Automated App Ads

Facebook automated app ads (AAA) refer to a type of ad you can create within the Facebook platform (now Meta)  that will take a variety of creative elements that you supply and mix and match them using artificial intelligence in order to automate the process of targeting, ad delivery, and customization.

The rough analog on the Google side is Google’s App Campaigns.

Facebook automated app ads can be highly useful for advertisers as they require less effort to set up than individual app campaigns. And if they are set up properly, AAA campaigns can achieve a high level of performance due to the fact that they’re powered by Facebook’s own machine learning algorithms.

While automated app ads offer a number of benefits and ease of setup, there are several downsides. For example, AAA doesn’t support several targeting options such as gender, interests, behavior, age, and so on. That said, you can target audiences based on language, OS, and country. Facebook automated app ads also do not support all ad types such as carousel ads, playable ads, and several others.

As highlighted in our blog post on how to analyze Facebook AAA, another issue with this ad type is that you can’t analyze all the data you may want to:

While you can pull country stats and you can pull creative stats at a high level, you can’t pull them together down to every asset in those ads. And other dimensions like platform and sub ad network or DMA (designated market area) are also difficult if not impossible to slice and dice with those granular creative and campaign variables. Essentially, that means that while Facebook’s AI knows what rocks and what sucks in your marketing campaigns … you don’t.

This insight into which creative is performing well can guide your asset design process for future ads so it is highly relevant for advertisers.

Thankfully, with Singular now you can analyze Facebook AAA and dynamic assets.

As mentioned, Facebook’s Automated App Ads create several versions of your ads based on the image and text inputs you provide, which is referred to as dynamic creative. Each creative asset is assembled with the various images, call to actions (CTAs), and ad copy you provide.

Over time, Facebook uses the data on which assets are performing well to optimize for the best combination of assets. In essence, on Facebook’s side they are giving you high level data on the overall campaign performance, but you will lack any granular data on which creative assets are actually outperforming others.

Singular solves this by interpolating the data, which is a process of using known data values to estimate unknown data values. After interpolation: 

… each asset is split assigned to a country in such a way to keep the proportions correct in terms of cost per country but also other metrics, like impression volume per geo, ensuring the data is as accurate as possible. It’s not hard data based on actual recorded activities, but it’s representative of what happened and how your ad campaigns were delivered.

The end result is that Singular is able to pull Facebook AAA asset level data and analyze it and provide granular insights into which creative asset is driving the best performance. In summary, advertisers that use Facebook AAA can take their ad campaign performance to the next level with Singular’s creative asset insights and optimization in order to achieve the highest ROAS possible.