Facebook’s looking to add a new option to help advertisers automate their Facebook ad campaigns, with a process it's calling ‘Ad Strategies’ now being tested with some users.

As you can see in this notification, posted by user Roneet Michael (and shared by Matt Navarra), Facebook’s new Ad Strategies option looks to help users maximize their Facebook campaigns by automating various elements, which then enables Facebook’s systems to optimize ad spend based on your focus goals.

As outlined in the announcement:

“Ad Strategies uses automation to help you build complete customer pipelines. Just create one ad strategy to reach new, engaged and repeat customers. Your ad strategy will move customers through your pipeline automatically. Advertisers in early testing saw better average performance with less setup compared to other ad tools.”

Matt Navarra has also shared several images of the new process in action, beginning with the set-up flow in Facebook Ad Manager:

The process looks to simplify your ad creation process as much as possible, with the walkthrough then asking more questions about what you sell, how often people are likely to purchase from you, and your campaign goals.

You then choose your focus region. The process will automatically target people for you based on Facebook’s learned knowledge about how each user is likely to respond, taking into account their past in-app behaviors and noted interests, so you don't need to narrow down your audience with specific parameters as such.

You then add in your creative elements, covering all aspects of your sales pipeline.

Facebook will then implement the campaign based on these parameters and options.

The system will measure response over time, and optimize your ad spend accordingly, simplifying your Facebook outreach set-up and management.

The process essentially puts more trust into Facebook’s systems to detect the best ways for you to optimize your campaigns, without you having to set up individual targeting for each stage of the sales funnel. Which could be helpful for smaller businesses - though you will lose the more minute management capability, in refining each element based on response.

But then again, Facebook’s systems are always getting better at automated targeting based on user behaviors, and over time, a growing number of Facebook ad experts have come to put more reliance on Facebook’s automated optimization tools to maximize their campaign response.

You want to manage this as much as possible, to ensure that you’re making decisions based on the data you’re seeing. But Facebook’s systems are getting better at guiding your approach, and may end up delivering better results than you're able to through manual process.

There are already similar automated targeting flows available in Facebook’s ad options, with Facebook looking to push more users towards its system processes to maximize ad response.

Given the changes in ad targeting due to new elements like Apple’s ATT update, it may well make more sense to put more reliance on Facebook’s targeting options in this respect – or at the least, it’s likely worth experimenting with Facebook’s automated targeting, in comparison to your own manual efforts, to see what results you get.

Facebook is clearly confident that it can drive better response, and if it works that way for you, it could provide significant benefit.

Either way, it’s another consideration in your Facebook ads approach.