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Picking Up the Pieces
What next after yesterday’s disastrous day in the Meta ad auction?
by Tod Maffin (LinkedIn • all social media)
Today's News:
Meta Ads • What The Hell Was Yesterday, Anyway?
Meta Ads • 30% Fee for Mobile-Boosted Posts
Pinterest • New Business Manager Rolling Out
Instagram Verified Comment Filter
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Meta Ads • What The Hell Was Yesterday, Anyway?
It is all anyone is talking about on DTC Twitter today: The shit that went down on Meta's ad platform, blowing past budgets, messing up caps.
To get a handle on it all, this morning I spoke to our Shit-has-gone-down-at-Meta correspondent, Barry Hott.
What happened yesterday? How many marketers are affected? Give us the lowdown.
A lot of people saw really inflated costs and and budgets being overspent.
The weird thing about budgets being overspent is that you may have read it can spend up to 25% over your daily budget. But there's actually a new change, and that’s that it is increasing to 75% over your daily budget.
Right. The idea being that it’ll underspend the following days to bring your overall budget back in line. So is Meta saying that yesterday’s overspend was part of this?
It's not an “overspend” in most of these situations.
The other thing I'm seeing that that happened seemingly to most people is that this was affecting cost caps. Basically the system was ignoring the actual caps and just spending the budget as if everything was lowest cost, which is, you know, really bad. And the opposite of the point of using those caps.
So yeah, based on my experience and having seen these before, I would expect to see significant refunds in four to eight weeks from Facebook.
Which is fairly easy to do if you have a human being as an ad rep at Meta. If you don't, though you shared some great information on LinkedIn about how you can without an ad rep get a refund.
You can go to http://facebook.com/business if you're just looking for the easiest way. There's like a button at the top to contact support. And then you're going to have to like, press like five more buttons to eventually get to chat support.
If you find my link on LinkedIn, I shared the direct link that will get you straight to the form to start filling out what's going on.
Do not assume that chat support a understands that there was an outage, or even understands that there is a page that Meta manages that reports these outages, or understands anything about advertising in general.
Be kind to them, be nice, be helpful, be patient, but give them all the information that you have about the situation. Give them all the ad account IDs that you have that were affected. And you might have to give campaign IDs if they're specific campaign IDs affected.
Barry Hott writes the Have a Clues newsletter, and is our Shit-has-gone-down-at-Meta correspondent.
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Meta Ads • 30% Fee for Mobile-Boosted Posts
Meta today announced it will start charging a 30% fee on Facebook and Instagram ads when those are created by boosting a post from an Apple mobile device.
This fee is what Apple charges the platform, so rather than absorbing it, which Meta has done in the past, they’re now just passing the fee along to advertisers.
It was honestly a little hilarious to read their news release try desperately to spin this into a positive. Many small business owners operate their business on their phones, so it’s just bad news all around for them.
Still, Meta found this slightly convoluted rationale to use:
To support the millions of small businesses that use boosted posts on Facebook and Instagram, advertisers can now go to Instagram.com and Facebook.com on mobile and desktop to boost their content and avoid a 30% Apple service charge.
This isn’t new, of course. This is the way all web sites with revenue-generating apps avoid the fees.
Even Apple came out swinging saying today:
We have always required that purchases of digital goods and services within apps must use In-App Purchase. Boosting… is a digital service — so of course In-App Purchase is required. This has always been the case…
Apple spokesperson Adam Dema
But there is one important change — advertisers will need to go through a different payment process when boosting posts through the Facebook and Instagram iOS apps.
Unlike the previous experience, where advertisers were charged after their boosted posts ran, businesses on iOS will now be required to pay in advance, and add prepaid funds to their account to draw from to boost a post.
If an advertiser adds these prepaid funds within the Facebook or Instagram iOS app, the Apple service charge will apply.
If an advertiser chooses to add prepaid funds from their payment settings using their desktop computers or preferred mobile web browsers, they can then use these funds to boost content from any tool, including from the Instagram or Facebook iOS apps, without incurring fees.
This new payment process, and subsequent Apple service charge, is starting in the US, and additional markets and countries will be subject to this fee later this year.
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Pinterest • New Business Manager Rolling Out
Pinterest users are finally getting access to the platform’s new Business Manager, which it teased back in September.
Specifically, it adds:
New collaboration tools
The ability to reuse existing ad audiences between ad accounts
New Asset Groups for more segmented audience targeting
The ability to enforce 2FA
The main focus is on collaboration, and enabling multiple participants to take part in a Pin campaign. Which could not only help in internal projects, but also when working with influencers, by giving you more ways to integrate content in-stream.
There are some handy updates here, and it could make things a lot easier in your Pin creation process.
The new Business Manager is available to anyone with a Business profile on the platform.
Pinterest has a training course on using the new tool here.
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In Brief
Google Search Update?
Another possible Google search ranking algorithm update is underway. Google doesn’t announce these any more, so the SEO community sort of self-reports volatility in the results listings. Some people say they’ve noticed missing featured snippets and other anomalies. If you obsess over your brand’s Google position, you might want to check up on your positions.
Instagram DM Filter
Instagram has a new DM filter letting you see only messages only from accounts your brand follows on the app. This is in-app only, it is not a part of any API, so this functionality is likely not part of any third-party engagement tool you use.
Instagram Verified Comment Filter
Instagram also is rolling out a new filter to put comments from people who’ve paid for the blue checkmark first in your view. While this certainly could help a little in reducing how much time you spent looking at bot comments, it’s likely more of a line item on a pricing table for Meta to convince people to buy the checkmark.
YouTube Music Remix
YouTube now allows users to remix music videos into Shorts, offering options like sound, green screen, cut, and collab.
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