Upload Facebook Ads in Bulk: A Guide to Automating Ad Creation

Have you ever spent hours creating new Facebook ad campaigns? Or have you ever hired an intern to "delegate ad operations" such as uploading images and videos to every ad account in Facebook ads manager? Creating ads for the new campaigns is an easy task but very time-consuming. That's why more and more advertisers are looking for ways to automate ad creation, which might be the most manual and timewasting task for any paid social specialist. One way to speed it up is to automate and upload Facebook ads in bulk via Facebook API.

When we discuss Facebook ads automation, we tend to image intelligent algorithms that are much better than humans with ad sets optimization, choosing the target audience, and targeting options. It might or might not be the case. However, it doesn't help with the most time-consuming and tedious ad creation process.

A classic way to create Facebook ads

Evaluating the specific amount of time media buyers spend creating ads is challenging, as it can vary depending on several factors. These factors can include the ad format's type and complexity, the creative asset's weight, and the tools and resources used to create the ad.

Creating a simple single image or video Facebook ad with pre-designed text and headline can be relatively quick and inexpensive, while creating a more complex ad with multiple images, videos, or interactive elements may require more time and resources.

The traditional way to create ads is the following:

1. Download creative assets to your computer
2. Upload videos and images to the Facebook Ads manager
3. Wait until Facebook encodes all assets
4. Go to Facebook Ads manager or campaign builder
5. Choose a new campaign or an existing one
6. Create a new ad or duplicate an existing one
7. Copy-paste the ad headline, body text, link, display link, choose a call to action and a creative asset
8. Repeat this step for every single ad you need to create

Following this process, if you create 15 or more ads weekly, the ad campaign creation process can easily take between 2 and 6 hours every week! Imagine what a nightmare it will become when scaling your business and creating more ads for multiple markets!

Creating Facebook ads manually can easily take your entire day!

Automate and upload Facebook ads in bulk

Get access to Facebook API

One way to speed up a process is to automate Facebook assets upload. Unfortunately, there are only a few ways to do that, and the most common is through the Facebook Marketing API. Authorization and access to the Facebook API can be challenging. Still, it allows you to programmatically create and manage your Facebook ads, saving time and effort compared to creating and managing ads manually through the Facebook Ads Manager. Check out our tutorial to start using Facebook API for your marketing!

To use Facebook API, you'll need to have a Facebook developer account and create a new app. You'll first need to authenticate your app and get an access token. This token will authenticate your app and grant it access to the Facebook API on behalf of a user or a page.

Once you have authenticated your app and obtained an access token, you can start making API requests to access different data types from Facebook or make changes to your ad account. In the example of uploading Facebook ad creatives, you can use AdVideos edge with a POST request to upload your videos to an ad account. You can similarly use AdImage edge to upload images to your Facebook Ads account. You can take a look at the Facebook API documentation for detailed instructions.

Create a content storage system

Once you upload a couple of creative assets with Facebook API, you need to start thinking about the content storage system. For example, where are the assets that need to be uploaded located? Ideally, you need to develop a system to automatically detect the new creative assets in a specific folder and upload them to Facebook Ad manager.

The easiest way is to use a cloud service such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or AWS since they can provide you with a public link, which can be used to upload the creative assets automatically. In addition, you can share files and folders with others and set different levels of access, making it easy to work on projects with others.

Adopt a bulk creation template

Using an Excel template may be an excellent solution if you're looking to streamline your Facebook ad creation process. With an XLSX or CSV file ad creation sample template, you can easily create and manage your Facebook ads in bulk, saving you time and effort compared to creating ads manually through the Facebook Ads Manager. All the ad variations can be made by copy-pasting rows and changing certain elements.

The template lists the available columns for your ad, each representing one element of ads such as headline, destination URL, or campaign name, making it easy to input multiple ads, copy-paste them and then modify them to increase the number of ad variations created,

Importing ads using an Excel template is relatively simple. First, download the Facebook ad template from the Ads Manager. Then, open the template in Excel and enter the information for your ad, such as the ad copy, images, and targeting details. Finally, save the template as a CSV file and upload it to the Ads Manager to create your ads.

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Summary

Overall, using an Excel template for Facebook ad creation is a convenient and efficient way to manage your ads. However, it has certain disadvantages.

First, you will still need to manually upload creative assets to the Ads Manager or use an exact name and the location of the creative asset. Doing it without a content management system can become even more work than creating ads via Ads Manager if you plan on creating many ads. If you make mistakes, your ads will not be uploaded, and you will have to go back to the file, find an error, and manually change it.

Second, you will still need to manually export and import the file, which means quite a bit of manual work. It also means that you need to trigger the process. It won't start automatically or on schedule if new creative assets appear in your creative assets library.

An alternative way to upload Facebook ads in bulk

If you want to publish hundreds of Facebook ads at once, check out Kitchn'io bulk ad creation solution. You can save time by preparing ads directly in a Google template spreadsheet. You can also automatically upload all ad creatives by choosing the Google Drive or Dropbox folder. Learn how Vice Reversa automated Facebook ad creation with Kitchn.io and reduced time spent creating ads by 75%.

Upload Facebook ads in bulk with Kitchn.io