Boosted Posts or Ads Manager: Which is Best for Your Engagement Campaigns?
"Boosted posts offer simplicity and quick reach, but Ads Manager gives you the power to maximize results through advanced control and insights."
In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, it's crucial to stay ahead of the curve to maximize engagement and drive results. Today, we're delving into the key differences between running engagement campaigns on Ads Manager versus utilizing boosted posts, shedding light on the advantages each offers and the recent changes in fees you need to know about.
Now let's dive into the top 5 differences between Boosted posts and Ads Manager Campaigns that your need to consider before making a choice: ⤵️
1. Targeting precision:
Ads Manager allows for granular audience targeting based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and more. This precision ensures your content reaches the most relevant audience segments.
PROS
Spend your budget on the audiences that historically have proven to convert better.
CONS
New Ad Accounts do not offer historic data so you need to test broader audiences to start identifying good performing audiences.
Boosted posts offer straightforward targeting options, making it easy to quickly reach an audience based on basic demographics, such as age, location, and gender.
PROS
Quick to setup, no need for advanced knowledge for setup, great starting point.
CONS
You will inevitably use a portion of your budget and time to allow the algorithm a chance to figure out where conversions happen and you need to be much more specific with your creative, so your are truly speaking to your target audience.
2. Ad Creative Customization:
With Ads Manager, you have extensive control over ad creatives, including formats, placements, and calls-to-action. This flexibility enables you to tailor your content to different audience segments and objectives.
PROS
Particularly with smaller budgets, the stacking method can allow for significant testing of creatives and call to actions in a short period of time. This requires you to be able to run several creatives, copies, headlines, CTAs within the same Ad, and allow Metas Algorithm to choose the best option for each person.
CONS
Time and resources need to be invested in crafting each asset on the correct dimensions and multiple variations to be able to leverage testing.
Boosted posts maintain the original format and content of the post, providing a seamless way to amplify content that is already performing well organically.
PROS
If something performed well organically, with a few clicks you can get more people to see and engage with it without further creative or copywriting work on your end.
CONS
The time you are not investing beforehand in crafting creatives, copies, CTAs to test, you will invest in figuring out what works best. You will need to compare each boosted post against each other after they have finished running and then apply adjustments on the following boost.
3. Budget Optimization:
Ads Manager provides advanced budget optimization features, allowing you to allocate your budget dynamically based on ad performance and objectives, maximizing ROI.
PROS
You can control your budget to a granular level and adjust based on performance in real time, allowing for additional learning and over time optimization.
CONS
You need to monitor your campaign, know how to evaluate each metric and know what and how to change to obtain the optimization benefits.
Boosted posts offer a simple, fixed-budget approach, making it easy to manage spending without needing in-depth knowledge of ad budgeting strategies.
PROS
Tight Control over budget, short term "set it and forget it" process.
CONS
You cannot leverage the algorithm's ability to predict and learn who is more likely to take the action you find valuable - signing up for a trial, filling a lead form, watching a video, clicking to your website- because each boost is a new learning phase.
You cannot make any adjustments on a boosted post while its running, you can only turn it off and create a new one.
4. Ad Placement Control:
In Ads Manager, you can choose where your ads appear across Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger, optimizing placement for different audience behaviors and preferences.
PROS
Some placements are known for delivering poor quality results, particularly leads. Having the ability to handpick where you want your paid traffic to show, is a good way to exercise some control over the quality of your results.
CONS
Meta is not particularly a fan of us not allowing it to decide what to do - aka, where to show your content. This can result in some cost increase, particularly on CPMs.
Boosted posts benefit from Facebook's algorithm-driven placement, which automatically selects the most effective placements to help your content achieve better visibility.
PROS
Quick setup, no need to make size adjustments or multiple assets as Meta will leverage their AI to adjust your original content for each placement.
CONS
Facebook's algorithm will not always have YOUR best interest in mind. It is after all, a business that profits from every single impression they give your content, regardless of it being the best impression for your business objectives. It will heavily favor content from brands willing to put more skin in the "pay to play" game.
Your boost will only apply on the platform you use to create it therefore, you need to create one individual boost for Instagram and one for Facebook.
5. Insights and Analytics:
Ads Manager offers comprehensive analytics and insights, providing detailed performance metrics such as reach, engagement, conversions, and more. These insights empower you to make data-driven decisions and refine your campaigns over time.
PROS
By leveraging the Reporting and integration capabilities of Meta, you might be able to know as close as possible, if your efforts are truly driving the actions that are valuable for your business and how much those actions cost to be able to plan in the future.
CONS
You need to have knowledge on how to set up, analyze AND USE all this data to drive your actions towards obtaining the most ROI over your investment.
You need time in order to gather relevant and significant data that will help you make informed decisions, specially with smaller budgets.
Boosted posts offer straightforward performance metrics within the Facebook interface, giving you a quick snapshot of how your content is performing without delving into complex data.
PROS
You get only a handful of high level metrics to analyze, making it easy and quick to evaluate performance against industry standards.
CONS
Metrics offered from boosted posts are famous for being "vanity metrics" that don't really help you determine if your efforts are having a direct impact in your business goals. I might know that I have a great CPM or CPC compared to the industry standard, yet I can't know if my investment actually helped me generate leads or make a sale.
"A whooping 30% fee for using the [apple] apps makes you double think of wether the ease of use is worth such a high premium"
Moreover, it's essential to note recent changes in fees imposed by Apple on boosted posts initiated from their apps. Any content boosted from Instagram, Facebook or Meta Business Suite's apps on Apple, will result in a 30% fee. This fee will be automatically deducted from the pre-paid funds that you are now required to add to your account in order to boost content directly from any of these apps.
These fees can significantly impact your advertising budget, specially if you're trying to stretch a small one. This will, without a doubt, make it even more crucial to consider alternative avenues.
One way in which you can avoid paying these fees, other than using Ads Manager, is utilizing a browser to access the apps, either from a mobile device or desktop. Not all functionalities are available on browsers but you can certainly get the job done.
If all this feels like a lot to digest... you're not the only one. To boost or not to boost is an on going debate amongst marketers, and everyone has their own opinion. We suggest that you base your decision after analyzing the following: 1. Specifically what do you want to achieve by investing money on paid social? 2. Your (or your team's) time, abilities and disposition to tackle the task and 3. The total budget you are planning on investing, 4. How relevant is it for you to know if your investment is yielding results.
If you'd like expert assistance in managing your ads effectively and maximizing your results, I invite you to book a discovery call with our team. We offer comprehensive ad management services tailored to your business goals and budget.
