7 Free Tools for Facebook Ads (2024)
If you’re in search of tools for creating effective Facebook ads, you’re in the right place. Navigating the vast array of Facebook ads tools can be a challenge, particularly given the multitude of options available—some free, others paid.
Fortunately, we’ve curated a list of our top picks for Facebook ads tools that won’t cost you a dime. These tools are designed to streamline your social media advertising efforts, making the management process a breeze.
The best part? All of these Facebook ads tools are free. No need to worry about shelling out money for premium subscriptions or additional add-ons; you can utilize these resources completely free of charge.
Moreover, some of these tools can also serve as essential elements of your standard Facebook marketing toolkit, further contributing to your organic presence. Consider bookmarking this post for future reference, and your future self will thank you.
1. Facebook Ads Manager
Facebook Ads Manager is a comprehensive tool provided by Facebook, enabling users to create, manage, and analyze advertising campaigns on the social media platform. This tool empowers advertisers to craft ad campaigns, establish targeting criteria, set budgets, and closely monitor the performance of their ads.
With Facebook Ads Manager, users gain the capability to track essential metrics, make real-time adjustments to ad content and targeting, and extract valuable insights to refine and optimize their advertising strategies on Facebook.
Facebook Ads Manager offers an array of features designed to assist advertisers in creating, managing, and optimizing their ad campaigns on the platform.
Here are some key features of Facebook Ads Manager:
- Ad Creation: Generate various ad formats, including image ads, video ads, carousel ads, and more.
- Audience Targeting: Define and reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviours, and custom parameters.
- A/B Testing: Conduct experiments with different ad elements, such as images and headlines, to identify the most effective combinations.
- Ad Performance Tracking: Monitor the performance of your ads through metrics like reach, engagement, conversions, and more.
Another notable advantage of Facebook Ads Manager is that it provides a variety of ad manager tools completely free of charge. We’ll delve into a few of these tools later in this blog, emphasizing that users have access to an even broader toolkit when utilizing Facebook Ads Manager.
It’s worth mentioning that, despite its fantastic features, Facebook Ads Manager can make the ad creation process slightly more complicated. To navigate this, we recommend creating a campaign brief before delving into Facebook Ads Manager.
A campaign brief is a document that outlines the essential details and objectives of a marketing or advertising campaign. Typically, it includes information such as the campaign’s goals, target audience, messaging strategy, creative elements, budget, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
This document serves as a roadmap for all stakeholders involved in the campaign, ensuring a unified understanding of the objectives and strategy.
If you’re eager to learn more about crafting your own campaign brief, consider checking out our blog post on 7 Steps to Creating An Effective Campaign Brief.
Additionally, you might be questioning what would be the ideal budget for your Facebook Ads.
Indeed, you have the flexibility to spend as little as $2 per day or as much as a few hundred dollars daily. For insights into budgeting considerations, we recommend reading our blog post titled What Can You Do with a $1,500/Month Marketing Budget.
2. Meta Ad Library
The Meta Ad Library, a publicly accessible archive offered by Meta Platforms, allows users to explore and view ads from all industries running across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. What a great way to gather inspiration and do some competitor analysis. It also serves as a transparent overview of advertising activities on Meta’s platforms, even encompassing ads related to politics and social issues.
The reason we like this tool for Facebook ads is simple: ii provides an avenue for keeping tabs on your competition and examining the types of Facebook ads they’re currently running.
The ad creation process is undeniably one of the most significant challenges in Facebook advertising. We understand the struggle—conceiving a creative ad visual that captivates users, halting their scroll, and enticing them to click on your ad is no small feat. The Meta Ad Library proves invaluable by enabling us to spy on our local competitors or glean insights for our own ad strategy from major brands’ advertising strategies. And that’s what makes this free Facebook Ad tool so great.
Key features and aspects of Meta Ad Library include:
- Search Functionality: Users can effortlessly search for specific ads, Pages, or advertisers to access comprehensive details about their advertising campaigns.
- Ad Details: Each ad within the library is accompanied by crucial information, such as the Page running the ad, the amount spent, demographics of the audience reached, and the ad’s performance metrics.
- Political and Social Issue Ads: The Ad Library brings a specific focus to ads associated with politics and social issues. This entails information about the ad’s sponsor and the demographic details of the audience it reached.
For a deeper understanding of how Meta’s Ad Library can elevate your digital marketing game, check out our dedicated blog post: How Meta’s Ad Library Can Improve Your Digital Marketing.
3. Ad Creative Bank
Ad Creative Bank is a complementary Facebook Ads tool that presents thousands of Facebook Ads for your inspiration, spanning from static image ads to engaging video ads. It stands as the ultimate go-to resource for igniting new Facebook Ads ideas.
What sets this tool apart is its user-friendly organization of Facebook ads into various categories, encompassing promotional ads, lifestyle ads, benefits ads, and more.
As any marketer knows, generating an ad that captures users’ attention, pausing their scroll, and motivating them to click can be challenging. Ad Creative Bank becomes an invaluable ally in overcoming this creative challenge as they provide you with a massive list of ads to take inspiration from.
Moreover, Ad Creative Bank compiles a selection of top-performing ads based on performance data. With this free Facebook ads tool at your disposal, the task of coming up with innovative ideas becomes significantly more manageable.
The continuous updates to Ad Creative Bank make it an outstanding resource to stay ahead of current trends in Facebook ad creation. It essentially serves as a Facebook Ad Creation Tool, featuring a tab highlighting what’s currently trending in Facebook ads. This proves particularly beneficial for those who rely on holidays or seasonal changes as their primary sources of sales.
In our opinion, Ad Creative Bank stands out as one of the best Facebook ads tools, delivering substantial value entirely free of charge.
4. Canva
Speaking of tools we love, Canva remains a go-to graphic design platform, empowering users to create a variety of visual content, such as social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents, and more. With its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and a vast library of templates, images, icons, and design elements, Canva caters to both beginners and experienced designers.
This platform is popular among individuals and businesses for its accessibility, enabling even those without extensive design skills to generate professional-looking graphics. Users have the flexibility to kickstart their design journey with pre-designed templates or opt for a more hands-on approach by creating designs from scratch.
Canva proves to be an invaluable tool for creating Facebook Ads due to its user-friendly platform, featuring pre-designed templates tailored specifically for social media advertising. Advertisers can effortlessly customize these templates, seamlessly incorporating their branding elements, images, and messaging.
The drag-and-drop functionality simplifies the design process, allowing advertisers to create eye-catching visuals without requiring advanced design skills.
Canva also provides access to an extensive library of stock photos, illustrations, and design elements, offering advertisers the resources to enhance the visual appeal of their ads. Recognized as one of the best tools for Facebook ads, Canva’s impressive stock library sets it apart.
Combining versatility with time-saving features, Canva remains a convenient choice for advertisers of all skill levels looking to efficiently craft impactful and engaging Facebook Ads.
5. Facebook Ads Audiences
While we acknowledge that this tool resides within Facebook Ads Manager, its significance is too important to overlook.
Facebook Ads Audience stands out as an exceptional tool for those seeking a Facebook Ads Targeting Tool. Within Facebook Ads Audience, advertisers can construct custom audiences and precisely target these specific groups through Facebook Ads Manager.
This tool enables advertisers to define audiences based on diverse criteria, including demographics, interests, behaviours, location, and more. By honing in on the right audience with precision, advertisers can optimize the relevance and effectiveness of their Facebook Ads.
This strategic targeting ensures that messages reach users who are more likely to engage, click, or convert, ultimately enhancing the overall performance and efficiency of Facebook advertising campaigns.
What sets Facebook Ads Audience apart is its capability to target three exclusive types of audiences.
These are the 3 types of audiences you can target through Facebook Ads Audiences:
1. Retargeting Audiences
Retargeting audiences, also known as remarketing audiences, consist of users who have previously interacted with a website, app, or specific content. This interaction might include visiting a website, viewing certain products, watching a video, or taking other specific actions.
Advertisers use retargeting to re-engage these users with targeted ads across various platforms, encouraging them to return, complete a purchase, or take another desired action.
2. Custom Audiences
Custom Audiences allow advertisers to create specific audience segments based on their own data. This data can include information like email addresses, phone numbers, or user IDs collected from various sources, such as customer lists.
By uploading this data to platforms like Facebook, advertisers can target ads to a predefined group, ensuring that their campaigns reach an audience with a known connection or relationship to their business.
3. Lookalike audiences
Lookalike Audiences are created by platforms like Facebook to identify and target users who share similar characteristics, behaviours, and interests with a Custom Audience.
Advertisers provide a source audience (e.g., a Custom Audience), and the platform analyzes the shared traits of that audience to find new users who are likely to be interested in the advertiser’s products or services.
Lookalike Audiences help expand the reach of campaigns to a broader yet relevant audience.
6. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI, specifically based on artificial intelligence (AI). It is designed to understand and generate human-like text based on the input it receives.
Okay, that was a complex definition of ChatGPT, but the best way to explain it: it’s like having a virtual personal assistant.
ChatGPT has been trained on a diverse range of internet text and can perform various tasks, including answering questions, generating creative content, assisting with writing, and engaging in human-like conversation on a wide array of topics.
ChatGPT is a groundbreaking tool for Facebook Ads as it can also assist with an endless number of marketing- and advertising-related tasks.
You can use ChatGPT for Facebook Ads in various ways, such as generating ad copy, brainstorming ad ideas, creating engaging headlines, providing content suggestions, and even helping with audience targeting strategies. It can be a valuable tool for content creation and ideation within the context of Facebook advertising.
We like to think of ChatGPT as more of an automation tool for Facebook Ads. It indeed saves time, though it’s crucial to have a foundational understanding of Facebook Ads since, ultimately, it generates text created by artificial intelligence.
Ranked at the top of our list as a Facebook Ads automation tool, ChatGPT can swiftly generate a large volume of information within seconds.
For a deeper dive into what ChatGPT is and how it works, explore our blog post, What ChatGPT Is and How It Works.
7. Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a free, powerful web analytics service provided by Google that allows website owners to track and analyze various aspects of their site’s performance. It provides valuable insights into user behaviour, interactions, and engagement on a website.
Surprisingly, many businesses run Facebook ads without checking if these ads are converting into sales or desired actions. This is where Google Analytics 4 steps in.
Advertisers can set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 to measure specific actions taken by users after clicking on a Facebook Ad, such as completing a purchase or filling out a form. This data is crucial for understanding the return on investment (ROI) of the ad campaign.
While Facebook Ads Manager provides robust analytics about the ads themselves, it offers limited insights into the final destination where users are directed. Google Analytics 4 emerges as a free tool for bridging this gap in understanding.
The combination of Facebook Ads and Google Analytics 4 empowers advertisers to make data-driven decisions. Analyzing performance data allows for continual optimization of ad campaigns, budget allocation, and targeting strategies to maximize results.
It’s recommended to send traffic from most marketing campaigns to a focused landing page with a single purpose, rather than a webpage.
Unlike a general webpage, which may have various distractions and navigation options, a landing page is crafted to guide visitors toward a specific action or conversion, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
For more information into the importance of landing pages, read our blog post, 5 Key Reasons To Send Your Ads To A Dedicated Landing Page.
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