Meta’s Ads platforms went on a bender over the weekend and advertisers woke up to a hangover of overspending and chaos in their ad accounts.

Some people reported seeing the daily budgets of their ad sets exceeded, and not by a little. Others saw CPMs jump 5x or 6x the month average.

For more detail on what happened, I spoke with digital ad veteran Andrew Foxwell this morning:

Andrew Foxwell is the “Foxwell” behind Foxwell Founders, a fantastic Slack community and Meta ads training resource. You can learn more about it at our affiliate link : b.link/founders

Tod Maffin – host:
Meta's ads platform went on a bit of a bender over the weekend, and advertisers woke up to a hangover of overspending and chaos in their ad accounts. Some reported seeing daily budgets of their ad sets exceeded, and not by a little. Others saw CPMs jump five or six times the month average. For more detail on what happened, digital ad veteran Andrew Foxwell joins me now. Andrew, do we know how many ad accounts this affected?

Andrew Foxwell:
You know, we don't know. We know that it was mostly, as far as we can tell, concentrated to the United States and to Europe, but it doesn't seem that it affected actually Australia and New Zealand but it did affect, as far as we can tell, conversion-based ad accounts, so those optimizing for purchase and conversion. Lead Gen did seem to be affected here and there, but less reports of that. Mostly people that I've been able to hear from are from the direct response world, and certainly our accounts are all direct response. optimizing for purchase. So we don't know how many.

Tod Maffin – host:
It's interesting not in Australia and New Zealand because that's a very common place that Meta goes to test things. So you'd think that if it was some weird bug that they were testing, that it would go there first.

Andrew Foxwell:
{laughs} Right.

Tod Maffin – host:
Do we know, was this a bug? Often Meta will kind of release stuff without telling us and then we all think it's a bug and it turns out, no, surprise, that's actually our new feature.

Andrew Foxwell:
Yes, so they are calling it a bug and they wrote, you know, originally and said, look, it's we're dealing with an ad delivery bug. It's unclear how widespread and that's all that they told us. So they actually themselves called it a bug, which is interesting. But it was, yes, it was around ad delivery. I mean, essentially the ads just spent way faster

Tod Maffin – host:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Foxwell:
Most people in the United States woke up and the ads had spent all the daily budget within like a two-hour time frame or overnight. So that's, you know, and I mean the really big thing here in the story is that there was no fix for like six to ten hours depending on who you ask, which is a severe outage. So.

Tod Maffin – host:
Was it at least overspending on the audiences that we'd set up or was it just going out to like random people?

Andrew Foxwell:
You know, that's the part I'm trying to figure out now. It appears that actually it was to the audiences that we've set up, so it just pasted incorrectly and spent them all in the frequencies were higher. But it's hard to say. I don't think we know that yet. I believe some people are saying that they actually left things on and they didn't turn ads off, which I think is very gutsy. I would not have done that. I mean, we didn't do that, right? we look at our client dollars as fiduciaries. If you're spending money, it's your own money. So like I turned it off because it worried me. But those people left it on. It appeared that actually some of those brought them good results throughout the day. So they were able to see lower CPMs because less competition and results were decent and not a terrible dumpster fire. I'd say that's a big minority of people to be honest, but that would give indication that it went to the people that were being targeted purposefully.

Tod Maffin – host:
Big changes, when we do them, can change the learning in the ad account. Has this bug reset learning, do you think?

Andrew Foxwell:
I think in some cases, yeah, I mean, if you're turning ads off, it will in fact learning and it could affect delivery moving forward. What we've seen thus far is it's okay. It doesn't appear that things are totally out of whack. Where we're seeing a little bit of performance weirdness is in Advantage Plus shopping campaigns. So if you're also seeing that you're not alone, that may take longer to stabilize.

One of the things I worry about with Advantage Plus shopping campaigns… And the bare case on it is that we all got really good results on it. And as more people have come onto it, it's been harder to find more quality impressions. And therefore the ad load of it and the ad serving of it is being, was part of this disruption, right? Like it's complicated and complex and it requires a whole bunch of different things happening. And I think they could take longer to recover. Would be… a hypothesis that I currently have, but who knows.

Tod Maffin – host:
When this has happened in the past, not something of this scale, but similar sort of things, Meta has in the past, as they have this weekend, said that advertisers can get credits back if they contact their ad rep (if there are any ad reps left at Meta!). But can we get refunds instead of credits? What's the recourse if this happened in our ad account.

Andrew Foxwell:
I think it's right now, it's really difficult to say they are being more public in reference to the how they're going to resolve this. They're saying we are going to provide recourse for refunds. That's something we've not heard before. So that's interesting. I think that refunds technically are very difficult for them to process in their system, honestly. So I would imagine that they actually may give us credits more. That might be just what takes place instead of a refund. So currently there is no recourse. We're waiting to hear on this. We're waiting to understand what recourse there is. But at this point it's making sure that you've documented what takes place, making sure you're telling chat support or your rep or both what has taken place, and allowing that story to continue to be told over time. So that's basically what we're looking for.

Tod Maffin – host:
Is there any way for us to be alerted when this happens again? Like, you know, there are rules set up, but I mean, can we, is there such a thing as a rule that says in the event of massive overspending alert me?

Andrew Foxwell:
There are stop loss rules that you can put into your ads account. The issue is a lot of times those are buggy and don't work. So that also is a real issue. You know, to me it's watching the status monitor and having, you know, you can set up a RSS on the status monitor. There's a Twitter account you can follow. It basically updates and tweets if there's an issue or an outage. So those are really the things that you can do and stay on it. I mean the reason that we caught it for our clients is because we logged on early to look on a Sunday because we were up because we have toddlers and small kids.

Tod Maffin – host:
Yeah, the Twitter account is MetaBizStatus.

Tod Maffin – host:
Andrew, thank you for this.

Andrew Foxwell:
Thank you.

Andrew Foxwell is the “Foxwell” behind Foxwell Founders, a fantastic Slack community and Meta ads training resource. You can learn more about it at our affiliate link : b.link/founders