Facebook has become an essential part of media buying in Europe. Attracted by the sheer volume of users on the platform and peerless audience microtargeting, European advertisers continue to shift significant amounts of media budget through the social network behemoth. But buying and optimising large amounts of dispaly inventory directly through the Facebook interface can often be an inefficient process. Glow Digital, a London-based ad technology company, has built out a solution that addresses these issues for advertisers and agencies looking to utilise the Facebook channel for media buys. Damian Routley, Director at Glow Digital, took time this week to speak to ExchangeWire about the One Media Manager platform and how it is helping optimise and manage media spend across the Facebook platform.

Can you give an overview of the One Media Manager platform?

DR: ONE Media Manager helps advertisers to run successful Facebook Advertising campaigns. It does this by reducing much of the resource requirement involved in creating and optimising campaigns.

Successful Facebook campaigns depend on instant testing of numerous messages to huge volumes of micro-targeted segments; creating these initially is time consuming, but essential. We have automated much of this process so customers can set up their campaign in minutes, rather than days.

Who would be a typical user of the One Media Platform?

DR: It’s built for people who are serious about Facebook Ads. This means agencies and large advertisers. The tool is built to handle sophisticated campaigns containing numerous ads. We don’t have a cut off point, but the greatest benefit is realised when managing multiple campaigns, or with a single campaign of £20k+ in spend each month.

What problems does the One Manager Platform address – and how can it help agencies, advertisers and media buyers?

DR: Facebook’s Ad platform is a great bridge between search and display. It blends the optimisation techniques seen in search with the audience segmentation common to display.

Facebook is able to deliver conversions to direct response advertisers and exposure to brand advertisers. The benefit of this channel doesn’t stop there however. One of the best ways we’re seeing ONE Media Manager being used is to derive insight into audience segments.

Using ONE Media Manager, it is possible to test multiple product and creative combinations out on different audiences quickly and easily. If you’re a mobile network for example, you will be able to tell that your pink handset on a £10 a month plan resonates most with a 16-20 female audience. You can also delve a step deeper into this audience and find out their likes and interests as well as their media consumption. This is hugely powerful information upon which to base future media, creative and product strategy.

The prerequisite for insight of this level is to have a properly constructed campaign in the first place. To do this at any meaningful level, you need automation. That’s where we come in.

Can you explain how One Media Manager would optimise a typical Facebook campaign?

DR: Facebook has many idiosyncrasies that advertisers won’t find in other ad platforms. As such, we have built much of ONE Media Manager specifically for the Facebook ad landscape.

The first problem we noticed was that advertisers were setting a static max bid which would often fall below Facebook’s fluctuating suggested bid range, meaning that their ad would get a very low share of impressions and often stop being served completely. ONE Media Manager checks each ad’s suggested bid range hourly and is able to change bids based on the high/medium/low value – ensuring consistent delivery.

Our auto-optmisation CPA strategy can run the campaign based on advertisers’ CPA and ROI goals. We have a very sophisticated algorithm that can be customised at ad or campaign level based on the client’s exact objectives.

Another problem advertisers have faced with Facebook is the CTR’s tendency to decline over time. This is problematic because Facebook automatically deactivates your ads when the CTR falls below 0.01%. ONE Media Manager checks each ad daily and flags up which ads have been deactivated so the user can take the appropriate action. This may be refreshing the creative, changing the bid or automatically duplicating and submitting the ad.

We have also built ad scheduling functionality into the application, so that users can run time sensitive creative easily across any time zone, or determine the cost and return of serving those ads at different times of the day.

How important is the FB media buy now in the agency buying plan? Is it becoming the “third channel” along with search and addressable display?

DR: It is vital. At Glow, we see Facebook Ads as being the perfect introduction to the new world of display buying. Facebook blends the analytical approach used in search with the audience segmentation of display. It’s the ideal stepping-stone onto the world of the DSP.

Are there still problems brand safety issues around user-generated content on Facebook that need to be resolved before bigger amounts of display budget is moved through the platform?

I think this is overplayed, or at least used by some as an excuse for not trying the channel. The fact of the matter is that these ads are targeted against the user, rather than the page. If the user you’re trying to target is looking at dodgy content, then your ad may show.

I think Facebook could do more to limit this such as adding some sort of negative matching functionality, but at the moment it’s a perceived issue that only a few have experienced first hand.

Do you see a lot more spend shifting to Facebook over the coming twelve months?

DR: I think there’s a huge way to go until we see sophistication in this channel on a par with search. With a couple of notable exceptions, agencies are still testing the waters, running small campaign-led budgets, rather than squeezing the most value from the channel. I think the learning curve is being led by a relatively small amount of agencies.

What are the plans for One Media Manager in the coming months? Any plans to build the platform out into other media buying channels?

DR: Needless to say we have some very interesting plans for our product in the coming months, much of this will be around improvements to how data is analysed and how the campaigns are optimised. I can’t say too much now, but we’ll be looking at how the information we have within ONE Media Manager can be harnessed for maximum advantage across other media channels. I can share more on this with you towards the end of September.