Facebook Business Account and 'staging' app

Question

We are a company that currently advertises on Facebook, to automate some part of our business we are building an external app that uses Facebook Marketing API. It will mainly create campaigns/adsets/ads/custom_conversions.

We are having a discussion about setting up our assets for testing our API calls. Right now we are doing these API calls on our 'production' Business Account and these resources: our dedicated Facebook app our 'production' Ad account our 'production' Pixel our 'production' page our 'production' instagram

By 'production' I mean the accounts we use to advertise for our business on a daily basis.

It seems that Facebook does not like our way to do things since some time after we have published some garbage adsets on our Ads Manager we had issues to do other actions on Business Manager (some of our campaigns were not reaching people normally for example). e would like to find a way to test our app without disturbing our 'production'.

Is there an optimal way to set up 'staging' assets? Should we create another Business account with new resources dedicated for testing? Or does it have to happen on the Ad account level?

Answer 1

Some hints for anyone searching for this.

Facebook allows you to create a testing environment by creating a test app for you fb application. the test app is a clone of your actual app where you can change some settings without affecting the original app, for example you can use it for local testing.

another tool you can use is the sandbox ads manager account were you can create ads through the marketing API without actually running or pay for these ads.

• To create a test app Go to https://developers.facebook.com/
• Click My Apps dropdown
• Choose an app and select create test app from the side menu.

to create sandbox ad account check out https://developers.facebook.com/ads/blog/post/v2/2016/10/19/sandbox-ad-accounts/