Meta Business Suite vs. Smartly.io

Meta Business Suite is great if you are a business that is heavily reliant on paid media performance. It is also a great platform if we are looking to scale paid performance and look to send partnership ads live with existent creators and influencers we are working with.

Incentivized

It is the best for visually appealing brands, basically, any hedonic goods to advertise. Best if you have a lot of visuals to represent your business and want to leverage your presence on given platforms. You can easily turn images into videos or have dynamic attributes for your remarketing campaign. As the pricing is not attractive for smaller clients, it is the best to be either a big brand to use the platform on your own or a big agency to use smartly.io features as your competitive advantage.

• Allows you to upload current email lists and drive ads to them more passively than email.
• Audience segmentation tools make it easy to target prospects based on actions taken on specific pages.
• Lookalike tools allow you to build new prospect lists based on common interests of your current clients.
• The ability to test multiple variations of ads against each other and report on them directly from the dashboard simplifies the decision-making process to optimize advertising efforts.

Incentivized

• Easy to use. You can copy, paste, duplicate and delete campaigns in few clicks which then was not a thing on Facebook business manager.
• Great templates for visuals, which is the biggest advantage of Smartly.io.
• Outstanding customer support. Replies in 5min and usually works until the issue is solved. If it cannot be solved by the first person, the next person takes part in.

• Reporting, especially as you drill down. For example, it won't show you purchases by region or hour of the day.
• Consistency has been an issue. Top-performing campaigns/ad sets/ads will hit a wall overnight for no apparent reason.
• Cloning ads doesn't work between certain campaign types. It seems like they could make it so that even a partial copy can be made, with other required fields left empty.

Incentivized

• The system is sometimes unstable and buggy
• UI improvements: the interface can be confusing at times

Incentivized

We have to continue using this tool in order to be effective on this marketing platform. Though there are several changes I wish we could see, the fact is that we will still need to use this product to provide customers with the information they need.

Incentivized

The main barriers is that Facebook has stitched together so many legacy systems and verifications and whatnot that it's sometimes hard to onboard new people or get all of the accounts to work together. Once it does, it does work very well.

Incentivized

I've only dealt with the API having issues a couple times, but as you can imagine an outage is not something an advertiser would find acceptable, especially during any ecommerce-heavy time of year. The overall platform could use some help with availability when it comes to authentication, as it struggles with consistency in authentication.

Incentivized

There are a lot of shortcomings when it comes to performance. There are pages that I do not expect to have much information to load on the page, yet it takes an incredibly long time (10+ secondes). I have not had experience with the integration slowing other platforms down too much.

Incentivized

I've found the Facebook for Business support to be hit or miss. For billing questions they're timely and helpful. For complex questions about specific services I've often received a longer wait and a less helpful experience. I'm often redirected to their docs, which are often not particularly helpful.

• If the problem involves some product bugs, customer support does not leave it be. They forward the problem to engineers so it would be solved. Once we caught a problem, they fixed it through the weekend. They always keep you in the loop with the current status of the issue. Once a new person jumps in to follow up, the reaction is
• They are all the time super polite and very friendly.
• Replies in under 5 minutes.
• Customer support can jump into your account and make quick fixes if you allow them to.

If you don't want to display your feed to your boss before going over scheduled posts for the week, use the Business site and it will be less awkward instantly. Having someone lean over your shoulder is always a bit awkward, you think about how you smell, maybe consider offering them gum because they have bad breath

Incentivized

Meta Business Suite is a good paid media option that offers several features for building ad campaigns, which other paid media channels lack. The usability is generally good, but it probably isn't quite as intuitive as Google, as a comparison. LinkedIn is behind all of these platforms, as its ad features are not as advanced. Overall, Meta is highly ranked.

Incentivized

This product is definitely able to run at scale, but it would be wise to have enough eyeballs to oversee it and the tools for keeping the campaigns, adsets, and ads organized could use some improvement. I can also see the UI interfering with usability at greater amounts of scale.

Incentivized

• Definitely has a positive ROI with increasing sales, but beware because it's not easy to measure on every stage of the funnel (how much does an ad in the very top of the funnel should be accounted for on a sale?). Attribution is hard sometimes.
• Managing is expensive and time-consuming. So far we haven't been able to find any solution to automate this. We are using automatic rules but you still need to be on top of things (considering how much budget we are spending on this).
• Beware on Facebook suspending your account. As I said before, the suspension was completely unjustified (they ended up activating it again) but don't over-rely on this platform because they just don't care if you spend your money there or elsewhere. They just don't give a damn about the customer (you).

Incentivized

• Allowed us the ability to A/B test organic content
• Workflow efficiencies
• Content insights

Incentivized