As you may, or may not yet know, Facebook recently released a statement that basically said they would be lightening up on some of their terms on how ads are approved. Ringtones, IQ, biz-op, dating and a few more niches were affected by this. To the heavy Facebook advertiser, this is like a godsend. Another recent improvement to Facebook ads is the ability to increase your ad spend to a ridiculous amount if you submit a credit check application. Some big players are getting daily limits set at $30,000. To get this bump, you’ll need to contact your Facebook Ads manager and ask them about how you can raise your limit. Comment here or contact me and I’ll get you hooked up with a Facebook Ads manager.

So with all these new goodies, if you aren’t advertising on Facebook yet, you probably should be getting into it now. You can do it on your own, but if you know Facebook like I do, you’d know it is a pain-in-the-ass to submit ads only to get them disapproved 12 hours later. This post will reveal some of the tools I use, and that you should use too if you wish to better perfect and target your campaigns.

Facebook Ads Manager – I gave this plugin quite a lashing in my other blog a while ago. Despite me calling it out, I can’t say I don’t absolutely love it. I can set a campaign to create 300 ads up with different headlines and texts, images, age targeting, countries, keywords, and bid prices, then click run, fall asleep and hopefully by the time I wake up they will be all approved and running. This thing does the grunt work of building campaigns, and you can save setups, too, so you can keep resubmitting the same ads over and over again to really piss off those Facebook “interns” (you should know by now they aren’t really interns). It has a high cost of $200, but it has been well worth it for me and should be worth it to anyone else that does a lot of Facebook. It sets up as a Firefox plugin and is controlled in the toolbars.

Facebook Ads Greasemonkey Script – You are gonna need Firefox and Greasemonkey to run this one. This thing lets you massively pause, activate, change click costs and even delete ads. This was great when I’d have 500 ads out of 501 ads disapproved in one adgroup (true story). It creates a checkbox for you to select which ads to modify without having to open up the indivdual ad’s page itself. This thing has saved me hours upon hours of work that I used to hate doing. It also allows me to easily pause ads and change bid prices during certain parts of the day I know an ad will do better.

Facebook Dayparting Script – From the same guy that did the above greasemonkey script comes the dayparting script. Dayparting just simply means you only run your ads during certain parts of the day. Rather than doing this manually,  this script will change the ads status for you. It is a bit difficult to configure and you need your own hosting plan, but it is well worth it once you realize how much money it can keep you from wasting on ads that don’t perform well during certain times of day. As an added bonus, this also works with Adbrite and Myspace.

FBSpy – I hate it when clever marketers release something that could make them thousands, even millions if they kept it to themselves. But, you gotta love that this is on the plate and out there for you. Pay $50, install this on your server and start scraping the Facebook adboard. Set up profiles in different countries through proxies and you can see what ads are running in other countries, too. Swipe and steal other peoples ads and LPs. Ah… the ethics of the game we are in.

Facebook AdBoard – If you are too poor for FBSpy, you can always just try browsing the Facebook AdBoard. They show you a bunch of ads targetted to the demographics and keywords of your profile. You can just create a bunch of different profiles varying the sex, age, relationship status, etc to see different ads.

Facebook Cloaking Script – Here is a pretty cool script that will collect IPs of the first IP to review your ad, and then redirect that IP each time to a different offer other than what you are promoting. This is good if you are trying to get ads up that might be determined as sketchy according to Facebook’s ad policies. It loads the data to a central database so there is already a ton of IPs collected.

If none of these really appeal to you, then think of your own script or plugin that you could use to take advantage of Facebook. If I could program at all, I know I would be on top of a few things fast.

There are probably plenty of other tools out there I’m not using, yet,  or haven’t even heard of, so if you have some suggestions list them in the comments and I’ll post them here.