Formerly known as Facebook Business Suite or Facebook for Business, a solution for small businesses used to manage all business activity on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram from one place. It is presented as a one-stop shop where business owners can manage all marketing and advertising activities on Facebook and Instagram. It centralizes tools that help the user to connect with customers on all apps and get better business results.
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Simpli.fi
Score 6.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Simpli.fi is the epoymous flagship product from the company headquartered in Fort Worth, for programmatic media buying, display advertising, and streaming / OTT monetization. It is a data management and demand-side buying hybrid platform (DMP / DSP).
Meta for Business has made a lot of improvements, but a lot of work still needs to be done as far as troubleshooting. I've had ad issues for months. It's probably getting close to a year. Every time I've submitted troubleshooting tickets, they're either slow to respond or don't respond at all. More than five times I've asked for help with getting the ad issues resolved. This included an online meeting (quite a first), emailing them, and even chatting with them. I went as far as multiple submissions of the materials they requested; I'm still at square one.
If you don't care where your campaigns are running, if you don't care about your clients then feel free to do business with them. I would not recommend them to other agencies or business if they have a lot of particular advertisers and clients that they work with. It is too much work for them. If you want to do a self-service model with Simpli.fi, then I could recommend working with them. As long as I don't have to deal with their customer service daily, and my company has the control of the campaigns, I can feel more comfortable working with them. But even still, there are a lot of red flags that have been raised over the last few years and I am skeptical.
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.
Simpli.fi's Geo-Fencing capabilities are top notch! The ability to include an unlimited number of geo-fences within a campaign is invaluable, as is the ability to measure the effectiveness of a geo-fencing campaign in driving foot traffic to our clients' physical locations.
Our organization appreciates the knowledge, experience and responsiveness of Simpli.fi's customer support staff.
One of the things Simpli.fi does particularly well is the education of its users and re-sellers. From monthly webinars, to its Bullseye learning courses, they have a way to make the complex understandable to even the most green digital sellers!
The amount of text allowed on images can be frustrating since it will include ALL text in the image regardless if it is part of the copy or on something random in the background of the image
Labeling ads and ad groups can be frustrating as we often had them default to generic titles which we would have to go back and edit. A mandatory field would be helpful, however, that might not be popular opinion as that much detail is really just a personal preference.
The constant emails from their sales team to "help you improve" your results are a little much.
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.
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.
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
Facebook stacks up against them in terms of its service. I choose Facebook for Business since I use it for business for almost more than a year now and I need to say this it is the most best possible business tool definitely a must-have for all the businesses type.
We have done a lot of research on many other vendors that offer the same or even more as Simpli.fi and have found a great fit for our business. There are many other options out there for programmatic buying! My advice to you is do your research. Don't just jump into bed with one without knowing all of the facts. Ask questions. Do some digging. And NEVER take anything they say at face value. They are there to sell you the product and if you move forward, you will for sure be disappointed
I haven't had much ROI from using Facebook for Business, and unfortunately, other local businesses I know haven't felt that they got much ROI on their paid ads either.
The good point of Facebook for Business is that I can still look into who is interested in my products and build around my audience that way.
