website)
• photo_view (views of post photo)
• post (post shares)
• post_engagement (general post engagement including any clicks)
• post_story (post stories including likes, comments and shares)
• receive_offer (offer claim)
• video_play (plays of your post video)

#4: Save Time With Bulk Editing

The Bulk Editing feature is a quick and easy way to shave off a few minutes from managing your ads.

Let’s say you create a campaign with five ads in it. All of those ads include the United States and Canada as your target countries. After looking through your results, you decide to target only the United States.

You could go into each ad individually and change your targeting or use Power Editor to highlight each ad and change one. That change will apply to all five ads.

Quickly edit multiple ads at once within Power Editor.

You can also quickly duplicate a campaign and all of the ads within it by clicking the “Duplicate” button while viewing the campaign.

Duplicate a campaign and all of its ads with Power Editor.

Or you can duplicate an individual ad by clicking the “Duplicate” button while viewing the ad.

Save time by duplicating an ad within Power Editor.

#5: Create a Campaign With Power Editor

First, make sure you click the “Download” button at the top right before you get started. This updates Power Editor on all recent activity you’ve had on Facebook and includes creating ads elsewhere, creating posts that can be promoted or creating tabs that could serve as a destination.

Make sure to click “Download” before each session using Power Editor.

Now go ahead and highlight either “Recent Campaigns” or “Active Campaigns”on the left.

Highlight “Recent Campaigns” on the left within Power Editor.

Then click the “Create Campaign” button at the top.

Click “Campaigns” and then “Create Campaign” to create a campaign in Power Editor.

Now select this new campaign on the left and simply fill in a few minor details.

Create a Facebook ad campaign within Power Editor.

• Campaign Name: Name your campaign something descriptive to make it easy to pick out later.
• Budget: Set a daily or lifetime budget. This is the maximum that Facebook will bill you in a day or from start to finish.
• Start/End: Set a start and end date and time. You can choose to run continuously without an end date if you choose.
• Labels: This is a way to help organize your campaign into groups. Feel free to add a label here to help keep similar campaigns together.

That’s it! Creating a campaign is pretty dang easy.

#6: Create an Ad With Power Editor

Here’s how to create your ad in Power Editor. First, make sure that your new campaign is selected on the left. Then click “Ads” at the top and “Create Ad.”

Highlight your campaign, click “Ads” and then “Create Ad” to create a new ad in Power Editor.

Your new ad is then broken up into three main sections and one subsection:

• Creative & Placements
• Audience (including Advanced Options)
• Pricing & Status

The Creative & Placements view will look like this:

The Creative & Placements view when creating a Facebook ad within Power Editor.

Here, you’ll need to provide the following:

• Ad Name (make it descriptive based on purpose, placement, bidding, etc.)
• Ad Type (Ad, Sponsored Story, Mobile Only Ad, Video Ad)
• Destination (Facebook Page)
• Page Post (if applicable)
• URL Tags (for tracking traffic to your website from ads)
• Conversion Tracking (for offsite conversions)
• Placement
• Mobile Devices

After reading this article on Power Editor, make sure you also experiment with different types of ads—particularly those classified as “Ad” and “Sponsored Story.”

The Audience view looks like this:

The Audience view when creating a Facebook ad within Power Editor.

This is where you’ll do the bulk of your targeting by defining:

• Audiences (select a Saved Audience to quickly fill in targeting details)
• Country, State, City or Zip Code
• Age Range
• Gender
• Precise Interests (target by interests, activities, education, job titles or groups listed on timelines)
• Partner Categories (target based on buying histories and lifestyles)
• Broad Categories (target people who include information in their timelines related to these words or phrases)
• Connections (target users connected to your Page, not connected to your Page or who have friends connected to your Page)

The Advanced Options view looks like this:

The Advanced Options view when creating a Facebook ad within Power Editor.

This is a continuation of the Audiences view. Target users based on the following:

• Custom Audiences (target users on your customer list)
• Excluded Audiences (exclude users on your customer list)
• Interested In (relationship interests)
• Relationships
• Languages
• Education
• Workplaces

It’s important to target languages here so that you don’t waste your money on people who can’t read your ad.

When you select one of the Education options, you can pick the precise school, graduation year and areas of study to target.

The Pricing & Status view looks like this:

Here’s the pricing and status view.

We already covered much of this under the Section #3: Optimize Your Bidding (above). But this is where you can really refine with your bidding.

• CPC (cost per click)
• CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions)
• Optimized CPM (optimized for a specific action)

I recommend split testing with each of these three options and that you consider manually assigning bids for a specific action to see what’s most efficient.

Make sure that you experiment with Conversion Specs to optimize your ad for the action that leads to success!

Don’t forget to click “Upload”!

When you’re finished creating your campaign, make sure to click the “Upload” button at the upper right-hand side.

Don’t forget to click “Upload” when you’re done creating or editing your Facebook ads in Power Editor!

Power Editor Results

Getting results with Facebook ads has a lot to do with whether you’re properly using all of the best tools available to you. Create your ads in Power Editor and you’ll get great results.

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5 Facebook Ad Tips to Maximize Your Facebook Campaigns

What Changed Within Facebook Ads?

If you’ve been running Facebook Ads over the past year, you may be confused by some of the new options and the new layout of the Ads area. You may have felt like you had a good handle on everything if you read our previous post about Facebook Ads.

But of course, this is Facebook, and the only constant with Facebook is change. Let’s dive into some of the new changes with the Facebook Ads platform so that you can fully maximize your next Facebook Ad campaign.

The first step is to choose what you want to advertise. You can choose an external URL or a Facebook Page, App or Event. This step has not changed much from the previous iterations of the Facebook Ads interface.

First decide what to advertise.

You’ll notice your first difference if you choose to advertise your Facebook Page, Event or App.

#1: You Have New Choices

One big change with the new Facebook Ads layout is the choice of objectives.

Your new choices when advertising your Facebook Page.

The changes are as follows.

• Get More Page Likes. With this selection, you’re advertising your Page and trying to grow your Likes. You can write your own ad copy, but the title of the ad is still unchangeable as the title of your Facebook Page. If your Page name is too long, the ad will only show the first 25 characters of your Page name. (More on this in a bit.)
• Promote Page Posts. This option was previously under the “Sponsored Story” section of Facebook Ads. This is a way to advertise one of your recent posts and the ad is prewritten for you. This type of ad still appears on the right side of Facebook Ads, as shown in the preview, and it appears in the News Feed where people can interact with the post itself right from the ad. A word of caution on this type of ad: You will get charged for a click if someone likes the post that you’re advertising. They don’t have to like your Page to like the post and they may even think that they are liking your Page by liking the post. So make sure you’re using this option wisely. But one thing I like about the Promote Page Posts selection is that you can select a post that had a photo and get a “bonus” photo in your ad.
  

  If you advertise a page post with a photo, you will have your profile photo and the post photo in your ad.

• See Advanced Options. Selecting this option allows you to have more flexibility in the bidding on your ad. If you select this option, you still have the same options of choosing to advertise your Page or a page post, and you will have to make those selections initially. The main difference here is in how you want to bid for your ad.
  

  Only the Bidding options change with the See Advanced Options selection.

Also note that when you choose to advertise your Facebook Page, you canchange the landing view so that when users click on your ad to see more information, you can direct them to a particular tab on your Page.

#2: Sponsored Stories Are Automatically Selected When Advertising Your Facebook Page, Event or App

Be very cautious about this next step, because it is one of the major changes with Facebook Ads.

Facebook auto-selects the Sponsored Stories choice for any ad that advertises something on Facebook, such as a Page, an Event or an App. Facebook says, “No increase in budget is required.” But that is a little misleading.

What that statement means is if you are spending $10/day on your ad, then Facebook will also run your Sponsored Story within that $10/day budget, but will still charge you when someone clicks on that Sponsored Story.

So now you may have $5/day going toward the Sponsored Story and $5/day going to the ad you intended and that has the copy you want.

Notice that Sponsored Stories is on by default.

Now this may not be a bad thing if you’re truly looking to increase your likes. Remember that Sponsored Stories are the ones that go into the News Feed (and they are shown on the right side also), where more people notice them.

The Facebook Ad I ran recently that included the Sponsored Story Ad performed very well. When you look at the data, the Sponsored Story looks like it had a 100% conversion rate (Actions to Clicks), versus the Facebook Ad that had an 80% conversion rate of Actions to Clicks.

The conversion on the Sponsored Story looks better than the ad.

But make sure you dig a little deeper into these numbers. When you expand each of these ads (notice how each of the ads has a different line item in your reports), you see more information.

You find that while the Actions were high on the Sponsored Story, they didn’t all result in an actual Page like. Some users just liked the post, some commented on it and some shared it.

Dig deeper into the Facebook Ad stats.

In this case, the Ad conversion now becomes 80% for the Sponsored Story and 77% conversion for the regular ad (74 likes from 96 clicks). The Sponsored Story still outperformed the ad in this case, but make sure you watch your numbers!

And do your own testing on Facebook Ads—you may find that your Page and your ads perform differently. Remember you can deselect the Sponsored Story if you do not want to create a Sponsored Story with your ad.

#3: Click See Advanced Options to Only Advertise a Sponsored Story

Another change with the new layout is that it’s more challenging to advertise just a Sponsored Story about people Liking your Page. To do so, click See Advanced Options, then Remove the Ad itself to leave just the Sponsored Story behind.

Click the See Advanced Options selection and Remove the Ad.

#4: Know Your Bidding Options

Bidding has not changed that much, but it is definitely something you should understand. When you choose to advertise something you have on Facebook such as your Page, Event or App, and you select the first radio button (Get More Likes, Increase Attendance, or Get New Users, respectively), then Facebook does your bidding for you. They optimize your ad with the CPM (cost per mille, which is cost per 1000 impressions) model.

If you choose the basic pricing model, Facebook optimizes your bid for you.

You can switch to the Advanced Pricing either here in the Campaign and Budget window or by choosing to See Advanced Options as mentioned in #1. If you choose the Advanced Pricing option, you can then use the CPC (cost per click) model, as well as set your own bids for the CPM model.

Switch to Advanced Pricing to set your own bids with either the CPM or CPC models.

#5: Use the URL of Your Facebook Page to Edit the Title of Your Ad

This isn’t a brand-new trick in Facebook Ads, but it’s one that seems to work sporadically. Luckily with the new Facebook Ads interface, this trick seems to be more available.

If you enter the URL of your Facebook Page, rather than select your Facebook Page from the drop-down menu, you can then edit the headline.

Use the URL of your Facebook Page to modify your headline.

The Choose your Audience section of Facebook Ads still works the same way as before and is great for reaching your perfect customer.

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