Thoughts on developing a facebook ads manager

adigitalorange

adigitalorange

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Nov 26, 2009
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I've been thinking about this for sometime now, because I kind of miss programming & I think something like this could save some people a lot of time. I know there is already something like this that is out, but I've heard updates sometimes take a while to roll out, and often times people get frustrated because they have to go back to doing shit manually while waiting for an update.

I want to make a desktop app, rather than a browser extension, as I believe there's a whole lot more we can do with that as you aren't limited to the features of firefox, and instead we have an entire language to develop in (Python is what I plan on using in case you were wondering).

So, I just wanted to get some ideas from you guys because I know a lot of you market on facebook everyday, and the more you can automate that process the more paper you can stack up.

Some features I was thinking that would be pretty neat would be:
-Ad generation (i.e. being able to take 5 titles and 5 ad bodies and automatically generate 25 unique ads)
-Subid tracking, basically allowing you to split test tons of ads and see what's converting for your demographic
-Integration with prosper... what this means would be downloading stats and matching them with your subid/keyword in prosper so you don't have to figure this shit out manually
-Export data
-Automatically upload generated ads

Any suggestions/comments are appreciated.
 


it's a good idea

forget the prosper integration and integrate conversion tracking + all the features of FBAM + CSV exports and that will be a valuable tool
 
Might be out of the scope of what you are doing but built in dayparting would be great.
 
aeisn said:
Might be out of the scope of what you are doing but built in dayparting would be great.
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That would be difficult to do as a desktop app like the OP wants to do, as far as I can tell the only way to day part in Facebook would be to have a scheduled task run hourly to iterate through your ads and send pause/unpause requests to a campaign, in effect you would need to run your desktop app 24/7. If there is another way to do it let me know, it's an interesting problem. A web app seems like a better way to go than a desktop app if day parting was going to be implemented.
 
sgtryan said:
100% security you aren't stealing campaign data (open source would be nice)
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Is a hosted web app (like prosper) that was fee based (assumption being that a rational company wouldn't want to jeopardize sales if it was discovered they were mining customer data) be a non starter?
 
I think someone already made something like this.. but it costs monies.

SO HOOK US FOLKS UP WITH SOME FREE SHIT!
 
Check out One Media Manager as your model to develop from. It has all the features an affiliate marketer needs (including the all important bid management piece) and it's build with FB's API. The agency that developed it takes a piece of your media buy though, so it's not really well-suited for us.
 
I think it would be better to be a web application as it can give a bit more functionality like on the fly changes (pause, day parting etc.).

Would you be using the API?
 
Nathy said:
I think it would be better to be a web application as it can give a bit more functionality like on the fly changes (pause, day parting etc.).

Would you be using the API?
Click to expand...

I would personally always prefer an API over mocking form posts, the API should be more stable, or at least a clear development path could be published versus no guarantees that inferred form posts won't change without notice.


Bevo Ryan said:
Already being done by a number of companies... I believe there was a techcrunch article about it not too long ago.
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Not surprised, big market, and there are apparently a lot of pain points with the existing FB ad management functionality. There's probably enough room for a few products out there.
 
Been there, done that. Never released it.

Make sure you charge a few hundred as they WILL pay it.

PS. They also don't care about you and will pass it around and pirate it, so have no mercy on charging for it. (personal experience)
 
Rage9 said:
Been there, done that. Never released it.

Make sure you charge a few hundred as they WILL pay it.

PS. They also don't care about you and will pass it around and pirate it, so have no mercy on charging for it. (personal experience)
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yeah, same here, and i've seen a lot of similiar implementations as well. none as good as mine though, haha!

if you code it, don't release it open source OP. just. don't. don't go sucking up to the a-list
 
Rage9 said:
They also don't care about you and will pass it around and pirate it, so have no mercy on charging for it. (personal experience)
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This ^^^

If you don't copy protect it hardcore, you're gonna be uberfucked.

harrymouni said:
yeah, same here, and i've seen a lot of similiar implementations as well. none as good as mine though, haha!

if you code it, don't release it open source OP. just. don't. don't go sucking up to the a-list
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Make it expensive and SCARCE. Make the features worth a $999 price tag, it'll still sell.
 
Rage9 said:
Been there, done that. Never released it.
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How come you never released it?

harrymouni said:
yeah, same here, and i've seen a lot of similiar implementations as well. none as good as mine though, haha!
Click to expand...

Every programmer thinks they can do it better than the last guy, I'm no exception :D

harrymouni said:
if you code it, don't release it open source OP. just. don't. don't go sucking up to the a-list
Click to expand...

Yeah fuck open source, open source is for tenured academics that don't need to worry about making money.
 
All of that is not too hard to do actually I've coded something that does most all of that. Integration with prosper isn't that easy but is doable as I actually did it their codes not the best around but it isn't too hard to work with overall. The hardest part is working with the facebook interface to get the ads uploaded. I could never get it to work with curl and had to do some backward methods to make it work.

I don't use it much anymore actually perhaps I'll repackage it as a service or something and sell it.
 
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