Changes in digital advertising platforms are par for the course and arrive regularly. April saw a larger than normal release of updates and changes over in Zuck’s house.
Here are the ones that are most important for advertisers to be aware of:
Facebook is evaluating more than just your ads to decide if you can advertise on the platform.
There are more and more advertisers flocking to the platform all the time and they can afford to be choosey. You can get ad disapprovals based on website copy that is pages deep in your site.
AI is scanning your ads as well as landing pages and even thank you pages for content that goes against their policies.
One client repeatedly ignored our warnings that a certain word on their website was triggering ad disapprovals and as a result, the ad account got shut down. In another instance, someone reached out to us for help with repeated ad disapprovals and the common denominator in the disapproved ads were landing pages that had spelling errors.
This level of scrutiny has actually been rolling out across accounts since Jan of 2019, but they smartly implemented it in a stepped approach, so some advertisers are only just now getting wind of it in the form of disapprovals and account shut-downs.
Clear User History and tweaks to Relevance Score are two changes with the most potential to impact costs for advertisers.
By the end of 2019, users will have the option to clear their history (like clearing browser history) on Facebook. This will potentially make it more difficult to accurately target people, but it’s unlikely to be a catastrophe.
We don’t believe that it’s going to be a huge percentage of people that will take the time to wipe their browser history and Facebook activity regularly. Most of us are lazy.
We also believe that the Venn diagram of people who don’t want to be marketed to, and the people who aren’t shopping from clicks on social media ads have a lot of overlap, so losing them in your targeting may not be a big deal in terms of sales.
It’s good to be aware of changes, it’s good to take advantage of new features, and it’s important to be aware of policy changes so you can stay in compliance and keep advertising on the platform.
It remains to be seen how all this will shake out in terms of CPCs and CPMs, but as marketers and business owners we must never lose sight of the fact that social media, or any advertising medium for that matter, is simply a means of reaching humans.
It’s of vital importance to review all aspects of your messaging – website, social media and otherwise to ensure that it is connecting with the humans that your product or service is designed to serve. Because ultimately that is where it will succeed or fail. Connection with the end user is paramount, not what platform is being used to reach them.
A savvy and critical outside perspective to ensure the messaging, customer journey and targeting are dialled in can be incredibly helpful in this regard.
So often, because we understand our business inside and out, we either gloss over something that needs to be explained in more detail for a newcomer to understand.
Or we go way too deep in the explanation details when they just need to understand broad strokes.
If you aren’t confident that your messaging is cohesive, or that you are talking about the right things, or you’ve been plugging away at social media and only getting vanity metrics (likes) but no sales, or not getting much of anything in return, a strategy session could be just what you need.
