Facebook Campaign Planner Now Available in Business Manager for Facebook and Instagram

The latest addition to Business Manager is the Facebook Campaign Planner "a standalone tool for media planners to draft, compare, and share media plans using reach and frequency buying across Facebook and Instagram." Brands and advertisers can now plan out campaign budgets and schedules to predict the estimated reach and frequency, these campaign insights can then be shared with clients and co-workers through link sharing or direct emails.

Each media plan can have up to six versions. Within each version of the media plan, you can play with different combinations of budgets, schedules, audiences, placements, and ad impressions per day to better understand the potential reach and frequency of your campaigns.

Below is an example of how the campaign planner provides insights around your reach based on your budget, schedule, and desired frequency. Using the prediction results,  you can compare different versions against each other to determine which media plan best fits with your performance goals.

Why Facebook Campaign Planner Rocks

In the past, there was no way to view available Facebook targeting options, and the level of scale to reach your audience. The only workaround to uncover these insights was building a dummy ad set, selecting the desired targeting, and gaining access to reach estimates. Now with the new Facebook Business Manager media campaign planner, not only can you see all the targeting options available, it actually calculates the potential reach based on your budget, or the budget required to attain a specific reach goal, within the selected campaign's run timeframe.

With these estimates, you can make more informed campaign decisions, without having to use real budget to test and optimize. If you're working with clients or a team of digital marketers, you can easily share the media plan and reveal key audience insights into your plans and show how reach and frequency will impact your campaign.

How to Get Started with Campaign Planner

As of now, Campaign Planner is only available to advertisers with eligibility for reach and frequency buying. To get started, follow these steps below:

1. Log in to your Business Manager
2. Click Create Plan
3. Name your plan
4. Click Create Version
5. Fill out each field that you’d like to customize for your media plan. Below is a screenshot of the different fields you can populate to estimate frequency.

For advertisers with a limited budget, we suggest inputting your actual budget for each version, while varying the frequency and/or audience to see how the estimated reach changes based on the different variables that are selected.

On the flip side, for brand advertisers that are mostly concerned with maximizing reach within a given timeframe, we recommend using the same reach inputs (which should be your target reach) in the different versions of your media plan, and playing around with the frequency, targeting options, and available placements to see how you can maximize reach for the lowest CPM.

Have you tried creating a media plan within Facebook Business Manager yet? Tell us your favorite use case for the new Campaign Planner in the comments below!

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