Ads Manager vs. Boosted Posts: What’s the Difference? Unlocking the Power of Meta Advertising

In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, paid social media campaigns (when created and managed correctly) have emerged as a particularly efficient and lucrative way for many businesses and content creators to drive reach, engagement and conversions with a highly targeted audience. This is an offering that now exists across all social platforms. No matter what type of audience you’re going after or what product or service you’re selling, you can find success with a well-strategised campaign optimised for your goals and objectives.

To the untrained eye, these campaigns often look simple to set up and run, but there is in fact a science behind how to set up and manage a successful campaign, with many of these platforms offering training and certification for individuals and agencies who wish to specialise in paid social. Becoming an expert (and staying an expert) in an ever-changing social media landscape is time-consuming, so for many business leaders and owners or in-house marketing teams, this is a service that can be outsourced to a professional provider or agency, like Brandscend.

Let’s take Meta as our platform example. One of the most common mistakes we see businesses make is throwing money at Meta’s ‘boost this post’ button, without considering the campaign objectives or the tools they might need to measure success. If you want to see the strongest ROAS (return on ad spend) for the dollars you invest, you need to know the difference between creating an ad campaign in Meta Ads Manager (with a detailed and specific objective, target audience and measurable outcome) and simply boosting an already-existing organic post and when to use each option for your desired-outcome.

While these tactics may seem similar on the surface, they serve distinct purposes and offer different levels of customisation and control. Let's delve into the key differences between a Meta Ads Manager campaign and boosting a post.

1.     Campaign Objectives and Customisation: 

Meta Campaigns: Ads Manager provides a comprehensive range of campaign objectives, catering to different stages of the marketing funnel, such as brand awareness, consideration, and conversion. This level of granularity allows businesses to align their goals with precise outcomes, whether it's driving traffic to their website, increasing app installations, or generating leads.

Deciding on the right goal for your campaign is crucial to its success and should be a SMART goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). Your campaign specialist can help you choose the right goal, correct budget and campaign time period to ensure you deliver maximum results. Before all of this takes place, you also need to ensure you’ve placed a Meta Pixel (&/Or Conversions API on your website). The pixel is a piece of code that enables you to track every action (what Meta calls an ‘event’) that takes place on your site so that it can be attributed back to your campaign, your audience and even your ad creative. These analytics allow you to make data-informed choices in the future about how to best set up and optimise your next campaign.

Boosted Posts: The 'boosting' button primarily centres on increasing the reach and engagement of a post, making it suitable for quick and easy content amplification. However, the limited objectives in boosting may not fully encompass the diverse needs of businesses seeking specific actions from their audience. Boosting only has a limited set of objectives (such as profile visits, site visits or post engagements) and an equally limited audience selection tool.

2. Targeting and Audience Reach:

Meta Campaigns: Ads Manager excels in offering advanced targeting & retargeting options, including demographic, interest-based, behavioural, and lookalike audiences. This intricate approach enables businesses to pinpoint their ideal customers and deliver tailored content, thereby maximising the efficiency of their campaigns.

In addition to enabling you to reach the heart of your target audience, Ads Manager also allows you to set up numerous ad sets under each campaign so that you can test different audiences against one another and use an Advantage Campaign Budget to automatically optimise delivery to the best performing ad set and ad.

Boosted Posts: While boosted posts do allow for some basic targeting options, they lack the depth of customisation available in Ads Manager. This can lead to a broader reach that may not always align with the intended target audience.

3. Ad Formats and Creatives:

Meta Campaigns: Ads Manager provides a wide array of ad formats, from carousel ads and video ads to reel ads, collection ads & audience network ads. This flexibility allows businesses to experiment with different formats to find the most engaging content for their audience. By running automatic placements in Ads Manager, you can also test which creative placement works best for your campaign, allowing for ongoing optimisation and flexibility.

An additional benefit to targeting within Ads Manager is the higher level of brand safety the set up provides. Within the platform, you can upload block lists for certain websites or content you don’t want your ad to appear against.  

Boosted Posts: The 'boosting' button is limited to boosting existing posts, restricting the creative freedom that Ads Manager provides. While it's quick and convenient, it might not be the best option for campaigns with specific design and messaging requirements.

4. Budget Control and Optimisation:

Meta Campaigns: Ads Manager provides comprehensive budget control, including options for daily or lifetime budgets, bidding strategies, and ad scheduling. This level of control allows for meticulous campaign optimisation based on performance data.

Campaigns, ad sets and ads can be paused on certain days of week or times of day (for example, a business could have ads run only during opening hours), rules can also be created to turn ads off when a certain budget or campaign result is reached or when a certain offer ends (eg: automatically switch campaign off at 11:59pm on 30th June).

Bidding also allows the advertiser to control how much they pay for a particular campaign metric. This could be the amount they’re willing to pay for a CPC (cost per click), CPE (cost per engagement) or CPA (cost per acquisition). Goals can also be set for ROAS so that Ads Manager’s machine learning optimises toward a 1.5x ROAS goal, giving the advertiser peace of mind that they will make more from their campaign than they spend on the advertising. To do so, your developer and campaign specialist needs to set up event parameters to ensure you’re attributing the correct value to each of your events (whether it be a sales event or a lead-based event).

Boosted Posts: Boosted posts offer simplified budgeting options, which might not be suitable for businesses seeking to fine-tune their ad spending. While boosting is user-friendly, it lacks the robust optimisation & automation features found in Ads Manager.

5. Performance Measurement and Insights:

Meta Campaigns: Ads Manager provides in-depth analytics and reporting, offering insights into key metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROAS. This data-rich environment empowers businesses to evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns and make data-driven decisions moving forward.

Boosted Posts: The insights provided for boosted posts are limited compared to Ads Manager, potentially hindering the ability to gauge the true impact of the campaign.

Choosing the Right Approach: 

The choice between Meta Ads Manager campaigns and boosting a post depends on your specific goals, resources, and level of expertise. If you're looking for a comprehensive strategy with detailed targeting and specific objectives, Meta Ads Manager campaigns are the way to go. On the other hand, if you want a quick and straightforward method to amplify the reach of a single post, boosting may be more suitable, particularly if you’re working with very minimal budgets.

In many cases, businesses use a combination of both approaches. They run campaigns through Meta Ads Manager for their primary marketing objectives and occasionally boost high-performing posts to give them an extra boost of visibility on something that’s already proven to perform organically.

In conclusion, understanding the differences between Meta Ads Manager campaigns and boosting a post is crucial for effective social media marketing. By leveraging the strengths of each approach, you can create a well-rounded strategy that helps you achieve your desired outcomes on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Want to know more or speak to our team about paid social campaigns? Get in touch today!

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