Kenshoo Has It: Facebook’s Two-Tiered Business Manager

David Delaplane, Channel Strategist, Local @ Kenshoo

February 06, 2020

One of the assumptions that many marketers have is that the native ad platforms such as Google and Facebook have all of the features available from those publishers.

But what many marketers may not know is that publishers generally have two separate ad technology teams—one that works on the native platform and one that manages the API-offerings to third-party integrators. And sometimes, the API team builds features that the native platform team may choose not to adopt.

Facebook’s Two-Tiered Business Manager is a recent example of functionality that is exceptionally valuable for local marketers and supported by Kenshoo but not integrated into Facebook’s native platform.

One-tiered Facebook Business Manager isn’t ideal for multi-location businesses

One of the major pain points with Facebook advertising for SMB and local agencies is managing accounts for hundreds or thousands of small businesses. Simply setting up a new client that may have dozens of locations or more can take a lot of time.

The previous method—without Kenshoo’s new integration, called the “one-tiered system”—requires agencies to create and maintain ad accounts in their single Business Manager for each new location.

This isn’t ideal for high-volume customers with multi-locations that require individual ad accounts, and according to Facebook, the one-tiered system has some limitations:

“There was one system user under the Business Manager who had access to all the pages and ad accounts. This meant that there was a single point of failure and if the system user’s access token was compromised, it would compromise all ad accounts.
The same one-system user also had access to all the pages, which meant that if the user was blocked due to scale issues or policy violations, it would affect all ad accounts.
There is a limit on how many ad accounts a Business Manager can have. That is, if the limit is reached, someone from the partner’s company must reach out to Facebook and ask them to manually increase the limit.
If a certain number of ad accounts are blocked for policy violations under a Business Manager, it blocks the entire Business Manager or its System user, which negatively affects the partners.
Because there are some assets that live at the Business Manager level, all of your client’s assets are all present at the Business Manager level. This, in turn, means that you must track which Pixel/Custom Audience/Product Catalog belonged to which user.”

The benefits of the two-tiered Business Manager

Under the two-tiered system, there is now a Parent/Child hierarchy so that SMB and local agencies can onboard new clients under their own, unique Child Business Manager. This helps to keep accounts separate from each other and away from the issues that can occur with a one-tier approach.

“The addition of the two-tiered Business Manager to build automation around the onboarding of new clients for SMB & local agencies enables efficient scale,” says Kenshoo Product Manager, Lior Feldman. “Marketers rely on technology partners to help solve problems like this and fully automate their onboarding process so they can get to the real task at hand of running valuable advertising and scale their business.”

Another benefit of Kenshoo’s solution is that our software can automate the creation of new Child Business Managers and Ad Accounts, as well as sending out Facebook Page access requests to link the existing Page to the newly created Ad Account. This all can be accomplished through the Kenshoo User Interface or the Kenshoo API.

Facebook lists the following benefits of this new two-tiered system:

“It lowers the friction for your client who signs up for Facebook advertising and improves your client’s stickiness to your platform.
It allows more revenue models for you and settles the balance with Facebook after setting aside service fees. You can share your LOC with the child Business Managers on behalf of your clients.
Scales well – It doesn’t require any manual intervention from Facebook every time your Business Manager reaches the limit of the maximum number of ad accounts.
Organizes all client assets more efficiently – Instead of you managing all the assets (Pages/Custom Audiences/Pixels, and so on) within one Business Manager, it organizes all client assets within their own Business Manager.
It provides you with actionable notifications for critical errors when an ad account has been blocked due to policy violations.
Get consolidated invoices for all your ad accounts, which helps with bookkeeping.”

The one-tier vs. two-tier systems, diagrammed

In the Facebook Developer blog post, Onboard SMB Advertisers to Your Platform at Scale, Facebooker Zain Aziz shares the following diagrams to better explain the differences of the one-tier and two-tier system.

Diagram key

BM=Business Manager

C=Child

SAU=System Admin User

The one-tiered system

As you can see, under the one-tiered system, all of the ad accounts are attached to a single Business Manager.

The new two-tiered Parent/Child system offered by Kenshoo

In the new system, Child Business Managers live under the Parent Business Manager.

Native platform + third-party platforms to get the best of both worlds

When most marketers consider the benefits of third-party vendor tools connected to big publishers such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, it’s about how paid tools have advanced features. In fact, in a recent survey, marketers rated third-party API platforms better than native publisher tools in 12 of 13 feature categories.

When you also add in the fact that third-party vendor tools can have even more of the publisher’s API features than even the publisher’s own native tool, it makes a compelling case for leveraging both tools for best-in-class marketing.

“While paid social advertising is already a mainstay in enterprise-level marketing, it is a burgeoning opportunity for small businesses and the agencies that support them,” says John Dobrowolski, GM of Kenshoo Social. “Kenshoo’s support for Facebook’s two-tiered Business Manager enables agencies that service small businesses to onboard clients quickly, organize assets effectively, and move towards a structure that’s built for scale.”

Are you maximizing performance while maintaining the most efficient workflow with your marketing campaigns? Kenshoo Social can help you with your local advertising needs.