Facebook Ads’ “First Time Impression Ratio” Problem
TodayInDigital is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. Today, Tod touches on:
Why is Facebook showing your ad to the same people over and over again?
A huge development for people who sell things online
Pinterest and Instagram both add announce welcome platform upgrades
An inside look at the American military’s social media negative-response strategy.
Below is the transcription from this episode
IT’S Tue Oct 27 2020
Happy National Architect Day - Colombia
I’m Tod Maffin from engageQ digital. And here is what you missed, Today in Digital Marketing.
FB Saturation
There’s an interesting discussion underway on Twitter this week about an apparent bug deep inside Facebook’s ad algorithm — a bug that may have been crippling your campaigns for weeks or even months.
The bug is related to how Facebook chooses how many people to show your ad to.
Let’s say you have an ad set where the targeting is a million people. You give it a small but decent budget for that size — say $100-grand. But for whatever reason, the campaign doesn’t seem to perform well.
You dive into the delivery insights of that ad set — and discover that the First Time Impressions metric is about 20%. What that means is that even though you had a big audience group, and a LOT of money — 80% of that audience saw your ad more than once.
Even though you had a MILLION people in your targeting group — 4 out of 5 people saw your ad at least twice. Why? When there are hundreds of thousands of other people who’ve never been exposed to it.
So what’s happening? Honestly, nobody really knows.
David Herrmann, who runs a lot of DTC campaigns on Facebook for his clients, tweeted: “To FB an audience of 9.5 million hits 56% of its 1st time impression ratio after reaching 34,000 people. That’s a problem. FB’s ad reach is not hitting your desired numbers and instead just hitting the same people over and over again.”
Some people are speculating that this is an inventory issue — that is, that Facebook has run out of inventory. But if that’s true because of the U.S. election, then that really should only affect inventory for U.S. users. And this seems to be a global problem.
Angela Ponsford, the VP of Media Buying at Tier11, says “we've been seeing it for the past couple of months and have raised it with FB multiple times. They just give us a nonsense reason why it's happening and no resolution.”
So all that to say — check your delivery insights and the 1st Time Impression metric. If you have a decent audience and budget, and it’s under like 60%, something is up.
TikTok + Shopify
Big news for people who use Shopify — this morning, the company announcing a deal with TikTok to enable shoppable video ads.
This doesn’t sound like it’s going to be as deep an integration as you might think — the transactions will still happen on the sellers’ Shopify sites. But the direct one-tap over to the store is most definitely a huge deal.
It comes at an interesting time. Remember, Walmart — which is in itself an e-commerce giant — Walmart has provisionally agreed to a buy 7.5% stake in TikTok's American operations, pending approval from the Trump administration.
So then if that’s still in the offing, why is TikTok cutting deals with Walmart competitors — well, sort of competitors. I mean who knows who’s a competitor these days. Walmart itself cut its own deal with Shopify this past June to expand its online marketplace.
Also this month, Shopify surged past Royal Bank to become the most valuable company in Canada.
Pinterest Updates
Just in time for the holiday season, Pinterest today announced a number of solid upgrades to its marketing platform.
First, an updated profile that will let merchants transform their shop tab into a storefront with featured in-stock products organized by category, featured product groups, and dynamically-created recommendations.
And when Pinners search for shopping-related ideas on Pinterest, they’ll see recommended merchants based on the product category.
Also — They’re testing an improved product tagging tool that gives merchants the ability to tag their own scene images with exact products. The company says this will make it more seamless for shoppers to shop from a scene to “make that inspiration a reality.”
Pinterest also says it’s now easier to upload catalogs and activate shopping ads, with faster Catalog feed ingestion, video as the main hero image in collections (that’s a nice touch), collections as a new shopping ad format, and a new scheduling tool.
And finally, Conversion Analysis gets a bit more granular. You can now see how customers are completing their path to purchase—all summarized in a familiar funnel—in the visualizations tool.
Instagram Updates
Instagram also today announced some changes to its platform — changes that brands who livestream on the app will appreciate.
First, an extension of the live-stream time limit to four hours. That’s a big change from its current one-hour limitation. This applies to all users.
You’ll also soon be able to archive your Live broadcasts for up to 30 days — so, basically the same as Stories. And that archived version will contain the comments and Likes as they came in.
They’re also updating the “Live Now” section within IGTV to provide better discovery options. And also putting those Live Now recommendations at the end of other lives. That MAY be a brand safety issue for you — this is kind of like how YouTube puts that “hey you should watch these videos next” boxes at the end of every video. Doesn’t seem to be any way to turn that off.
Twitch and Navy
As you probably know, I’m a big video gamer. And during the workday, my second monitor is always playing Twitch — the game streaming site. I usually watch ML7 who is a support main in Overwatch. I’m also a support main in Overwatch so I like to see what positioning he uses, how he manages his cool-downs, all that stuff.
Twitch itself can be a marketing opportunity for brands. Last week, popular American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played some games on Twitch as a get-out-the-vote strategy. Apparently, the site she was plugging ended up having record traffic.
Another interesting marketing use of Twitch is from the U.S. Navy. Where members play games to promote military recruitment.
That channel has had its share of controversy. Twitch channels all have chat rooms so you can talk to the streamer and other viewers while you watch. Since the Navy started streaming, people would troll them by asking about the U.S. military’s record on war crimes. Their first response was to just block people from the channel. That went about as well as you think.
So lately they’ve been just sort of gritting their teeth and baring it. Which got some people to wonder — did the U.S. Navy produce any kind of internal guidelines for how to deal with being trolled on Twitch? And if so, wouldn’t it be great if there were some kind of legislation that let people request public records under some kind of — I don’t know — call it like a freedom of information initiative?
See where I’m going with this?
Yes, someone has FOYAed the U.S. Navy and has received the internal policies for how their streamers should respond when someone asks in chat “What's your favourite U.S. war crime?”
They actually made a response flowchart for this, with a number of quite-robot response suggestions including:
"I am here to hang out with people like me who love gaming. If you want to know more about my life in the Navy, I am happy to discuss. But I will not speak on behalf of others."
And “I'm here to play games. I have no interest in engaging in personal attacks."
And "If you have concerns about Navy policies or actions, I suggest you contact the Federal Elected Officials from your state."
The gaming web site Kotaku.com nailed it perfectly today with their headline: “U.S. Navy Tells Its Twitch Streamers — When Asked About War Crimes — Respond Like Whiny Cowards”
Bing Bugs
And finally, some people reporting bugs with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Apparently, Bing is having some indexing problems. There was some kind of issue with CloudFlare links, but it sounds like this bug is on the Bing side of things. Sounds like they’re working on the issue.
If you’re looking to get a new gig in the digital marketing world, our Slack community might be perfect for you. In the last week alone, jobs were posted for an agency content strategist, a marketing coordinator position where you can work remotely, and a Facebook ad specialist for a cosmetics brand. See what you’re missing? Tap the link in this episode’s notes to join our Slack group. It’s free! Or go to todayindigital.com/slack
The video game plan tonight — my wife and I are playing Sea of Thieves with our niece and nephew in Montreal. Well, my wife and I will be doing the mission work, and the kids will be on the other side of the map emoting and barfing and giggling their faces off.
I'm Tod Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.
Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.