Ads management: connect ad accounts, set spend limits and manage campaigns

Ads management brings your ad accounts into Vista Social. Once an ad account is linked, you can boost posts, see paid results in reports, and ask Ask Vista about your campaigns or have it make changes for you, with spending limits you control.

This article is the full operating manual: how to connect ad accounts, link them to profiles, organize them with profile groups, set who can do what, put limits on spend, and run day-to-day work through Ask Vista.

Note: Ads management is available on the Advanced plan and higher. If you don't see Ad Accounts under Settings > Profiles and Ads, check your plan in Settings > Plan and Billing.

How it fits together

Four things decide what anyone can do with an ad account in Vista Social:

On top of that, each person's Ads permission and role decide whether they can only look at results or also make changes.

Supported networks

Anything not listed, such as building a Reddit campaign from scratch, is done in the network's own ads manager. The campaign still shows up in Vista Social reports and in Ask Vista once it exists.

Connect ad accounts

Go to Settings > Profiles and Ads > Ad Accounts and pick a Profile group at the top. Everything on the page applies to that group.

There are two ways in, depending on the network.

Networks that link through a profile

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest and Snapchat ad accounts are linked to a profile you have already connected.

1. Under Profiles without an ad account, find the profile and click Link ad account.
2. Pick the ad account from the list. These are the ad accounts the login behind that profile can manage.
3. Click Link ad account.

If the ad account you need isn't in the list, the login you used to connect the profile doesn't have access to it. Give that login access in the network's ads manager (for example, add it to the ad account in Meta Business Settings), then reconnect the profile and try again.

TikTok and Reddit use a separate ads login. The first time, the dialog asks you to Sign in to TikTok for Business or Sign in to Reddit Ads. You sign in once, come back to Vista Social, and pick the ad account. After that, the ad accounts from that login are offered for any TikTok or Reddit profile in your profile groups.

Networks that connect directly

Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and OpenAI Ads have no social profile behind them, so they connect on their own under Connect an ad account directly.

• Google Ads and Microsoft Ads: click Connect, sign in with the Google or Microsoft account that can manage the ad accounts, and choose the ad accounts to add.
• OpenAI Ads: create an API key in OpenAI Ads Manager settings, then click Connect and paste it. Each key opens one ad account. The key is stored securely and never shown again.

The connected ad account joins the profile group you picked at the top of the page.

Link ad accounts to profiles

The Ad accounts table lists every ad account in the profile group, with the profiles it's linked to in the Linked to column.

• One ad account, several profiles: an agency or brand often runs ads for several Pages from one ad account. Click the + in the Linked to column and pick another profile. One ad account can be linked to as many profiles as you need.
• One profile, one ad account: each profile uses a single ad account per network. Linking a different ad account to a profile replaces the one it had.
• Change or unlink: click a linked profile to change its ad account, or Unlink to remove it.

Why the link matters:

• Boosts and new social ads run as the linked profile. Ask Vista refuses to boost a post from a profile that isn't linked to the ad account, so the wrong Page never ends up on an ad.
• Paid results for a profile's posts come from the ad account linked to it.

Organize with profile groups

Ad accounts follow profile groups. A person sees an ad account when they have access to a profile group that holds a profile linked to it, or holds the directly connected ad account itself.

Common setups:

• Agency with one group per client: link each client's ad account to that client's profiles in that client's group. Client teams and account managers added to the group see only that client's ads.
• Brand with regional groups: link the regional Pages to the regional ad accounts. The US team sees the US ad account and the EMEA team sees EMEA, while admins see both.
• Shared ad account: if two groups' profiles are linked to the same ad account, people in either group can see it.

An admin can turn a network off for a profile group. That network's ad accounts then can't be connected there, and the Ad Accounts page shows Your account admin turned off [network] for this group.

Who can do what

Ads permission

In Settings > Team Members, each person has an Ads permission:

People with the Admin or Manager role can also make changes: create and launch campaigns, boost, edit, pause, change budgets, and change ad account settings.

If nobody has set a person's Ads permission, it follows their Reports permission: anyone who can see reports gets View.

Ad account access level

Each ad account also has a setting for What Vista Social can change. It applies to everyone in the workspace, in the app and in Ask Vista, so even an admin can't go past it without changing the setting first.

Pause and lower only suits accounts where you want people to be able to stop spend quickly but not add any. Read only suits accounts a client manages themselves, where you only report on results.

Control spend with limits

Open an ad account's limits from the Settings button on its row in the Ad accounts table.

Monthly spend limit

Optional. It counts all spend on the ad account this month, including spend made outside Vista Social. The dialog shows how much has been spent this month and how much is left.

When the month's spend reaches the limit, new boosts, launches and budget increases are on hold until next month. Pausing and lowering budgets still work.

If Vista Social can't read this month's spend from the network, it plays safe and treats the limit as reached until the spend can be read again.

Daily budget cap per campaign

Required, 100 a day in the account's currency unless you change it. Any launch, boost or budget increase above the cap is refused. Pausing and lowering are never limited.

The cap applies to a campaign's daily budget. When a campaign's budget is split across ad sets, the cap applies to their total.

Where limits are checked

Limits are checked everywhere Vista Social spends:

• When you save a boost in the calendar, and again when the boost runs.
• In Ask Vista, before the confirmation card is shown, so you aren't asked to confirm something that would be refused.
• In Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants connected to Vista Social.

The Ad accounts table shows each account's limits and access level, so you can check them at a glance.

Tip: Set the daily cap a little above your largest normal campaign budget. It catches a typo like 5000 instead of 50 without getting in the way of everyday changes.

Working with ads in Ask Vista

Ask Vista works with every ad account you can see. Just ask in plain language.

Reading results

• "How did my Facebook ads do last month?"
• "Which LinkedIn campaigns had the lowest cost per lead this quarter?"
• "Compare Google Ads spend and conversions this month to last month."
• "Why isn't the Spring Sale campaign delivering?"
• "Show the top search terms for the Brand campaign over the last 30 days."
• "Which ads are running on Pinterest right now, and what do they look like?"

If a question could match more than one ad account, Ask Vista asks which one you mean instead of guessing.

Making changes

Every change goes through a confirmation card that lists exactly what will change: the ad account, the campaign, the current budget and the new one, the targeting, and so on. Nothing is sent to the network until you click Confirm and proceed. Cancel sends nothing.

Examples:

• "Pause all campaigns on the Acme Facebook ad account."
• "Raise the daily budget of Spring Sale to 40."
• "Boost my last Instagram post for 5 days at 10 a day, targeting the United States."
• "Create a LinkedIn campaign for marketing managers in the US and Canada, 50 a day, with this image and copy."
• "Create a Google search campaign for our new cold brew, 40 a day, targeting Chicago."
• "Add 'free trial' as a negative keyword to the Brand campaign."
• "Rename the Q3 campaign to Q4 Retargeting."
• "Duplicate the Holiday campaign with a new end date of December 31."
• "Archive the campaigns that ended last month."

How changes behave:

• New campaigns start paused. Ask Vista creates the campaign, ad sets and ads paused so you can review them, and turning them on is a separate confirmation. The card for turning a campaign on shows the daily budget it will start spending.
• Limits and access are checked first. If a change would go over the daily cap, break the monthly limit, or isn't allowed by the access level, Ask Vista tells you why before any card appears.
• Network rules are checked first too. Each network has its own minimum daily budget and its own options. For example, Reddit needs at least 5 a day, and Ask Vista tells you when a budget is too low before you confirm.
• Nothing is sent twice. If the same change is confirmed twice within a few minutes, it's sent once and Ask Vista says so.
• Every change is logged. Confirmed changes and ad account settings changes appear in the Audit log on Settings > Team Members, under Ads, with the person who made them.

Boosting from the calendar

You can still boost posts from the calendar the way you always have. See Boosting Posts with Vista Social. Boosts saved in the calendar follow the same access levels and limits as Ask Vista.

Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants

When you connect an AI assistant to Vista Social (see Connect Your AI Assistant to Vista Social), it can read and change ads with your permissions, under the same access levels and limits. These assistants don't show Vista Social's confirmation card, so read what the assistant says it is about to change before you approve the action in that assistant.

Example setups

Agency: let account managers optimize, never overspend

1. Put each client in its own profile group and link each client's ad account to that client's profiles.
2. On each ad account, set a Monthly spend limit to the client's monthly media budget and a Daily budget cap per campaign a little above their largest campaign.
3. Give account managers the Manager role on their clients' groups, so they can launch and adjust campaigns.
4. Give client contacts View for Ads, so they can ask Ask Vista about results without changing anything.

Once a client's spend reaches the monthly limit, launches and budget increases stop until next month, while pausing still works.

Brand: one team runs ads, everyone else reports

1. Leave the main ad accounts on Everything and give the paid media team the Manager role.
2. Give the rest of the marketing team View for Ads.
3. For an ad account a partner agency runs directly in Meta, set the access level to Read only, so it shows in reports and Ask Vista without anyone in Vista Social changing it.

Freeze an account quickly

Set the ad account's access level to Pause and lower only. Nothing new can launch and no budget can go up, from the calendar, Ask Vista or a connected assistant. Then ask Ask Vista: "Pause every active campaign on this ad account."

Disconnecting an ad account

Open the ad account's Settings and click Disconnect. The account is unlinked from every profile in the workspace, and directly connected accounts are removed from every profile group. Ask Vista and boosts stop using it.

Disconnecting does not touch the campaigns themselves: they keep running in the network. Pause them first if you want them to stop. The account's limits and access level are kept, so they come back if you reconnect it.

Troubleshooting