How we streamline work on advertising campaigns in the Meta Ads Manager

If you are also a person handling advertising campaigns for your company, work as a Facebook Ads Specialist, or simply want to speed up your work with the Meta advertising panel, in this article you will find methods tested by us that will save your precious time during daily, repetitive tasks performed in the advertising panel.

Using Keyboard Shortcuts

Few people know this, but the Meta advertising interface provides a range of keyboard shortcuts that allow navigation between campaigns, ad sets, or individual ads.

Thanks to them, for example—without taking your hands off the keyboard—you can display ad statistics for selected campaigns, edit ad sets, or browse the activity history for selected ad creations.

Keyboard shortcuts within the ads manager interface also allow you to summarize and publish current changes made to your campaigns or delete them.

They also allow for performing the action that probably saves us the most time when working with advertising campaigns in the Meta advertising ecosystem. This action is…

Copying selected elements of the advertising campaign

If it weren’t for copying certain campaigns, ad sets, or even individual ads, we would spend several times more hours in the ads manager than we do on a daily basis.

It often happens that there is a need to change, for example, the budget type of a given campaign or to quickly configure three types of very similar campaigns that differ only in the advertising objective (e.g., for tests).

In such a situation, setting up nearly identical ad sets within these campaigns and ads within those ad sets would be a plain waste of time and energy.

Thanks to the ability to duplicate campaigns within one account in the Meta advertising ecosystem, we are able to create many tests and control many parameters such as budget, bids, placement, or campaign objectives in just a few clicks, and approve all changes made in this way by reviewing the changes via the keyboard shortcut ⌃+R (Ctrl+R).

Advertising copy suggestions

However, it is not always possible to duplicate all elements of an advertising campaign arbitrarily—for example, for campaigns with a different advertising objective. In such cases, text suggestions come to the rescue (so as not to spend hours jumping between the original ad and “copy-paste”).

This is currently the only way to save time when creating identical ad creations in newly created campaigns focused on a different objective than the campaign where the original ad creations were located. Because even when creating a duplicate of a creation, the advertising system “clears” the ads, so their elements must be filled in anew.

Still, after clicking in the text input field, the advertising system may suggest adding copy to the ad that you have already used in other campaigns within the same advertising account. And it is definitely worth taking advantage of these suggestions.

Bulk editing of selected advertising campaign elements

It also happens that even the best specialist makes a mistake. It takes just missing in a word an “o” and then applying the step from the previous paragraph, and you will have not one ad text to correct, but 30 such texts.

Fortunately, the creators of the Meta advertising interface also foresaw the possibility of bulk editing specific elements of the ad.

Thanks to bulk editing, you can change virtually any number of ads within selected elements such as their title, description, link, or ad copy content.

This feature has saved us many hours of corrections more than once in situations where the UTM tagging scheme sent by the client changed or when a new promotional code was introduced in the store system for recipients of the abandoned cart recovery campaign.

Importing and exporting Facebook advertising campaigns

Why are we addressing the issues of importing and exporting campaigns at the very end?

This feature itself contains a very noble assumption, under which advertisers would export complex advertising campaign configurations, ready for editing in Excel, and then import them back into the advertising panel to publish the changes prepared in this way with one click.

Additionally, such a solution would allow for convenient use of predefined settings based on Excel templates for preliminary campaign configuration.

This process could be extremely convenient if not for the fact that it doesn’t work. Unfortunately, I have not yet encountered a situation in which importing a campaign previously exported from the ads manager resulted in it being imported without alerting import errors.

The most common errors we encounter during such an import include, for example, mismatched ad or ad set identifiers, non-existent references to creations, date-related issues, and many other “silly” errors from the user’s perspective.

Despite this, have we exported configurations of the most complex campaigns in this way? Yes, but it was solely for statistical and analytical purposes. Sometimes it’s easier to extract IDs of specific elements in bulk precisely thanks to the export function.

However, as advertisers, we cannot count on the campaign import and export function in Meta being useful for speeding up our daily work. Facebook programmers have not fixed this functionality since the times of Power Editor, and nothing indicates that they intend to return to this topic.

Automatic generation of UTM tags

If every time we create a new ad creative we had to rewrite UTM tagging for a given campaign from Excel or invent it anew, configuring new advertising campaigns would take us several times more time.

Fortunately, there are simple UTM generators both inside the Meta advertising system and outside of it.

If you want to generate tags for links that you will use in your advertising campaign, simply use the blue link below the URL addition field when creating an ad creation in the ads manager.

However, this method, like many internal Facebook tools, likes to fail, so for our agency needs and for clients we consult, we have prepared a dedicated tool that works and generates ready UTM tags.

You can use it completely for free — in our UTM Tags generator, you will prepare your own tags and then copy the ready destination link to the promoted page, which you can just paste into your ads.

Here you will find our free UTM generator.

Clear naming structure

At the beginning of training courses on advertising in the Meta ecosystem, we usually address the issue of correct and sensible campaign naming.

This seemingly insignificant detail is all the more important because during consultations on advertising accounts working on large budgets, unclear naming very often costs businesses tens of thousands in losses.

Especially when several specialists work on one advertising account, each naming campaigns, ad sets, and ads in a completely different way.

So how to do it correctly?

The naming convention of your campaigns doesn’t have to be complicated. We start marking campaigns with an ‘@’ character and the initials of the person creating a given campaign or information about which stage of the marketing funnel the given campaign belongs to.

Then its name further specifies the campaign objective and a general description of the content types of ad sets (e.g., general targeting category).

At the end, we leave some free space for any unforeseen additions (for example, when we test a campaign with a daily or total budget, this is the place to mark such a difference).

An example campaign name based on the scheme described above looks as follows:

@ TOF v | Prospecting | DPA | Conversions [ViewContent]

Filter, include, and exclude

The appropriate naming convention mentioned above allows not only to quickly orient oneself among campaigns visually, but also to separate different views from each other.

For example, as we mentioned, at jakubjacek.pro we use a scheme of marking campaigns using an ‘@’ character and the initials of the specialist handling a given campaign.

Thanks to this, we are able to filter out all campaigns created, for example, by a specific person on one advertising account.

Moreover, thanks to the use of appropriate symbols and abbreviations, we are able to take a look at advertising campaigns belonging to a selected marketing funnel segment in just a few seconds.

All you need to do is use the “campaign name (does not) contain(s)” filter and enter the word by which you want to filter the campaigns displayed in the panel.

And finally, filtering by selection, the option I use most often, which gives me the ability to display results exclusively for selected campaigns based on checking.

By the way, this is a great way to bypass the well-known Facebook error known to advertisers, in which the summary row did not display results for all visible campaigns.

Thanks to using a filter whose condition is having one or more PLN spent (which de facto means previewing a campaign that was actually launched), in most cases allows me to force Facebook to summarize all campaigns filtered in this way in the sum row.

We could talk endlessly about optimizing work within the Meta Ads Manager. Especially considering that the methods described above are only a small part of the knowledge we share as part of our online marketing educational project.

By visiting moonwise.pl/en/knowledge you will familiarize yourself with our free downloadable materials and find paid online courses on the Meta advertising system at various levels of advancement.

Still, if you are looking for an agency that will take care of your advertising campaigns — stop looking and get in contact with us. We will gladly talk about how we can help you.