The Meta ‘Discount Code Fiasco’

A huge bug on Meta's ad platform appears to be adding discount codes to products — without merchants' knowledge or permission.

META • Discount Codes Being Randomly Applied (!)

Most Thursdays, we check in with our Meta Ads correspondent Andrew Foxwell. Andrew has visibility into $300 million dollars in Meta ad spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders.¹

Main Points

There's a bug where Meta is adding random discount codes to products sold in its Shops. In some cases, these discounts work.

Advantage+ Shopping (ASC) campaigns are changing, with limitations on excluding existing customers and adding caps.

The rollout is new and causing destabilization in traffic and campaign management.

Meta's internal communication seems fragmented.

Traffic to shops has significantly decreased, affecting advertisers' performance.

Watch the Full Interview

Conversation Summary

Have you heard the reports of Meta putting discount codes on ads just sort of randomly?

Yes, this is a bug related to generative AI. Even if options are turned off, discount codes like 20% off appear on ads. Meta reps have confirmed it's a bug, though they initially suggest turning off certain options. Sometimes these codes actually work (!) because they’re integrated into the shop.

I see Advantage+ shopping campaigns (ASC) are changing again.

As far as I can tell, the UI is sort of like a standard ABO setup, but now you cannot exclude existing customers.

You can’t exclude existing customers? You also don't appear to be able to add any caps.

It's interesting. It's a brand new rollout as of today. You have to set your engaged audience and your existing customer audience like you’ve done for ASCs. You can’t exclude as much as before. It's unclear if this is permanent or just a test in the US. This is causing destabilization, affecting traffic quality and creating issues in the ecosystem.

You have contacts inside Meta at fairly senior levels. What is their thinking with not letting us exclude past buyers?

Many product managers work on specific pieces, and changes might not be communicated across teams. The UI changes eliminating exclusions weren’t communicated, leading to scrambling among account managers. The different teams are not talking to one another, causing major issues. June has been challenging due to this destabilization.

How has traffic to Shops been?

Traffic to shops has been inconsistent. Initially, most traffic was going to shops, but this flipped in June, causing issues for those relying on shop traffic. Meta hasn’t confirmed this issue, and the traffic quality has been impacted. Custom calculations are needed to track this. The overall traffic quality and control issues have made it a tough month.

Be sure to check out Andrew’s Foxwell Founders community of digital ad buyers and his extensive training in the digital ad space.

AMAZON • New “Ad Relevance” Targeting System

Amazon is rolling out a new ad targeting system which doesn’t rely on cookies or other third-party information.

They call it Ad Relevance and it pulls from all the purchasing and streaming data across Amazon’s large platforms, looking for a match between who an advertiser wants to reach and what content a consumer is viewing.

The company says it’s been working on this for years now and claims it saw CPMs [?] drop by as much as a third in testing.

Of course, Amazon doesn’t need to use third-party data given its enormous pool of its own data of online consumer behaviour. It knows who its users are, it knows what they do, and what they like. That means they don’t need to infer that data from other platforms. In fact, the company says it can extend addressability on up to 65% of impressions that were previously anonymous.

This move, and others like it, of course are on high priority given Google’s promise to remove third-party cookies from its Chrome browser. The deadline for that keeps getting pushed back — the latest postponement put the cookiepocalypse to next year.

Amazon itself is on a bit of a tear. Ad revenue grew 24% year over year last quarter — much of that driven by demand for its sponsored product ads and video ads on Prime Video.

AMAZON • GenAI Tools Rolling Out to More Regions

Amazon is also expanding its genAI tools to more merchants — now, sellers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. can use the toolset which will help brainstorm product descriptions, titles, and other assets.

If you want to try this out, go to the List Your Products page, enter some keywords that describe your product, and hit Create.

Or you can also have it create a listing by uploading a photo to the Product Image tab.

Of course, Amazon recommends you double-check it before letting it actually publish live, given the tech’s proclivity for hallucinating.

INSTAGRAM • Livestreaming and Carousel Music

A couple of nice updates to Instagram:

Livestream to Close Friends

Instagram is expanding its livestreaming abilities — soon, you’ll be able to go live to only the people you’ve marked as “Close Friends” in the app.

Some brands use that subset as a way of keeping track of VIPs, or ambassadors, or people who’ve won a contest, or employees, and so on.

Music in Carousels with Videos

They’re also adding music to carousel posts that include video clips.

In the past, we’ve been able to add music to posts with only images in a carousel, but if that carousel had an image, your music option was blocked. Now, you don’t need to remove the video card to get music added.

– 30 –