/Snitch
A command line interface for Facebook Ads in Slack
At Lost My Name we’re very much committed to building a ‘full stack’ publishing company.
We do all our own marketing, sell our books direct on our website, design our own products, print them and ship them to customers ourselves and manage all customer communications in house. We even built our own door entry system.
A key part of becoming good at all these things, and binding them together tightly, is our commitment to investing in R&D across the whole operation.
Recently we started a programme of work looking at how our software engineers could help our performance marketing team work faster and make more sales — our first product to ship is called Snitch. Here’s what it does:
The problem — overwhelming CPA monitoring
At Lost My Name we’re running around 13–15 Facebook Campaigns at any one time. Each Campaign contains 3–4 live Ads at any one time.
This means we have up to 60 Ads to monitor at all times (and many many more archived Ads — and a constant supply of new ones). Here’s a shot of the FB Ads Campaign view.
And here’s a view of some Ads in a Campaign:
You can see in the above screenshot (if you squint really hard) that each Ad yields a slightly different ‘Cost Per Acquisition’ (CPA).
In order for a sale to be profitable we need that CPA to be less than £10. When it goes over £10 we’re basically losing money on the sale.
Facebook doesn’t let you set caps on CPA at the Ad level. Instead, you can allocate money to a Campaign and move it around manually.
In the past, our Facebook performance manager Shalina would login and check each Ad individually, turning off under performing Ads (over the £10 CPA) and replicating high performing Ads (around £5 CPA).
With 60 live Ads to monitor this is a nightmare to do — and she has a lot of other stuff on her plate preparing new Ads, managing audiences, duplicating high performing campaigns…
What she really needs is just to be told when an Ad exceeds the CPA so she can quickly turn it off (and the inverse with a high performing Ad).
The solution — Snitch, CPA alerts in Slack!
To solve this problem we (well, basically Oz) built Snitch, a tiny little app that listens to the CPA changes on Facebook via the Facebook Ads API and tells us every hour if any Ads are exceeding our desired CPA on in a channel in Slack.
Here’s what it looks like for the user:
BOOM. So useful! Each of those items links directly to the individual Ad, so Shalina can just click once to view it, and once to turn it off.
But, it gets better. By using Slack as our UI we’ve opened up lots of simple ways to allow Shalina to interact with Facebook Ads via a ‘command line’ style interface.
She can now type the following commands:
- /snitch: fetch — gets her the latest high and low CPAs
- /snitch: add_member — adds a subscriber to the channel
- /snitch: high_CPA_{value} — Changes the high CPA value
- /snitch: low_CPA_{value} — Changes the low CPA value
For a power Facebook Ads user like Shalina this is pretty awesome, and we’re very excited to see where we can take this command line concept.
Slack as a command line UI into other apps is an intriguing meta-idea. We already built a command line UI for our doorbell. I think we’ll be building more soon.
We’d love to know about other people building marketing tech into Slack, and if you’d like to use Snitch drop us a line on Twitter — @lostmynametech
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