You must use Meta Business Manager
You might have already noticed quick 'promote' and 'boost' options within the normal Facebook interface, but to have proper control over your ads you need to use a tool called Meta Business Manager.
Dealing with Facebook means managing various different assets that are all linked together in different ways:
- Pages
- Instagram accounts
- Ad accounts
- Pixels
Over time you'll want to give various people access to all of the above, with different permissions levels. You'll want to be able to remove that access too, as colleagues join and leave the organisation.
That's where Meta Business Manager comes in (formerly known as Facebook Business Manager).
As well as making it easier to manage all these things, it gets you out of the precarious position of having a single login to manage everything and significantly helps in separating work and personal Facebook use.
If you aren't already using Meta Business Manager (MBM) then you really must.
Getting started
Think of MBM as an independent entity, sitting separately from your colleagues' personal Facebook accounts.
What you'll need to do is:
- Set it up
- Give it access to all your assets (pages, ad accounts and pixels)
- Add people to it (members of your team and any freelancers or agency partners)
- Then give those people access to the relevant assets
A quick tour of Meta Business Manager
We wouldn't be the first to say that MBM could be easier to find your way around. The interface is likely to be quite different to what you're used to, and it bears no relation to the main Facebook design. Finding the Ads Manager is trickier than it should be, so let's take a whistle stop tour of MBM's many menus.
After you've logged in, you'll find the Meta Business Suite menu off to the left. It looks like this:
You might think that 'Ads' is where you want to go. This will take you to a streamlined ads interface, which is not what we're dealing with in this course. Instead, you need to select 'All tools', which displays...this:
If there's one thing Meta like, it's to give you a lot of options. Looking closely, you'll find Ads Manager hidden away in the bottom-left quadrant. Clicking that will jump you into the Ads Manager proper, where we'll be spending most of our time:
To confuse matters further, clicking the menu button on the left now opens up an entirely different set of options:
This menu, at least, is far more useful, providing you with quick access to ads, events, audience and business settings from one place. It's worth bookmarking Ads Manager once you've found it, so that you can jump straight back in without needing to navigate the rest of MBM.
It should also be noted that Meta are continuously changing MBM, adding and removing sections, altering menu positions, updating the interface and so on. This is unfortunately something that Facebook marketers simply have to get used to.