Inside Facebook

We’ve been covering Facebook’s gradual rollout of the Facebook Ads APIs in recent weeks. Now, we’re beginning to see the first tools built on top of the APIs come to market. This week, two London-headquartered agencies, 77Agency and Techlightenment, are showing off what’s coming soon.

77Ageny’s new Facebook Ads tool lets advertisers manage multiple accounts, track conversions, run custom reports, bulk upload multiple campaigns and ad groups, and manage bids in real time. The agency says it is planning to license its tool to its finance, fashion, entertainment, telecom, publishing customers over the next few months.

“Our vision is that Facebook is going to be an alternative to Google AdWords. Facebook Ads is going to be a big direct response opportunity,” Marco Corsaro, Managing Director of 77Agency, told us from Rome this morning. “We have received a significant amount of queries from our clients who are already using Facebook Ads, and are interested in exploring our technology to do that in a better way.”

London-based social media agency Techlightenment tells us that its new social ads management tool, called Alchemy, will be launching in “full beta” in the next couple of weeks.

Techlightenment director Ankur Shah says that their service features better budget control, dynamic copy creation, auto-optimization for CPM, CPC and CPA, and day-parting.

Both companies have been working directly with Facebook as part of the initial testing of the Facebook Ads APIs, an expansion to Facebook’s performance advertising platform that we think should have been launched a lot sooner. Managing sophisticated Facebook Ads campaigns has been a major headache for agencies to date, so giving them more automated ways of managing and optimizing spend is good for the entire ecosystem. We expect to see many more advertiser tools coming soon.

To dive deeper on Facebook marketing tools and best practices, check out our industry leading Facebook Marketing Bible: The Guide to Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook.