Before delving into the various advertising options available on Facebook and how you can utilize them, it’s helpful to understand how Facebook interfaces with advertisers.

Facebook has three sales channels: Direct, Inside and Online.

• Direct sales deals with the largest global brands, for which Facebook has dedicated account teams to manage the relationship directly with the advertiser and their agencies. These are generally referred to as managed accounts. The first important point to note is that certain products, specifically Premium (discussed later), are only available to managed accounts.
• Inside sales handles the next tier of clients, who may be spending in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on Facebook. These clients will have a sales rep whom they deal with directly to buy advertising, but they don’t have quite the same level of strategic support as managed accounts.
• That means the rest of us interact with Facebook sales via the Online, or self-serve, channel. There are companies developing products on top of Facebook’s Marketing/Ads APIs to facilitate the buying process for self-serve advertisers. Platforms such as Ad Parlor, Blinq, TBG Digital and others can be beneficial to those spending enough to justify an investment in automation and optimization.

But when it comes to the type of advertising available, these platforms don’t provide access to anything that you can’t....