Bugs and problems in Facebook Ads [UPDATED 10/08/2016]

Introduction

I’ve been doing a lot of Facebook advertising. Compared to Google AdWords, Facebook Ads is missing a lot of features, and has annoying bugs. I’m listing these problems here, in case anyone working at Facebook would like to have an advertiser’s opinion, and that people working with programmatic ad platforms see how difficult it is to create — if not perfect, then at least a satisfactory system.

A caveat: although I’m updating the list from time to time, it might be some bugs are already corrected and the missing features added. The ones fixed have been pointed out by strike-through.

Acknowledgments: A big thanks goes to Mr. Tommi Salenius, who is my right hand in digital marketing.

[UPDATED 10/08/2016]

  • add ‘like disavow tool’ (cf. Google’s link disavow)
  • ‘Facebook marketing partner’ –> expanding to smaller agencies (cf. Google Partners)
  • save target groups when making targeting in ad creation tool
  • add possibility to exclude saved audiences
  • ads receive an unequal number of impressions; if many ads in one ad set, most of them receive zero impressions
  • de-duping target group frequency across campaigns (overlapping audiences: avoid inflation of total frequency by de-duping)
  • distribute budget automatically between campaigns and ad sets
  • Split option in Power Editor does not split an existing audiences, but actually creates a new (complementing) one
  • add possibility to exclude age groups (could be done with exclusion of saved audiences)
  • sorting columns does not work in Power Editor reports section
  • sorting based on conversions does not work properly in Ads Manager columns (it calculates some sort of average)
  • re-position image in Power Editor –> not possible to see preview
  • in web interface impossible to make advance connection with parameter OR – now it uses AND – for example, fans of my page AND friends of fans makes target group impossibly small
  • does not show total budget (or any totals) in campaign view (UPDATE: partly fixed for some metrics, but total budget still not visible)
  • impossible to target competitors’ fans (what are the barriers for making this happen?)
  • breakdowns not possible based on e.g. education level (more breakdown possibilities)
  • possibility to set budget at campaign level
  • no possibility to filter campaign (cf. adwords) –> trying to find a campaign quickly is a pain
  • utm tagging missing –> impossible to track from 3rd party analytics
  • shared budget feature is missing –> you should copy this feature from AdWords
  • when copying campaigns, impossible to change goal (really stupid, cannot test performance with different goals)
  • campaign reporting –> no trends, no graphs –> impossible to assess long-term development of campaigns (compared to AdWords)
  • campaign page –> no possibility to change metric for graph (much better in AdWords where two metrics can be freely chosen)
  • no frequency cap (again, possible in AdWords)
  • no ‘compare to previous time period’ option in reports (unlike AdWords)
  • no possibility to delete images in image gallery –> wtf, makes it very difficult to manage
  • too small image size in image gallery –> again, hard to manage images
  • not possible to copy numbers in power editor (!!!) –> sometimes, you’d want to copy numbers between campaigns or into excel
  • power editor loses text field content when changing ad (field)
  • power editor does not enable image variation
  • web version does not show all image variation ads in first pageload
  • unable to copy ad sets in web interface –> impossible to make quick new versions targeting e.g. newsfeed vs. right column
  • doesn’t show pause status in ads while in review
  • power editor does not copy ad statuses while duplicating ad sets
  • rotate evenly option missing –> compare to AdWords
  • cta not possible to be removed in powereditor once put into ads
  • unable to revert to suggested image in web interface after choosing image from gallery
  • facebook ads no sound in video preview
  • missing bid modifiers: e.g. for ad placement, e.g. -50 %, right column

—

Problems in Page Insights:

  • inability to answer standard questions such as: what are the all-time most liked posts? how many posts did we do last month?

Want to contribute? Send me bugs and/or missing features and I’ll list them here.

Dr. Joni Salminen holds a PhD in marketing from the Turku School of Economics. His research interests relate to startups, platforms, and digital marketing.

Contact email: [email protected]