You may or may not of heard the news that Mr Green has taken over ownership of the FB Ad Manager.

There are some big changes coming up to the FB Ad Manager which should increase uploading speeds and reduce any bugs.

There was a new update sent out yesterday which should be working 100%. But the speedier more efficient uploader should be sent out in the next 48 hours.

Happy Facebook ad uploading!

Most importantly you’ll now be able to resume the script in case it’s stopped or fails. I know the biggest headache has been having to restart scripts all the time, so now you won’t need to. There’s a red start button at the top that will allow you to resume the script. Additionally, the last stop point will be saved to the ad file so that it can be rerun at any time, anywhere.

I’ve also made a big change to the saved files feature. Saved ad files will now be in XML format, which make it much easier to read in case you want to take a look, and this has also fixed several bugs in the process. (Note: you will need to recreate your old campaigns to be compatible with this version. The old campaigns can be read in any text editor)

You’ll now be able to include a radius when city targeting, just check off the checkbox and pick the radius you’d like to use.

Finally, you can now enter colleges when targeting users who are still in college or alumni.

On top of these feature updates there have been a whole host of bug fixes, best of all greatly improving keyword handling. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Cheers

- Remove icon for ad copy and images. Now you can remove unwanted images and ad copy from your setup.

- Image previews. See small icons of your images in the sidebar.

- Variable insertion into the url. Use the same insertion variables as the ad names to customize your urls. eg: url.com/?sub={country}-{gender}-{age}-

- Continue subids. Enter in where you want to start your subids.

For international ads, script files are now encoded to support international character sets (ISO-8859-1). Also, you will now be able to enter in city/state info for other countries – if they are supported, I’ll leave it to you guys to see if Facebook allows this for the country you are targeting.

I’ve also added several measures to make sure the script doesn’t hang or freeze in case of a bad connection or Facebook stubborn-ness.

Give this new version a try and let me know how it goes!

- Education. Target different education levels.
- Workplaces. Now you can enter in a list of workplaces to target.
- Birthdays. Target users on their birthdays. (Not sure how people would use this?)

I also fixed a bug related to entering keywords.

I’ve noticed that some people were using the custom ages field incorrectly and it was causing the tool to stop. The format of that field is a list of age ranges, not individual ages.

Right: 20-25, 26-30, 31-35, etc
Wrong: 20, 21, 22, 23, etc

In order to target individual ages, use “All ages in range” and set the lower and upper limits accordingly. Now if the custom age field is in a bad format an error message will pop up (rather than just stopping silently).

Next, now that Facebook has beefed up their interface to quickly do actions on multiple ads, I’ve taken out the ‘change bids’ section of the tool, so now it’s completely focused on ad creation.

One of the most common requests was the ability to customize ad naming, so I’ve added that. This will work similar to the keyword insertion feature. Add a custom naming string such as:

{country} {gender} ad-{txt} image-{img} {sub}

And each ad will be named accordingly, ie: “Ca M ad-5 image-3 10″.

All the available parameters are listed on the tool, pretty self-explanatory. You can add the sub id to the ad name now which should make it a bit easier to reconcile your stats.

The next most common request was the ability to have custom age ranges, so I’ve added that too. Now you can enter a line like “20-30, 30-40, 40-50” and split test using those age ranges, rather than just the ones I’ve had before. I know I’m personally going to use this alot.

That’s it for now, hopefully that give you guys some more to play with. There still a few more lesser used fields that I’ll get around to adding soon.

I met alot of people at Affiliate Summit East in New York this last weekend that are users of this tool. It’s always nice to hear stories about how much this has helped with your daily work. Like one guy who has his wife help with his online marketing, and after using this tool ended up saving hours every day for her creating ads on Facebook. I have some kickass tools in the works right now that should help out alot on other ad platforms, stick around.

City/State Targeting – I know alot of you guys like to break down your demos by city and state, so here it is. I think this only works with Canada, US, and UK, someone correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll add that in too. Enter a list of cities or states to target, with the option of split testing, where each ad variation will be created targeting each city/state in the list. The ad name format will include the first two letters of the city/state (it does look a little awkward but that’s the best I can do, there’s a limit to how long the ad names can be).

Languages – Now you’ll be able to add in Lanuages. No split testing here as I don’t think it would really be useful here. Pretty simple.

Age/Location Insertion – This one I think is really powerful. Insert the age you are targeting into your header or body using “{age}” or the city/state using “{city}” or “{state}”. Watch your CTR’s go up with this technique. Hint: grab a list of major cities and split test with city insertion for a kickass campaign!!! I’ve heard of Facebook not liking this kind of thing but I see it all the time, great way to get the attention of comatose Facebook users when they’re making fluff friends.

Post any questions/feedback on the forum:

FB Ads Manager Forum – Version 3 Released

Have a happy 4th to all the Americans out there!

The biggest issue by far was that resubmission doesn’t work anymore. As you might have noticed Facebook has selectively stopped letting you copy ads, using the “Create a similar ad” link, depending on which ad it is. Disapproved ads seem to be completely disabled, making it impossible to resubmit ads, manually or using this tool. Thankfully we can save ads here and re-run them anytime, making resubmitting unnecessary. Just delete your rejected campaign, and restart the ad creation process, same deal. Good luck trying to do that by hand.

Here’s the latest changes in this version:

- Grouped header and body together. The old way of split testing header and body didn’t make much sense, since they’re almost always a cohesive whole – mixing and matching different headers with different bodies isn’t the best way of split testing ad copy. Here’s what it looks like now:

- Changed the ad titles. Much more descriptive now, you should know exactly what ad you’re looking at without having to click through to the full screen ad.

- Bug fixes related to copying ads, stopping ads, etc.

That’s it for now, if anyone has any suggestions how to improve the tool, send me an email to fbadmanager aatttt 4houraffiliate.com

What are your options? Here are some to think about:

- Develop your own product. Pick a niche that you’ve had success with promoting and that you’re interested in. Find out who your customers are; their demographics, where to go online, what ads they respond to, what they are missing in the marketplace now etc. Affiliate marketing gives a huge head start to new product development, you’ve already mastered several phases of the lifecycle. And you probably already have a nice stash of capital to launch. If you think you’re earning alot selling a couple hundred bottles of pills a day on your network, think how much your merchant is pulling in.

- White label: buy direct from the manufacturer. Go to a site such as Trade Key and find an exporter of the product you want to sell. Then it is your job to handle the marketing and sales. Here you can get creative, eg. marketing ginko powder as “Power Drive, the performance enhancing supplement”. You will not have as much flexibility to create the exact product your market will want, but you have much more freedom than trying to promote a similar product on an affiliate network.

- Start an ads consultancy shop. Here you will continue to advertise for other companies, but scale this far beyond a single man/woman operation. Automate processes as much as possible through outsourcing, software, and hired guns, and partner with other internet marketers to take on as many projects as possible.

All these options solve the critical problem of building a reputation and base of customers that is missing from the work of affiliate marketing. Give me a shout at Affiliate Summit West if you have any good ideas.