Optimize your ad management routine and boost your return on ad spending

Reveal is an Advanced automation tool for Facebook Ads: helps you manage and test ads, promote page posts, and even get custom reports on 5 other marketing platforms. You don’t need to have a huge team of marketers or account managers to run dozens of your ad campaigns — just set the rules and Reveal will handle it for you: will pause inefficient campaigns, increase budgets for well-performing ads and will find the right bid.

Kevin William David interviewed Mikhail Trofimov, CEO at Reveal to know more.

Hi Michael, Can you tell us about what you are working on? What is Reveal?

Reveal is an professional Facebook Ads automation tool that provides lots of automation possibilities not available with native Ads Manager, as well as an advanced reporting tool.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

We had a successful experience of building Slack bot for our previous project, and we wanted to apply that experience to a new area that was not occupied by anyone else at the time. It turned out that ‘Facebook Ads + Slack’ was a perfect match (that’s where the ‘bot’ in our initial name comes from). So we built the first version of the product which received a warm welcome on Product Hunt but wasn’t commercially successful. Thanks to chats with our users and customer development interviews, we learned more about the main bottlenecks and decided to focus on Facebook Ads management part. And since automation tools at the time didn’t cover much of our users needs, we decided to come up with something that could solve that. So here we are now!

Reveal lets Facebook marketers free up a lot of time by automating routine processes that previously had to be done manually. You know, there’s always a better application of your work hours than just routine operations that can be delegated to an algorithm that’s never tired and never sleeps. Now hundreds of marketing managers save their time for analytical and strategic tasks with a help from Reveal.

What’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use Reveal?

The FB Ads automation market is quite competitive, but there are only few more products worth mentioning: AdStage, AdEspresso, Qwaya, and Smartly.io. Reveal has the most advanced automated rules system among all of them.

Reveal lets you create a very sophisticated Facebook Ads automated rules with the tools we have: nested rules, advanced logging, parent elements metrics, metrics comparison within rules, hourly metrics etc.

Who uses Reveal? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

Every business with marketing activities on Facebook is our potential client. However, our typical customers are either agencies or ecommerce and their FB Ads spend varies from $10k to $1M per month.

Here are a few of them: AgencyY (marketing agency), Ubisoft (mobile gaming), Scentbird (ecommerce).

How are your customers using Reveal? Could you share a few different use cases?

Reveal use cases are pretty straightforward, we provide four main features for our customers:

• Automation: You set the rules and conditions for your ads and Reveal makes the rest of the work managing the ads
• Alerts: You set trigger conditions and Reveal alerts your team via Slack or email when the conditions are met.
• Custom reports: You can set up reports across multiple marketing platforms with metrics and custom schedule you want, get them in your email and Slack to stay on top of your overall marketing performance.
• Post boosting: Promote posts on your Facebook page automatically based on their organic performance.

Have there been unique use cases for Reveal that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Some agencies are using Slack channels to send reports to their clients. We didn’t have this feature initially so had to implement a more advanced way of managing access to reports.

Some clients needed a way to base their rules on hourly performance of an ad. Since Facebook didn’t have such small time presets themselves, we’ve came up with the solution ourselves.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

There were no special hacks, we were pretty common things that most startups do. The most effective channels were:

• Product Hunt which generated some hype on the early stage but didn’t lead to any commercial success.
• Growthhackers brought a fair amount of new customers after posting some interesting content about the product.
• AppSumo held a promo campaign with us that helped us acquire lots of customers last fall.
• There are also a few influencers who like our product and promote it in their own FB Ads master classes.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

We’ve started with just sending alerts and reports to users work chats (Slack). That was fun, but there wasn’t any product-market fit and we had to make additional steps until we found it. We realized that people weren’t ready to pay just for an alert bot, so we made a pivot to a full-scale ad management system and the product found its customers.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

The most important integration was the one with Slack. That’s what we’ve started with and it has always remained one of our main product features. Slack featured Reveal in its App Directory’s main page and has added it to the Brilliant Bots category.

What are the top 5–10 products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

That’s a pretty common list of tools, we use Mixpanel, Slack, Asana for internal and analytical stuff, and Intercom, Stripe and Github for running the project itself. You can check out the full list here at Siftery.

Originally published at siftery.com.