The Problem with Facebook’s Email to (Some) Advertisers
TodayInDigital is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. Today, Tod touches on:
Facebook says the price of ads is about to drop
Some updates from LinkedIn’s new live events platform that marketers will love
Sprout Social adds integration with Glassdoor
and the digital ad industry gets another spanking from the European Union.
Below is the transcription from this episode
IT’S Tue, Oct 20, 2020.
Happy WORLD STATISTICS DAY.
Warning: High snark levels ahead.
I’m Tod Maffin from engageQ digital. And here is what you missed, Today in Digital Marketing.
FB CPM rates
Facebook today announced that CPM rates are expected to decrease next month.
And by announced, I mean their sales reps picked a small handful of big-budget advertisers at random, emailed this to them, those people then leaked the email on Twitter. Which is how Facebook makes these kinds of announcements. I wish I were kidding there.
The email read: “Immediately after the polls close on November 3, we will not allow social issues, electoral, or political ads on the platform. We may see a fluctuation in performance once we remove these advertisers from the auction. I also want to note this may be a possible opportunity to scale before the holiday as we will likely see CPMs decrease in cost during this time. Currently, no date has been expressed as to when we will allow these advertisers back on the platform.”
So, four things to unpack here.
First: it’s not clear exactly WHY Facebook thinks CPMs will fall. Yes, CPMs are directly tied to supply and demand. If there are fewer advertisers, the rates generally go down. But Facebook itself has said that — in the whole picture — political ads don’t actually account for much spend.
Second: This rep hasn’t made the obvious connection that even if CPMs do fall, they’ll only fall if you’re targeting Americans. If you’re in Canada and you market to Canadians, there won’t really be ANY significant change in demand for targets.
Third: And this is troubling — the category they’re going to turn off is “social issue, electoral, or political ads.” While YOU might not think your ad campaign is about a social issue, Facebook frequently makes mistakes here and will disable campaigns that its AI bots mistakenly believe are about a social issue. Are you a recycling depot? That’s a social issue! Do you sell renewable energy products? Obviously political. This happens all the time.
And Fourth: Facebook has a bad habit of applying American jurisdiction to all countries. If it’s not legal in the U.S., but IS legal in another country — well, tough for you. Cannabis is a great example here. In the U.S., it’s illegal federally. In Canada, it’s fully legal — federally, provincially. Hell, we have cannabis stores here literally run by the government. But can you advertise cannabis products on Facebook to Canadians? No you can not.
And so, if you run social issues or political ads in ANOTHER country — will they stop all those too? Past history suggests they very well might. And worse, they won’t say or haven’t decided, when they’ll let them run again.
So MAYBE CPMs will fall… if you’re targeting Americans, maybe not.
I think the REAL reason Facebook is saying this can be found in the email where it says “this may be a possible opportunity to scale before the holiday.” In other words: Hey - buy more ads.
And I don’t know if anyone from Facebook listens to this podcast, but if you do — like, would it kill you to just set up a blog to sell ALL advertisers about this stuff? Hell, I’ll go halfsies with you on a Mailchimp account.
My favourite tweet response to this was from independent Facebook ads consultant Andrew Foxwell who said “Facebook is all like: No it’s not political spending. Reps are like yeah it might be political spending. Facebook’s like hey we’re going to keep breaking stuff in the meantime cool?”
ALSO, DTC advertiser David Hermman reported today that the breakdown of dynamic creative no longer shows which variation performed best. Because, you know, why would we need that kind of information anyway?! What are you guys, like, digital marketers or something?!
LinkedIn Events
Virtual events are a much bigger part of our world now, ever since Covid. And today, LinkedIn announced a number of updates to their still-fairly-new live events platform.
Which apparently is called “LinkedIn Events with LinkedIn Live.” Come onnnnn…. Stawwwwpppp.
Anyway, here are the new upgrades:
Some new organic discovery features like personalized event recommendations in your audience’s “My Network” tab and a new weekly Events digest email.
Also, when you post an event from your Page, LinkedIn automatically notifies your followers who are most likely to attend based on various criteria, including their interests. This will be rolling out in the next few weeks.
You can now include a free registration form for your event and collect the names and emails of people who signed up. You can also download the list from your event page and send them a thank-you email, upload the list to your CRM, or share it with your sales teams.
You can now run Sponsored Content Single Image Ads alongside your organic posts to promote your event.
And — I actually think this is the best — you can retarget prior event registrants. All you have to do is create a custom target audience in Campaign Manager based on those who have RSVPed to any of your LinkedIn Events.
Sorry.. Your LinkedIn Events with LinkedIn Live events.
They say they’re working on more stuff, including advanced event analytics and a new Events Ad format.
LinkedIn made this announcement on their corporate blog. Which is only accessible to — anyone with a computer.
Okay, I’ll stop now.
What’s Working
Speaking of Andrew… if you sell anything online, a great podcast to have in your app is his Ecommerce Influence podcast. And earlier today, they put out a really solid episode about how to revamp your Facebook ad performance in Q4.
They cover How user behavior is impacting the current state of Facebook, Using bid overrides to manage volatile Facebook ad performance, and How long you need to run campaigns to maximize performance. Here’s a short clip:
Again, that’s the Ecommerce Influence podcast which you’ll find, well, you know how to find podcasts.
Platform Updates
A couple of nice platform updates.
Sprout Social has added Glassdoor to their engagement toolset. Glassdoor is the site where people rate their employers. This new integration will let you see reviews as they come in, reply to them, escalate to your team — all the usual stuff. I suppose you can also apply Sprout’s regular automation as well, like tag content with specific words. This automation is only available in Sprout’s advanced plan, which is $250 bucks a month.
I do love Sprout Social — we use them here at our agency. But this automation is a bit light… You can’t auto-hide or auto-delete comments based on their content…. Something that Agorapulse can do.
Speaking of Agorapulse, they’ve added support for seeing comments on dynamic ads. They say there is an API restriction that prevents them from dropping these comments into your regular Inbox stream — if those comments are on an INSTAGRAM dynamic ad, so you’ll have to open the ad natively in the Instagram mobile app to respond.
To see all ads, go to the “Published” tab of the “Publishing Lists” section of your dashboard. Pure dynamic posts will appear in the “Dynamic ad posts” dropdown option under Type > Posts.
And Hootsuite this morning said they were having problems with their Amplify product — specifically, trouble receiving mobile and email notifications for posts. They’re working on it.
IAB Offside
There’s some trouble brewing for digital ads in Europe this week.
As you probably know, the privacy regulations in Europe are more stringent than in other parts of the world. And when the GDPR came into effect, the ad industry responded by developing something called the TCF. The Transparency and Consent Framework.
You probably know it from those irritating banners at the bottom of every web site now telling you that ‘there be cookies ahead.’
Now, Europe’s data supervisor says — that framework isn’t enough.
Quoting Techcrunch: “The framework fails to meet the required legal standards of data protection, according to the EU data supervisor. The investigation follows complaints against the use of personal data in the real-time bidding (RTB) component of programmatic advertising which contends that a system of high-velocity personal data trading is inherently incompatible with data security requirements baked into EU law.”
The ad industry group that created this cookie banner solution is IAB Europe. The IAB is one of the main advertising industry groups. But the EU says they haven’t done enough. They haven’t appointed a Data Protection Officer, they don’t have a register of its own internal data processing activities, even its own privacy policy wasn’t good enough, said the EU.
For its part, the IAB says it “respectfully disagrees”
The fellow who filed the original complaint that led to this finding works for a civil liberties group — he told TechCrunch: “The TCF was an attempt by the tracking industry to put a veneer of quasi-legality over the massive data breach at the heart of the behavioral advertising and tracking industry and the Belgian DPA is now peeling that veneer off and exposing the illegality.”
So far, the only enforcement action from the EU has been several mildly worded blog posts.
‘Cause — yeah… that’ll teach ‘em!
Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.