4 Methods to Quickly Share Facebook Ad Previews with Clients

One of the most common questions about Facebook Ads we see on Quora, Reddit, and other similar forums is: “how do you share Facebook ad previews with clients?“

However, we haven’t yet seen an answer that gathered the community’s consensus on what should be the standard procedure for this task.

While Facebook seems to have tried to (at least) tackle the issue with the Facebook Creative Hub, expectations kind of fell short of what the tool can actually do for advertisers, especially those who work at agencies and manage multiple different accounts.

So how can we share Facebook ad previews with clients?

How To Share Facebook Ad Previews

To share Facebook Ad previews with clients, we need a solution that can be at the same time…

• Professional: we don’t want to send isolated links via e-mail to our clients, so they spend hours going over each one of them. It doesn’t look good, and isn’t very professional.
• Feedback Friendly: if the client doesn’t approve one (or more) of the ads, they need to be able to quickly communicate with the agency and share the reasons why.
• Scalable: the best agencies and businesses out there are those who work on well-oiled SOP’s. As such, we need a tool that enables us to share ads with our clients in a repetitive, easy way.

Last of all, we also want to ensure there’s a “central” folder where ads are placed for approval, and where it doesn’t require a back-and-forth with clients to discuss ad details.

In the next sections, we’ll share four of the most common methods used to share Facebook Ad previews with clients and a mini-version of our own internal document template.

Let’s get to it.

1. Printscreens & Video Recordings

The first and most common method in this list is also the most basic one.

In this scenario, you’ll take a screenshot or video recording of your ad and share it directly with your client either via PowerPoint presentation, or via Google Drive (or other similar tools).

Some of the best tools to do so include Loom, TinyTake, Window’s Snipping Tool, or Droplr (Mac).

The downside of this method is that it can easily become too time-consuming to take screenshots of all ads after you’ve created them. Plus, it’ll take a while for the client to go over them all. It also…

• Isn’t easy for the client to share feedback about the ads.
• Isn’t scalable, since it will require more manual labor to record and take screenshots of the ads as your ad production increases over time.

2. Share Facebook Ad Preview Links

The second most common method used by Facebook advertisers is to share the Facebook Ad preview link, directly with the client. Oftentimes, this is done via Google Spreadsheets or Excel.

To do so, navigate to your Facebook Ads Manager and access your campaigns at the ad level. Then, select the ads you want to share the links to, and click on the “Export & Import” button.

Then, click on “Selected” and choose the file format for the Excel file.

You will then want to locate the “Ad Name” and “Permalink” columns within the Excel sheet, and share these with your client. You can (and should) use some tables, colors, and other formatting tools to make the spreadsheet look a little better, though.

The downside of this method is that it is neither…

• Feedback-friendly, as it doesn’t make it easy for the client to share feedback about the ads.
• Scalable, because it forces you to constantly access the ads manager to export and send the links over to your client.

If it’s a method to be used for one-off situations, then it’s probably more than enough, though.

3. Use Facebook Ad Preview Tools

The third method in this list is to use external Facebook Ad preview tools, such as GreyMetrics, or AdParlor’s mockup tools.

Or, you could also use Facebook’s own Creative Hub but, as we mentioned, this isn’t much of a reliable tool, in our opinion.

To do so, in Facebook’s Business Manager menu, click on “Creative Hub”.

In the next screen, you’re able to create your ad mockups and see how they look like in all available placements. Then, in the top right, you can click on the “Share” button to send the links over to your client.

Now, while this can be a more professional method to share the previews with your client, it is more time-consuming than the method before, and isn’t feedback-friendly either.

So, what’s left?

4. Google Sheets + SuperMetrics

The last method discussed to share Facebook Ad previews with clients relies on Google Spreadsheets, and SuperMetrics. In short, it’s a better (and more automated) version of method number #2.

If you’re not familiar with SuperMetrics, this tool allows you to connect your Facebook Ads data with other tools, such as Google Spreadsheets, or Google Data Studio.

So, what we’ll do is create a Google Spreadsheet that automatically imports the different creative elements of our ads directly from Facebook Ads and, at the same time, include the links for the previews in the different available placements.

You can grab this spreadsheet template in this link.

You can then schedule SuperMetrics to refresh data according to how often you launch new ads, such as weekly, or bi-weekly.

To do so, we often launch our new ads in a (paused) demo campaign and make sure that the data refresh only includes data from this campaign. This ensures we avoid ad duplication.

The client can then use the checkbox in the sheet (or any other method you choose) to let you know which ads are good to go, and which ones aren’t, as well as provide feedback on each one of them.

The major downside of this method is that video ads won’t display in the spreadsheet, but it still makes for a nice method of organizing your ads.

Closing Thoughts

While Facebook has indeed launched the Creative Hub to kind of “sort out” this issue, they haven’t yet found a good solution that is good for advertisers who test ads at scale.

In some cases, we’ve had clients who launch dozens of ads per week. As you can guess, it can quickly become too time-consuming to go through each one of them with preview links and spreadsheets.

Well, here’s to hoping Facebook will one day get to it and save us all from this (tedious) task.

What are your methods to share links with clients? We’d love to know, so feel free to reach out in the comments below, and let’s talk!