New Look, New Business Manager

Ring the bells, the long-awaited redesign of Facebook Business Manager is underway, huzzah!

Facebook has this week started rolling out the updated user interface for Facebook Business Manager to marketers and agencies.

Some may have noticed this in the past few weeks.

The Business Manager design spruce-up coincides with wider changes to Ads Manager, which went live last month and was announced back in April.

So Much Facebook Business Manager Pain

One of the biggest challenges for agencies and clients alike is structuring ad accounts and profiles, and syncing into Business Manager.

For organisations with multiple presences, and/or ad accounts, this can often be a fiddly process resulting in structural account problems that can be a real pain to fix.

Since day one this has been a convoluted and confusing process, and thankfully, Facebook has finally taken action to address, introducing:

• An easier process for agencies to onboard new clients and manage permission
• A better way to manage historical reporting
• An easier way to assign and organise assets to people within your Business Manager account

New & Improved Business Manager Interface

The latest updates to Business Manager include several changes with more likely to go live over the course of the year.

Seamlessly moving between features and being able to find important functions within Business Manager has always been a weakness.

To address, the new user interface includes a change to the navigation, with an updated menu on the left after you log in, including links to key management areas such as Ads Manager, Audiences, and settings.

There’s also a new “Create Ad” shortcut at the top of that menu, opening up into Ads Manager, which hopefully might help improve the quality of campaigns. Crucial given recent escalations in costs.

The vast majority of social media advertisers, on Facebook or elsewhere, rely on the easy ‘boost a post’ style options. The exact process varies by platform, but most social players offer it.

While these offer convenience and speed, they are highly limited in terms of functionality. They also generally imply an ad hoc approach to ads, rather than a more strategic ‘full-funnel’ approach. Perhaps one of the leading reasons why most social ad spend is ineffective.

New Business Assets, Permissions & Partner Updates

The updates above will help day to day implementation, while the introduction of new ‘business asset groups’ will help with more structural issues, especially for agencies.

Business asset groups offer an easier way to organise your Facebook Page, ad accounts, pixel and other assets so that you can better manage employee access to them and assign permissions to multiple assets at once.

With this new feature, you’ll be able to organise your business assets and control employee access based on work needs.

The basic idea within Facebook is that each business should OWN its Facebook Page, Ad Account and Business Manager account. If working with agencies or external consultants, the third party should be granted access as a partner.

In practice, in Australia and NZ, this is often not the case. With an agency quite often owning at least a client’s ad account. Something which leads to no end of problems usually in the medium-longer term, and should be remedied proactively, before it’s too late.

To try and clear up some of this mess, and Facebook should take some responsibility, it has also launched a new tool that will make it easier to view all partners, onboard new partners and grant access to assets. Along with more precise insights into who has access to what.

The latest changes are rolling out. What a way to roll into the weekend!

Is it 9am too early to raid the drinks trolly?