Dolphin —one of the best Facebook Ads Automation Tools ever! Full tutorial.
Hi guys, today I have smth special for you. If you are a media buyer or an affiliate marketer like me, then every day you have to deal with multiple Facebook Ads accounts. Some of your accounts get banned and you have to reconstruct your campaigns, reload creatives, add credit cards, create Fan Pages and so on. This is tedious and boring work that has nothing to do with media buying per se.
Monitoring of multiple accounts is also a pain in the ass. Sometimes, even if you run whitehat offers, you have to launch various antidetect browsers like Multilogin or Linken Sphere to analyze your results, stop campaigns, duplicate adsets or increase budgets. That’s not fun. But that’s not a problem anymore 🙃
Let’s look at the alternative - a tool that allows you to:
- monitor campaigns from multiple accounts;
- create and upload new campaigns using templates;
- start/stop and duplicate everything;
And that’s only a small part of the whole variaty of functions - take a look. The tool is called Dolphin, it’s easy to use, doesn’t cost much and can be used both by solo media buyers, teams and agencies.
This is what we need to start using Dolphin:
- a Virtual Private Server (VPS), where we’ll install it. Don’t worry, all the installation process is automated and takes a few minutes. BTW, developers say that soon there will be a cloud version of Dolphin so you won’t need any VPS;
- access tokens from all of your Facebook accounts. I’ll show you how to get them a bit later;
- proxy servers - if you are familiar with antidetect browsers like Multilogin or Linken Sphere then you know, that usually you need proxy servers to work with multiple Facebook accounts;
Ok, let’s get it started! I assume, that you’ve already registered for a free trial here. BTW, you can use promocode YELLOW during registration to get more trial days 😉
Installation
If you are going to use a cloud version of Dolphin (it’s not ready yet but will be live soon) - just skip this section.
First of all you’ll need a VPS/VDS where your Dolphin will be installed. The simplest way to get one is to use TimeWeb or Linode. You won’t need any additional software, everything is done automatically. Here are video tutorials for each of those hostings.
TimeWeb
Linode
Other VPS providers
If you want to use any other VPS provider (like Digital Ocean for example) - that’s also possible, here are the requirements:
1. 💻 Clean server = No additional software should be installed there.
2. 🐧 Server operating system = Linux Debian 10
3. ⚙️ Server memory = 1GB+
1GB is enough for most cases. 2–4GB is great! More than 4GB is just a waste of your money.
4.💾 Hard Drive = 10GB+
When you got your fresh new server, connect to it using SSH and run this command:
rm -f install.sh && apt install -y wget > /dev/null 2>&1 && wget https://panel.dolphin.ru.com/97384261b8bbf966df16e5ad509922db/install.sh -O install.sh > /dev/null 2>&1 && bash install.sh
Installation takes a few minutes. The status of the installation is displayed in the terminal. After installation is complete, paste your server’s IP into your browser and complete the registration process. You can also bind a domain to this IP address if you want to access your Dolphin in a more convenient way.
Configuration
For those, who don’t like to read articles, here’s a video that shows what you need to configure your Dolphin from start to finish:
If you’re still here, I’ll tell you, what to do, to have all of your accounts in one place step by step. And the first thing you need is to get access tokens.
Getting Access Tokens
An access token is a key to your Facebook ad accounts. Using them one can create new campaigns, view statistics, etc. All of these actions are done using Facebook’s Marketing API. This is how to get a token:
- Login to your Facebook account and go to https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager/manage/campaigns/
- Open your browser’s Dev Tools by pressing F12 on your keyboard and go to Console tab.
- Enter this text there: window.__accessToken
- Now your token will be displayed. Usually it starts with EAABsb. Copy it somewhere, we’ll need it a bit later.
BTW, you can also just press “View source” on your Ads Manager page and search for EAAB there.
There is only ONE access token for each social Facebook account. If you use it, ALL of your ad accounts that you have access to will be added to Dolphin.
Adding Proxies
For each of your accounts you’ll need a proxy! You can get some here, for example, or anywhere else. If you don’t add proxies, then all of the tasks that you’ll perform will be done using your server’s IP. That’s not good if you work with more than 5–10 accounts, cause you’ll get banned. Dolphin doesn’t support IPv6 proxies, IPv4 only! I personally recommend residential or mobile proxies.
When you bought some proxies - export them to a text file, we’ll use it to bulk upload all of your proxies to Dolphin.
Use this template to export from AstroProxy to Dolphin in a correct format:
{proto}://{login}:{password}@{ip}:{port}[http://{link}]
After that open “Add Proxy” interface in your Dolphin.
And copy-paste all of your exported proxies there
If the formatting is correct then your proxies will be displayed line by line in the “Check before you add” window. Then press “Add”, select all of your proxies and “Check” them. They should change their status to “Active”. Also it’s a good practice to give your proxies names. I usually just rename them to Proxy1, Proxy2, etc.
Ok, great, we are done with this part 👍
Adding Facebook Accounts
This is how we add our accounts. First of all go to Ads Manager and press “Add Account”. Then select “Bulk” tab there.
Enter your account’s name, the account’s token and the proxy ID (all proxies are displayed in the right part of the screen). Don’t forget to add spaces and double colons ::.
My format looks like this - {AccName} :: {AccToken} :: :: {ProxyID}
If everything looks ok - Add your accounts.
After a while your accounts will appear on the “Accounts” tab and will be in Active status:
Viewing Statistics
If you are already running ads on the accounts, that you’ve added, then you can watch all of the stats right now. Or go to “Running Ads” section of this tutorial, create some ads and return here a bit later 😉
First of all on the Accounts tab select the social account you’d like to monitor. Then go to “Cabs” section. It should be called Cabinets or Ad Accounts ofcourse. I think the devs will fix that soon.
Here you are able to see account’s statuses, spend and billing, number of results (leads or installs for example) and so on. Select the Ad Account that you need and then you can select Campaigns, Adsets or Ads tab to view the statistics. All of the columns are sortable (1) also you can start,stop and duplicate any entities here (2).
If you need to go deeper then use filters, select date ranges, create your own column presets, use search and tags. The interface is pretty simple, soon you’ll master it like a pro!
Running Ads
Usually to run some ads on your ad account you’ll need:
- Press a button to accept Facebook Policies (Facebook shows a screen with these polices, when you access your Ads Manager for the first time)
- a Fan Page
- a Payment Method (usually a card) linked to your account
- a campaign template
Let’s look at all of these steps, starting from campaign template creation.
Create a campaign template
Let’s go to “Create Ads” menu and create a new template, they are called Bundles here.
If you are running ads on Facebook then you should be familiar with the settings that you’ll see during the bundle creation process. I’ll create a simple bundle for Conversions objective and $50 budget on the campaign level (it is calle Campaign Budget Optimization or CBO in Facebook).
On the next tab select your targeting: Age and Gender, Country or Region, Placement and Devices and don’t forget to set your pixel’s event! For Conversions objective it is usually Lead or Purchase.
The last but not least thing is to enter you ad’s headline, text and description. Spintax is available here, so you can randomize your text a bit! Spintax, which is abbreviated for Spin Syntax, is a list of text phrases, sentences and synonyms separated by the pipe character (|). Each group of keywords is enclosed inside curly brackets ({}). The Spintax parser picks a random keyword or sentence from the available choices and generates unique sentences for each iteration.
So, each time your ad is uploaded to Facebook the parser will generate smth like this:
- Loose weight in 6 days!
- Decrease your weight in 1 week!
- and so on…
And we are done with the bundle creation. Let’s prepare our accounts now!
Prepare your accounts
Ok, guys, we need to accept Facebook Policies first, then create a Fan Page (if you don’t have one) and bind a Payment method (your card). Let’s go.
On the Accounts tab select the accounts that you’ll use to run ads, and then select “Accept rules” from the menu. When the rules are accepted you’ll see a green check mark near each of your accounts.
From the same menu select “Create fan page” if you don’t have them! Enter fan page names, select a bult-in icon or upload your own avatar, select a category and press “Create”!
After that you’ll see all the Fan Pages in the Account’s fan pages column
Great, we are almost there. Now go to the “Cabs” tab, select ad accounts that you’ll use to run ads, go to the menu and select “Attach bank card”.
Enter your card numbers here, expiration date and CVC/CVV code. Don’t worry about your cards, they are not saved anywhere so the data won’t leak. You can also change your ad account’s currency, timezone and country here if you need. When you are done go to “Data Check”.
On the Data Check tab you’ll see which cards will be attached to which accounts. If everything looks good press Attach.
When the operation is complete you’ll be able to see your cards near each of your ad accounts in the Billing column.
Time To Burn!
Ok, guys, now we are ready to take off! Select your ad accounts and press “Create Ad” menu item.
Select your bundle and then on the second step enter your links and select your fan pages.
You can also use other options here like settings URL parameters or Display URL. Last step is to upload your creatives! These can be videos or images, each creative will be processed and some noise patterns will be added to them so Facebook will think that they are a bit unique.
Ready-steady-go! Press “Create Ads” and watch the upload process. When everything is done go to the previous part of this tutorial to watch statistics!
Conclusion
Ok, guys, we got through the main features of this great product and left behind some of the options that I’m going to write about next time. Feel free to register for a trial version of Dolphin and check it out yourself! I’m sure, you’ll be in love with it😍
As for now I wish you profitable campaings and see you later!👋
BTW: All links that are used in this article ARE affiliate links. Cause we are affiliates, you know 🙃
