Why we built a tool that grades ads?

At GoMarble, we are on a mission to create a better ads manager - one that can be used by everyone, not just specialists. We have it stuck on a wall in our office.

Why? Because Meta, Google, and TikTok, despite being the G.O.A.T consumer tech companies, have made their advertiser-facing products overly complicated and inaccessible to non-specialists.

With our background in building AdTech for social media giants, we have a deep understanding of Ad serving algorithms. However, as they say, everyone's mileage varies and nothing substitutes actual data. That's why we got inside hundreds of ad accounts spending thousands of dollars on Meta Ads. We even tested various frameworks shared by all the paid media gurus to comprehensively study every ad account we could access.

Most advertisers look at ROAS, or at best, three metrics on a regular basis. That’s like looking at your car’s mileage to understand issues with your engine. A thorough audit, on the other hand, is hard work. Extracting historical data from Facebook, checking configurations campaign by campaign, finding the right benchmarks, and comparing performance is a tedious process.

Furthermore, most ad accounts might look great on the surface, but a deeper analysis often reveals opportunities for improvement, usually due to simple human errors. We discovered that different media buyers could identify various opportunities within an ad account simply because they analysed the data with varying levels of granularity and rigour.

To address this, our engineering team began exploring the Meta Ads API, discovering that most of the data and configurations in Facebook Ads Manager are accessible via an API.

That’s when we had our “Aha” moment. What if we could build a tool to automate the entire account audit process? Furthermore, what if we shared this product with the world, allowing us to pass on our methodology to everyone?

As a first step towards making ads more accessible, we figured that brand owners and marketing generalists would benefit greatly if someone would tell them how to improve their ads in plain English. This desire combined with our personal pain of having to spend hours and hours digging inside the clunky UI of Meta's Ads Manager led to the creation of our first tool - Meta Ads Grader.

This tool would not only enable CMOs, marketing managers, and brand owners to independently audit their Meta ads in a self-serve manner, but also assist media buyers in conducting thorough audits, double-checking for errors and opportunities.

While we're confident that we could charge money for the amount of value this offers, we still decided to make this tool absolutely free to use. As we don't believe in gatekeeping any information.

But, wait? How do we share a grade card of an ad account to easily communicate the opportunities?

How do we score an ad account?

How can we build benchmarks across categories, geographies and AOV ranges?

Stay tuned for our next blog to learn more.

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