AdEspresso by Hootsuite vs. Meta Business Suite

[AdEspresso is] great if you have a smaller budget or are just getting started with Facebook advertising. You can easily create ads and publish them in minutes after everything is set up for your account. I would recommended trying it if you don't have a lot of experience, but not to manage a large account with multiple clients (10+)

Incentivized

Meta Business Suite is ideally suited where you want to schedule content and where teams need to see what each other are doing. It is well suited to assessing the reach, interactions and success of your posts through its Insights, which can help you drive better performance. It is ideally suited to boosting posts, should you want to. And it is good for checking and replying to comments, or spotting notifications. It is well suited for looking at multiple feeds - Facebook and Instagram - at once. It is currently less well suited if you want to handle Threads as well as Facebook and Instagram.

Incentivized

• A/B testing
• Mass advertising
• Budget and finance

Incentivized

• Segmentation is HUGE. You can segment by almost anything you want, be it demographic, sociological, behavioral... you name it. You can also create targets based on your visitors and their actions. Even custom lists.
• They are very good at optimizing your campaigns automatically. This is so important because it will improve your ROI in several multiples otherwise
• Managing ads in general works fine, and the data, even though is not exactly as accurate as Analytics, it's pretty decent.
• Gives you placements and different ad types so you can get the most out of it.
• Pixel and catalog integration are very powerful. You can almost instantly start tracking and catalog fetches your site daily for updates.

Incentivized

• It is a bit limited in features, for example can't do everything that you can do in Facebook's Business Manager
• There are certain levels, depending on budget, so you'll have to pay more to use it the higher your budget is
• Could use an update for Lead Ad creation, found it very tough and couldn't get things to synch correctly.

Incentivized

• 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

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

I gave it this rating because it is so easy to learn to use and you are able to grow a following quickly by knowing when to post and who to post to or how to get in front of those prospects easily, and using those prospects to reach even further without any additional processes on your end through the sharing from your engaged readers.

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 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

I find it a lot more detailed in creation and ad reporting, but not very user friendly or helpful if you encounter an error or something happens that needs to be fixed. AdEspresso [by Hootsuite] is better if you want an easier experience and less to look at while you're creating your ads.

Incentivized

I believe since YouTube started with shorts, TikTok with their incentives for small businesses, and also Snapchat with their incentives for small businesses, it was time for Facebook/Meta to step up to the plate. Around late 2020/early 2021, Facebook/Meta offered small-business grants which was extremely helpful. Outside of that, I strongly feel Meta for Business had to come up with something in order to keep people associated with it. Finally, I believe Meta did what they had to do in order to stay competitive. Though it's free, you still have to pay to boost and promote ads.

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

• They have helped us greatly in lead generation for internal marketing efforts
• Big focus on lead generation for clients, have helped sell dozens of homes for them!
• Engagement and lead gen saw a big increase while using AdEspresso

Incentivized

• Overall positive ROI has been achieved using this platform. You must have a clear understanding of where your CPL maximums are to remain profitable and either optimize to success or pull the plug on campaigns that are bleeding spend.
• This is a great platform to build new audiences or grow existing ones.
• Building audience segments via pixel tracking is a huge win for this platform.

Incentivized