CYS is a big fan of Facebook ads. Over the past few years the platform has become exponentially more popular--and with that popularity has come significantly increased competition. In many cases increased competition has resulted in increased CPC’s and combined with Facebook’s announcement on June 26th, 2016 that it would change its News Feed to be more family and friend-centric--tools like AdEspresso go a long way to support our obligation to find what works for our clients and reach their audience.

What is AdEspresso

AdEspresso pitches the ability to “Optimize your Facebook Ads Easily, Like Morning Coffee. Why not get more money from your Facebook Ads with less work?”

The tool has two core components--a campaign builder, and an analytics tool--as well as a host of smaller yet still quite useful features.

They offer a free, full-featured 14 day trial without requiring a credit card and after sign-up you’ll be up and running and reviewing existing campaign data in minutes.

Being able to connect to multiple existing ad accounts quickly was great when I first started poking around. In less than ten minutes I added eight of our Facebook ad accounts, including our master account.

During the Trial

Let me start by saying this--I’m a skeptic. It’s just how I am--I tend to approach tools like these cautiously. Probably because I’m acutely aware of these $20, $30, $40/month reporting service's ability to eat into our margins. We run a tight ship, keep our costs low, and in doing so aim to provide the most value for our clients. Also I personally believe you need to know how to interpret just about anything in Excel before you need a specialty tool. Too many tools, not enough craftsman...but that’s another topic…

Day one was interesting but not profound. After the shine of the new analytics tool wore off I wasn’t really seeing how there was anything necessary here that I couldn’t or didn’t already do with my go-to combination of Google Analytics and Excel. But part of this was my fault because AdEspresso’s analytics really don’t get a chance to show off until you actually create a campaign within their interface--rather than import campaigns previously created in Facebook Ads Manager. And campaign creation in AdEspresso is totally, completely money.

It’s not just campaign creation that stands out. It's campaign variation creation, and this is where it all happens!

Once I got a hang of the interface, how I could add quickly add multiple variations of every component of a Facebook Ad including...

Headline
Ad Text
Link Descriptions
Image or Videos
Landing Page Link
CTA Button
Placements

...I was totally hooked. In less than an hour, including the time it took to come up with new creative and find new stock images--I had a brand new campaign, complete with almost 250 ad variations ready for testing! Wow. Wow. 250 ads. All set and ready to test against each other. Wow.

From there it just gets better because now that these ads have been created in AdEspresso’s interface--their analytics and reporting tool can really do it’s work.

Want to quickly compare CTA’s for different images across Ad Sets? No problem.

Curious about CPC by placement? Easy.

The AdEspresso ad hoc reporting tool is as good as it gets and the best part is that it aggregates data across all your ad sets in a campaign so you can get useful information from smaller budget tests and use that data to iterate quicker.

CTR analysis on post images showing the best ad performing 3x better than the worst. That’s valuable info!

Ongoing Optimization

Ongoing campaign optimization comes in two flavors--automatic and manual review suggestions. I’m going to save comment on the auto-optimization tool for now because frankly I’m not sure I’m using it correctly yet. But the manual suggestions have already been extremely valuable. Take a look at this example:

Optimization comparison highlighting CPC difference between Facebook Ads placement

So Did I Sign Up for the Paid Version?

You bet I did! Interestingly enough we had recently been trying to crack a problem for a client with a big budget for facebook, combined with a smaller geographical territory they needed to advertise in. It’s a brick and mortar service business. New clients need to come to the location. We were killing it on Facebook lead gen until we weren’t. Frequency burnout was the issue and AdEspresso was the solution.

At this point I’m actually not sure how we lived without this thing for so long. AdEspresso is an excellent tool and highly recommended for anyone doing any significant advertising on Facebook’s ad platform.

What’s Good?

The campaign builder is just money
Remarkable ability to easily create test variations
Automatic optimization is interesting but I’m not totally sold
Manual optimization suggestions are absolutely actional
AdEspresso’s learning content
Saving draft campaigns

What Could be Improved?

Option to make changes to existing campaigns
Support is pretty good, but we’d love to see some live chat options for paid users at least during business hours