What is the Best Facebook Ad Manager?
Trying to find the "best" Facebook Ad Manager can feel like a trick question, and in a way, it is. The answer is surprisingly simple: the most essential tool for managing Facebook ads is Meta's own Ads Manager. This article isn’t about finding a replacement, it’s about understanding the native tool’s powerful capabilities, recognizing its critical limitations, and building an intelligent workflow with supplementary tools to see the full picture of your marketing performance.
The Official Tool: Why Meta Ads Manager is Non-Negotiable
There's no getting around it - to run campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, you have to use Meta Ads Manager. It’s the command center for every single operational aspect of your advertising efforts, and replacing it isn't an option. Its core functions are comprehensive, powerful, and fundamental to the entire process.
Here’s a quick breakdown of what makes it irreplaceable:
Campaign Creation: This is where it all starts. From choosing your objective (like Traffic, Leads, or Sales) to setting your overall strategy, Ads Manager is the sole platform for building the foundation of your campaigns. The entire structure of ads - Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads - is built and managed here.
Precise Audience Targeting: Meta's unrivaled strength lies in its audience data. Ads Manager gives you direct access to this, allowing you to build detailed target audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviors, lookalikes of your current customers, and retargeting data from your website pixel.
Budget and Bid Management: You have granular control over every dollar you spend. Whether you prefer Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) to let Meta's algorithm allocate funds automatically or you set daily/lifetime budgets at the ad set level, this is where you manage your ad spend and bidding strategy.
A/B Testing and Optimization: Ads Manager has built-in features to help you test different variables. You can easily set up experiments to compare ad creatives, audiences, placements, or delivery optimizations to determine what resonates most with your target audience and drives the best results.
For the nuts and bolts of launching, pausing, scaling, and tweaking your campaigns, Meta Ads Manager is the one and only tool you need. It’s effective, powerful, and the source of truth for platform metrics. But relying on it exclusively gives you a narrow and often misleading view of your overall business health.
The Blind Spot: What Meta Ads Manager Can't Tell You
The biggest challenge with using only Meta Ads Manager for analysis is that it operates within a "walled garden." It's incredibly good at telling you what happened within its own ecosystem - how many clicks your ad got, if a user watched, the Cost Per Click (CPC), or how many on-platform purchases it attributes to your campaigns. However, it can’t see what happens once a user leaves Facebook or Instagram and interacts with your business across other touchpoints.
This isolation leaves you with serious blind spots, making it impossible to answer critical business questions like:
How do my Facebook ads contribute to sales from other channels? A customer might see your ad on Instagram, ignore it, then search for your brand on Google the next day and make a purchase. In this scenario, Google Analytics will attribute the sale to organic search, while Meta Ads Manager - depending on your attribution window - might also claim credit for it. Neither platform can give you the full, unbiased story of that customer's journey.
What's the true Lifetime Value (LTV) of customers from a specific campaign? Ads Manager might tell you that Campaign A has a great Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) based on initial purchases. But what if customers from Campaign B, which had a slightly lower initial ROAS, make repeat purchases over the next six months? Your e-commerce platform like Shopify has that data, but Ads Manager has no visibility into it, potentially leading you to pause your most profitable long-term campaign.
Are the leads from Facebook high-quality? Your lead generation campaign may be producing a low Cost Per Lead (CPL) inside Ads Manager, which looks like a huge success. But if none of those leads ever convert into paying customers in your CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot), you're just spending money to fill your pipeline with unqualified contacts.
What is our true, blended ROAS? Ads Manager reports its own ROAS, and Google Ads reports its own. Your true profitability measure is your marketing efficiency ratio (MER) - your total marketing spend across all channels divided into total revenue. You can't calculate this by looking at any single platform in isolation.
The "best" way to manage your ads is to break down these walls and connect Meta's data to the rest of your business data. This requires a few additional tools.
Building Your Ad Management Stack: Tools for a Complete Picture
True Facebook ads management isn't about replacing Ads Manager, it's about augmenting it with tools that fill in the gaps. Your goal is to build a small, efficient "stack" that provides a holistic view of performance.
For Unified Analytics and Reporting
This is the most crucial enhancement. The typical workflow for a marketing team involves downloading CSV files from Meta Ads Manager, Google Analytics, Shopify, and their CRM every Monday morning. Then, they spend hours wrangling that data in a spreadsheet, trying to stitch it all together into a coherent report before their Tuesday meeting. This process is time-consuming, prone to errors, and the report is already outdated by the time it's finished.
Unified reporting tools solve this by automatically pulling data from all your sources into a single, centralized dashboard. Instead of comparing reports side-by-side, you can build charts that directly compare Facebook Ad Spend vs. Shopify Revenue or Facebook Leads Generated vs. Deals Closed in HubSpot. This gives you a clear, objective view of how your ad performance translates into actual business results in real-time.
For Creative Production and Testing
Great ads require great creative, and Ads Manager isn't a design tool. While your ad creative has the single biggest impact on performance, it’s produced far away from the ad platform itself. A streamlined workflow here is just as important as your data reporting.
Graphic Design: Tools like Canva and Adobe Express have made it simple to create high-quality static images and simple video ads without needing a professional graphic designer. This is perfect for small teams and quick creative sprints.
Video Editing: For more dynamic video content, platforms like Veed, CapCut, and Descript are user-friendly choices. They simplify the process of editing, adding captions (a must for mobile ads), and formatting videos for different placements like Reels, Stories, and in-feed.
Efficiently producing and organizing your creative assets allows you to test more variations quickly, accelerating your learning process and ultimately leading to better-performing campaigns managed within Ads Manager.
For Advanced Automation and Optimization
While Meta’s built-in automated rules are useful for basic tasks (e.g., "pause an ad set if its CPA exceeds $50 for 3 consecutive days"), some teams need more sophisticated automation to manage campaigns at scale.
Third-party tools dedicated to automation can execute complex, multi-layered rule sets. For example, they can automatically increase budgets on winning ad sets in small increments, pause underperforming ads based on more nuanced metrics, or even cycle new creative into campaigns on a predetermined schedule. For teams managing large budgets across many campaigns, this can save hours of manual work and help optimize performance more efficiently.
Putting It All Together: A Simple and Effective Reporting Workflow
A great toolset is only as effective as the process you follow. Instead of getting lost in platform-specific metrics, ground your work in a simple, repeatable workflow focused on business impact.
Start with Your Business Goal, Not Meta's Metrics. Before you even open Ads Manager, be clear on what you're trying to achieve. Is it generating 50 qualified sales calls this month? Acquiring new customers at a blended CAC below $100? This goal will be your North Star.
Consolidate Your Data. Bring your key data points together in one place. Your centralized dashboard should display your Facebook ad spend alongside your website conversions (from Google Analytics), sales data (from Shopify or Stripe), and lead quality data (from your CRM).
Analyze the Full Funnel. With your integrated view, trace the customer journey. Is your ad getting a great Click-Through Rate (CTR), but your landing page has a high bounce rate? Your ad creative is working, but your page isn't. Seeing the full funnel helps you identify the real bottleneck.
Ask "Why?" to Form Hypotheses. Your dashboard shows you what happened (e.g., Campaign A's ROAS dropped last week). Now, dive back into Ads Manager to figure out why. Was it ad frequency getting too high? A new competitor driving up CPMs? Let insights from your unified view guide your investigation inside the platform.
Iterate and Document. Make one change at a time based on your hypothesis - new creative, a different audience, a revised landing page - and measure the impact on your primary business goal. Document what you learned so your whole team benefits from the insights.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, the "best Facebook Ad Manager" is not a single product you can buy off the shelf. It's a strategic combination of Meta's powerful, irreplaceable Ads Manager platform and a curated set of tools that provide a complete, business-centric view of your performance. By breaking free from the data silos, you can stop just optimizing for clicks and impressions and start making decisions that drive real growth.
Building that unified view of your data is traditionally the most manual part of the process, forcing you to juggle CSVs and spreadsheets. Here at Graphed, we eliminate that reporting drudgery entirely. We connect seamlessly with Meta Ads, Google Analytics, Shopify, HubSpot, Salesforce, and all your other key platforms, bringing your scattered data into one cohesive, real-time analytics Graphed. With our AI data analyst, you can simply ask questions in plain English - like, “show me a dashboard comparing Facebook spend vs. Shopify revenue by campaign for Q2” - and get instant answers, empowering you to focus on strategy instead of spreadsheets. You can sign up and connect your data in minutes right here: Graphed.