How to Manage Facebook Ads Using AI

It seems as though artificial intelligence is everywhere, and advertising hasn’t escaped the wave. Just like Alexa learning our music listening habits at home, AI can learn how we like to advertise and make changes to campaigns for more effective results. If you’re not currently utilizing artificial intelligence, you’re missing out on something that could save both time and money for the marketing department.

AI Uses in Advertising

In the second half of this guide, you’ll see a shortlist of names helping marketing teams with Facebook Ads. First, we’ll discuss how is this technology used in the industry in the first place and what’s its wider application?

Budget and Targeting

One of the most important uses is the optimization of targeting and budgeting settings on a Facebook ad. Even for experienced marketers, knowing where to target and how much to bid is a cause of many headaches. Bid too much and you’ll overspend on ad position, bid too little and the ad won’t appear at all. Similarly, choose the wrong targeting settings and your ad can appear in front of the wrong people.

With AI optimization tools, we can take a backseat while artificial intelligence and machine learning models do everything for us. After reviewing performance, an AI tool will learn the actions that generate stronger performance. While this includes spending changes in some cases, it might be alterations to targeting in others. Either way, the campaigns continually improve without the input of marketers. As a result, our ads get stronger, and we have time to perform other tasks.

Every year, the solutions in this market seem to improve a little bit more.

Ad Platforms

Although you may not realize it, Facebook itself already uses AI. What’s more, it plays a role with advertising marketplaces, third-party networks, ad exchanges, and in lots of other environments. Even if these platforms don’t explain their use of AI, it still controls who sees our ads, how our budget is used, how one ad appears over another, and the overall efficacy of campaigns.

In fact, AI is used with relevance score and ad frequency, two of the core data points the platform uses to value and display ads. Rather than getting employees to assess relevance scores, artificial intelligence gets the job. Having your ad shown too frequently is dangerous because your audience can start to give negative feedback, and this has a knock-on effect on relevance score.

Ad Creation

Even with the ad creation stage, there’s some streamlining that comes from using AI. Using Facebook as the perfect example again, there are artificial intelligence systems in place to help advertisers create not just the ad copy but also the variations quickly and more efficiently.

Moving away from Facebook, other third-party services are using this sort of technology to write copy on the behalf of advertisers. For those who lack the creative juices, they can take advantage of these tools to get ad copy written for them. Over time, the AI learns the best language for your audience and continually improves. If you’re willing to invest this time, many advertisers have found ad creation AI useful.

Ad Management

Alternatively, it might be that you want to use AI for the management of your ad campaigns. If you want to retain control of all decisions, or perhaps the size of your strategy isn’t big enough for full automation, some AI tools will assess the performance of campaigns and suggest potential changes. Every so often, you receive insights for your ad groups without having to analyze and delve into the statistics yourself.

Implementing AI into Your Facebook Ads Strategy

AI can help across the different areas of a Facebook Ads strategy, but how do you get started? Well, it begins by identifying the needs of your business. While some companies will need small levels of assistance, others will need artificial intelligence solutions across the whole ad journey. Here are a couple of the most important considerations:

• Business Size — The larger your business, the more likely you are to need an all-encompassing solution. For example, you might have several ad groups across many different social media platforms. Alternatively, you might have just a couple of campaigns on Facebook alone. Be sure to implement AI in a way that suits your needs. As a small business, think about if you are ready for full automation; most aren’t. Maybe instead, you choose a service that allows for scaling.
• Your Weaknesses — Although we don’t like to admit it, every business has weaknesses. Do you struggle with the ad creation stage? Do you lack the time to perfect the targeting and bidding of campaigns? Once you prioritize the needs of your own company, you’ll quickly find the right AI tools to help with your advertising adventure.
• Your Budget — Of course, many businesses are restricted by their own budgets. If this is the case, think about your weaknesses and narrow down the list of potential services according to what you can afford. Remember, this is considered an investment for most because of the return it brings.

Examples of Brilliant AI Tools

As promised, we’re going to finish with some examples of AI tools. These are great places to start the search for your own AI needs!

1. Zalster

As a campaign management tool, Zalster will learn from your campaigns to effectively improve the performance of bidding, targeting, and other areas. The dashboard is incredibly easy to follow, and there are integration opportunities with Slack. However, the main reason we included this service in our list is because of its advanced A/B testing facilities. You can create a host of ads and Zalster will compare performance between them.

Rather than basing all decisions on conversion, Zalster will assess multiple data points, such as ‘add payment information’. Unfortunately, the downside to this AI tool is that it doesn’t really help those who want website clicks and reach — their main goal is to maximize conversion.

2. Trapica

As far as real-time learning goes, there aren’t too many tools better than Trapica. Although there are many reasons to like Trapica, perhaps the biggest is that the service has been designed with the end-user in mind. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert marketer, you will still find value with their tools because they integrate machine learning and artificial intelligence with your ad campaigns in a simple way.

After you’ve followed the setup instructions, Trapica will learn all about your audience and their interests, behaviors, and intentions. Of course, their goal is to automatically update targeting and bidding settings to improve performance. What’s more, it will also perform A/B testing.

3. Reveal Bot

Finally, it’s possible to get live updates on campaigns whenever you need them through Reveal Bot. After integrating with Slack, your marketing team gets reports directly to their account showing clicks, reach, impressions, and more. Another unique benefit Reveal Bot provides is the ability to pause an underperforming ad without even leaving Slack — being able to cut the supply of funds to poor ads quickly without logging into a different platform saves both time and money.

If you want to try this tool, you don’t need to spend a cent; just use the free trial. You can then decide whether the automation, unlimited reports, and alerts are worthwhile for the fee afterward.

Which of These AI Tools Do We Recommend?

Long story short, Trapica.

Why did we choose Trapica? Well, for a few reasons:

• Trapica offers multiple different intelligent solutions to suit your business’s needs at every stage. Regardless of your size, they make it easy to meet various marketing needs all from one place!
• Free resources! What better way is there to check out a service than to try some of their tools out for free? (check out their Competitor Ad Library, Trapica Suggest, and Performance Monitoring tools)
• Rather than just Facebook ads, Trapica supports numerous social media platforms. You can use Trapica to maintain ad campaigns on YouTube, Quora, Twitter, Google, Reddit, Snapchat, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Even if you don’t have campaigns across several websites, it’s still useful to have for the future.
• Trapica also has a great team and their customer support is strong. Not only can you book a live demonstration before ordering from the brand, but there’s also always help available whenever you need it.

BONUS AI Marketing Tool!