Why Choose a Product Like Smartly

Facebook has a great UI for managing its platform, the FB Power Editor. They have some of the most brilliant engineers working on this product. Yet many companies get products on top of its API, such as Smartly.io. These products aint’ cheap. Smartly starts at $1,000/mo, and is 3-5% of your monthly ad spend. Why would anyone pay so much (sometimes $100,000/mo+) for a product such as Smartly?

In General

Support - Your Own FB Marketing Expert

The number one reason to get these products is the support. Smartly provides each client with a Technical Account Manager, that is someone who is not only an expert in Smartly, but Facebook Advertising as a whole. Marketing departments are often spread thin. Even large companies often have just one person managing all marketing efforts -- print ads, email marketing, Google Ads, going to trade shows. With so much to do, it’s hard to keep on top of the latest Facebook features and offerings, as well as Facebook Marketing strategies as a whole.

Smartly account managers, unlike general marketers are focused only on Facebook Marketing. They know the offerings and options inside out and constantly guide their clients towards the best strategies for their campaigns. Additionally, since they interact with so many clients, marketers, Facebook developers, and other technical account managers, they’re constantly on top of the latest tips and strategies and can share them with their clients.

Also, Smartly account managers are technically savvy, meaning they can help quickly implement and troubleshoot issues without the help of the client’s tech teams. They can help with Pixel setup and troubleshooting as well as integrations with the other systems.

They know what’s technically possible in terms of integrations with their clients’ internal systems, making the most use out of the data they have.

Building on FB API - Faster Feature Releases and More Specialized Solutions

Before Facebook releases features on their PowerEditor, they release a programmatic API interface. Smartly is able to quickly build on top of that interface and build out UIs for their clients. This gives Smartly users an edge against their competitors. It means that Smartly users will be able to better target their customers before anyone else.

Additionally, Facebook has thousands of customers, so it’s hard for them to create features that would be useful to all their clients. They focus on the lowest common denominator. Smartly is able to focus on specific client and industries needs, building hand-tailored features just for them. For example, they specialize in the e commerce and travel industries.

Specific Features

Smartly has built a lot of ingenious features over the years.

Built for Mass Campaign Management

While Facebook’s Power Editor is built for the general marketer, Smartly is built for power users. Smartly has lots of templating and automation features that are meant to save marketers a lot of time by eliminating repetitive tasks.

Smartly is great for agencies that have multiple accounts, allowing them to duplicate and share templates across those accounts.

Make Use of Feeds -- Integrate Your Data and Get Creative

One of the greatest features of Smartly is being able to sync your own systems with Facebook ads and programmatically augment your campaigns. A great example is a client who figured out that their sales go up significantly when it rains. So they integrated with a weather feed, running campaigns more aggressively when it was raining.

Smartly can also help coding automations for segmenting customer lists, coming from the customer’s systems, which would otherwise not be possible using a UI. This can save a huge amount of time, manually exporting and toying with the data in excel. Instead the user will have an automated feed that is constantly updated. Also it’s possible to create ads automatically from feeds of excel spreadsheets.

Automated Ads

• Restaurant ads. Have a bunch of restaurants all over the city. Create auto ads with menu items, based on city.

• Car dealerships. Advertise each dealership’s current inventory

• Tag each product with a custom audience

Smartly Creative Optimization - A/B Tests on Steroids

Smartly has automated what you would do with Facebook’s A/B tests and called the feature “Smartly Creative Optimization”. This features allows to test a set of creatives within a campaign continuously to see which is performing better and show those creatives more often.

Ad Rotation - Reduce Ad Fatigue

A common problem in advertising is ad fatigue. Users are tired of seeing the same creative over and over. This feature will switch out ads once every few days so that users will keep seeing fresh content.

Stop Loss

2 Factor Authentication

For added security, all interaction with Facebook ads runs through one Facebook account. Individual users are created within Smartly and you can force/monitor 2 factor authentication.

Other Stuff

• Campaign Conversion Lookalikes - have current campaign, and find people who lookalike to the people who converted excluding current conversions

Automating Lead Ads and Canvas Ads

Facebook recently released the Lead Ads feature