Whenever you create a Facebook ad, that ad needs to be reviewed. Usually, the review is complete within 24 hours, though it can also take longer. A delay, even for 24 hours, could mean missing a window of opportunity to promote a trending product, or launch a timely campaign.
To make things worse, every time you make a change to your ad, it has to be reviewed again. Making it even more difficult to keep promotions relevant.
What's the Problem?
Every time a FB ad is changed, it must again be reviewed before going live. This can take 24 hours or longer, making it even harder to ensure your ads are always up to date and relevant. Whenever an ad is under review, it can’t be seen by potential customers, making it difficult to justify a change in the middle of a campaign, regardless of how great an impact you think it could have.
Plus, relying solely on Facebook means that someone will have to set their alarm to manually start the new ad, as sales often start and end at midnight.
The review delay also limits opportunities for creative messaging, such as countdowns (“sale ends in 3 days; 2 days; 1 day”), limited runs (“only 4 items left!”), and special events (“you qualify for a special deal”).
Industry Best Practice
The best practice for this is to work around the problem. Companies submitting ads directly to Facebook, without a partner, must create and deploy a specific ad every time they have a sale.
Example:
- Regular ad is running
- New ad is created for a sale
- Once the sale begins, the regular ad is paused and the sale ad is activated
- Wait for approval on the sales ad (pausing the promotion you had)
- When the sale ends, the sale ad is paused, and the regular ad is reactivated
In addition to the approval delays, during which your original promo is paused, these companies are limited in the types of sales they can run, and how often they can run them. If every ad for every sale needs to be manually created, activated, and deactivated, then every campaign takes much longer to put together and run.
What's the fix?
Templates! By using ROI Hunter's template editor (TEDI) to create custom ads, e-commerce companies can skip the Facebook review process when making changes to their promotions. This is because those changes are made to the template, rather than the ad itself. Due to this, only the initial review of the promotion is needed. Plus with templates, the promoted product can easily and automatically be replaced with whatever item is currently a priority. Without templates, sale-specific imagery must be created for every single product.
This simple difference has saved our clients countless hours of waiting for their ad to be ready to go live. With customizable templates, they are able to adjust the elements of their promotion in time with changes they see in the market. They can easily automate these changes with conditions (IF stock level moves below X, THEN reduce sale from 30% to 20%), eliminating the need for someone to stay up late to update the promotions manually.
Finally, our clients have been able to explore creative messaging in their templates, knowing they can automate a countdown without extra effort, and leaving them with more time for analysis and optimization.
