The Facebook power editor tool was officially retired in October 2022, so yes, it is now gone. The power editor allowed marketers to create and manage Facebook ad campaigns and provided advanced options for targeting, scheduling, and optimizing ads.
Why did Facebook retire power editor?
There were a few key reasons behind Facebook’s decision to retire the power editor tool:
- Streamlining their ad products – By retiring power editor, Facebook consolidated ad creation and management into their main Ads Manager platform. This aligns with their efforts to simplify their ad offerings.
- Declining usage – According to Facebook, usage of power editor had declined significantly over the years as Ads Manager incorporated more advanced functionality.
- Investing in Business Manager – Facebook is pushing Business Manager as the single source of truth for ads management. Power editor sat outside of Business Manager, so retiring it aligns with this strategy.
Essentially, power editor was redundant and outdated, so Facebook decided to streamline by focusing their resources on improving Ads Manager and Business Manager.
What options replace power editor?
Advertisers now need to use Ads Manager and Business Manager to manage their Facebook ad campaigns. Key options that replace power editor functionality include:
- Bulk editing – Ads Manager lets you edit multiple ads at once using bulk edit.
- Saved audiences – You can save target audiences for re-use.
- Rules-based audience targeting – Create detailed audience targeting rules.
- Lookalike audiences – Build lookalike audiences based on your customer data.
- Automated rules – Set up automation rules to optimize campaigns.
- Scheduling – Schedule ads via the publishing options.
- Bidding and budgeting – Manage bids and budgets at campaign, ad set or ad level.
While not a perfect 1:1 replacement, today’s Ads Manager does incorporate most of the key features that power users relied on with power editor.
Is anything permanently gone with the sunset of power editor?
There are a few capabilities that were unique to power editor that are no longer possible now:
- Ad set level bidding – Can now only manage bids at campaign or ad level.
- Automatic end dates – Ads Manager doesn’t allow setting automatic end dates for campaigns.
- Visual workflow builder – Power editor provided a visual workflow builder for automations.
- Custom templates – Creating and saving custom ad templates is not supported.
However, most advertisers agree these specific features were rarely used in power editor. The core functionality around audience targeting, rules-based automation, and bulk editing remains fully available, just accessible in different ways.
What’s the impact on advertisers?
The retirement of power editor requires advertisers to adjust their workflows, especially large or sophisticated Facebook ad buyers who were heavy power editor users. Specifically:
- Re-learning platform – There is a learning curve to getting familiar with Ads Manager and Business Manager.
- More self-service – Less ability to rely on saved templates and workflows.
- Less customization – Not as much flexibility to customize UI and workflows.
- Adjusting automation – Automation rules work differently now.
In general most agree the core functionality is still there, it just requires re-learning the new platforms. Power users miss some of the customization and efficiencies possible with power editor, but overall it has not drastically reduced capabilities.
What about advertisers managing large accounts?
For advertisers managing very large or complex accounts, the loss of power editor is more significant. Some challenges they now face include:
- Harder to optimize at scale – Bulk editing is more cumbersome at large scale.
- Repetitive workflows – Tasks require more repetitive steps without workflows.
- Monitoring complexity – Large accounts are harder to monitor and optimize.
- Cross-account access – Cross-account access was easier with power editor.
Managing thousands of campaigns, ads, and audiences is certainly more challenging without power editor’s purpose-built interface and tools. Large advertisers need to be prepared to dedicate more resources to campaign management.
Conclusion
While the loss of power editor does represent the end of an era for Facebook advertisers, its core functionality has been preserved – though fragmented across Ads Manager and Business Manager. Most advertisers will be able to adapt their workflows and achieve the same results, though potentially with less efficiency. Extremely large advertisers juggling multiple accounts will feel the impact the most in terms of added complexity.
But given declining usage of power editor, Facebook’s push towards platform consolidation, and the gradual addition of advanced functionality to Ads Manager, the retirement was inevitable. For most advertisers, it represents a temporary disruption rather than a permanent loss of capability.