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Facebook announces new features to level-up your advertising campaigns

Krystel Bitar, global gaming product manager at Facebook, discusses the latest updates to Facebook's Automated App Ads

When it comes to the complex world of advertising, you want every cent you invest to count.

Launched last year, Facebook's Automated App Ads (AAA) is designed to help businesses, big and small, get the most out of their app ads. Using powerful machine learning and automated systems, AAA helps businesses grow their games through greater scale and sustained ad performance.

Building on existing features, we have continued to evolve AAA to support more business use cases such as In App Advertising and Real Money Gaming and to help drive even better results and improved efficiency.

Over the last year we've launched a series of new features to help AAA operate more effectively. Let's take a closer look at some of those changes and what they mean for you.

App Level Settings

In July we released App Level Settings , it's a new tab in Business Manager which allows you to specify settings, requirements or constraints at the app level. These settings are typically policy, legal or business requirements, and relate to the nature of your app, or the core target audience for your app or product. App Settings automatically apply to all existing and future Automated App Ad campaigns for a given app -- the settings do not apply to manual app ad campaigns given those campaigns offer these settings at the ad set level. Now you can define App Level Settings for:

Minimum age targeting: The default age targeting for AAA is 13+. For those of you who have policy limitations on minimum age targeting such as Real Money Gaming or Social Casino apps, this feature allows you to specify the minimum age required for your game (18+, 21+ or 25+)
Custom Audience exclusion targeting enables you to upload and apply Custom Audience exclusion lists. This feature can be used to allow you to exclude custom audiences that fall outside the default 90-days exclusion window applied to all our App Install campaigns.
City and state-level targeting allows you to include or exclude particular cities or states from AAA campaigns. This is particularly useful for Real Money Gaming advertisers as it ensures you can reach customers within your business operations constraints.

App event optimization with custom events

App event optimization with custom events within your app ads will help to drive meaningful results, allows for easier set-up, and also provides more flexibility to communicate your goals. If your true goal is player retention, particularly for In App Advertising advertisers, or you follow a subscription or hybrid monetization model, App Event Optimization with custom events is your answer to optimize to true business goals.

Using this feature you will no longer need to create a proxy event for your app campaigns. We have removed these intermediary steps, enabling you to directly optimize to a custom event of your choosing. Your custom events will be available in the App Events dropdown at the ad set level.

Creative reporting and management improvements
Throughout 2021, we also released a number of features to help improve reporting and managing creatives, such as:

● The ability to view the creative name for your AAA campaigns within the editing flow for easier management
● Creative level reporting breakdowns with Mobile Measurement Partner reporting. Make sure to reach out to your MMP for more info
● Restoring asset reporting for offsite conversion events on SKAN campaigns

Opening Editing and creation of AAA campaigns
We've also expanded the access of Automated App Ads from Ads Manager to the Marketing Ads API. This feature also allows Facebook Marketing Partners to integrate AAA creation and editing in their interfaces.

Dynamic language optimization [Coming soon]
Over the next few months, you will be able to create ads in multiple languages to reach multiple audiences with dynamic language optimization. This will allow you to target users speaking multiple languages within the same campaign and ensure creatives get delivered to users in the right language.

This helps with targeting liquidity, creative performance and, in particular, it will help you set up iOS 14.5 /SKAN campaigns with consolidated audiences given the limited number of campaigns per app.

Use case expansion of the A/B split test in the Experiments tool [Planned]
Over the coming months, look out for the expansion of possible split tests options for AAA campaigns, which will help inform better performance decisions, particularly around Country combinations, Creative Strategies or Optimization mixes.

For more information on Automated App Ads, these new features and more on what's to come, click here.