What Facebook Ad Tools can I use in Sprout?

New to Sprout Social? Learn all about our paid social tools here.

Sprout offers easy access to Facebook Boost and Unpublished Post features. Both help businesses looking to amplify their existing Sprout engagement efforts via Facebook Ads.

Additionally, you can also view Facebook PAC and DCO ad comments in the Smart Inbox.

Facebook Boost

Facebook Boost is available within Compose if a Facebook Ad Account is connected to a Group. It's also available in the Post Performance Report if you'd like to promote a post after it's been published. You may want to consider performance metrics like clicks, engagement, and likes when you are evaluating which posts to boost.

Boosted or Promoted Posts appear in the Facebook News Feed and show up higher so that the audience for that post has a better chance of seeing the content, potentially expanding the reach, visibility, and overall engagement. If you want to promote a sent message, we'll send you to the post directly on Facebook natively, where you can boost the post. For more about boosting posts, see this overview.

Unpublished Posts

Creating Unpublished Page Posts

When composing a post, click  > Facebook. You will see the option to send an Unpublished Post.

Unpublished or 'Dark' Facebook posts are created by businesses specifically for advertising purposes. These posts do not appear on a page’s Timeline or in fans’ News Feeds, but they can be promoted as advertisements using the ad console within your Facebook page in Ads Manager > Power Editor. 

After creating an Unpublished post within Sprout Social, use the Facebook Power Editor to create an ad with target-detailed demographic information to ensure it's seen by that specific audience segment and not distributed to every Company Page fan. 

Note: Unpublished Posts are meant for advanced users looking to push content and posts directly to Facebook for paid ad management. 

Ad comments

You can view Facebook DCO and Facebook PAC comments in the Smart Inbox in real-time. To view these comments, ensure that your Facebook Ad Account and Facebook Pages running your ads are connected to Sprout. These ad comments won't appear in Sprout if no comments are made on the ad posts.

Facebook DCO and Facebook PAC Ad comment FAQs

For a single ad, sometimes the ads are grouped under two or more instances of the same ad post. Is this expected? 

Yes. Sometimes a group of ad comments come into Sprout under a given ad post, and another group of ad comments come into Sprout under a different ad post, even though they look the same. 

When viewing the Ad Post in the Reply Layer or Smart Inbox there's no image, just the text. Is this expected?

Yes. Sometimes Sprout won't get the image on the ad post. 

The ad isn't showing up in the Post Performance report. Is this expected?

If the ad has no comments it will not show up in the report. 

I see the ad post in the Post Performance Report, but it has no metrics. Is this expected?

Yes, due to an API limitation.

Will these ad comments show up in the internal reports?

Yes, they appear in the Engagement Report and Inbox Team Report.

Do I need to re-auth any ad accounts or Pages to get access?

No.

Do I need to have the Ad Account and the Page connected to Sprout?

Yes.

Should I expect a delay for FB DCO and PAC ad comments? 

No.

If Facebook or Sprout has an outage, will I get the comments that were created during the outage?

No.

I published an ad and it's live but I don't see the ad post in the Inbox

You only see ad posts in the Inbox when at least one comment has been made on the ad.