Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook’s Ads Platform is Falling to Pieces

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Today, mass chaos among Facebook advertisers Be protected. Be Zen. away from the consumer space. Spoiler, they became profitable. And Microsoft just made it a lot easier to target people who are likely to buy things during Black Friday. It's Friday, November 6th, 2020. Happy Finnish-Swedish Heritage Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And we start today with the massive issues still ongoing on Facebook's ads platform. In the last 24 hours, everything from ad campaigns being denied for ridiculous reasons to wholesale banning of entire business managers with pages, ad accounts, pixels, catalogs, audiences, all caught up in it, all inaccessible, and many without appeal or review available.

Starting point is 00:01:22 Some examples just from our Slack community. There's a marketer in there who does advertising for a Christian author who released a book. That campaign was denied for, quote, using deceptive or misleading practices. Another one from our Slack group. One of our members has a colleague who is running ads for hats,

Starting point is 00:01:38 literally a hat you wear on your head. That was denied because listings may not promote medical and healthcare products and services, including smoking cessation products containing nicotine. In case you missed it, that was for a hat. A colleague of mine reported today, I had a client re-enable their Facebook ads. As soon as I turned on the campaign, it was disabled. After lengthy conversations with Facebook on chat, I discovered that Facebook is now actively disabling ads that are more than 30 days with no activity. They told me if the ad account is seasonal to deactivate the account and turn it back on when needed.

Starting point is 00:02:18 What? Like, where was this blog poster help page? Where was this announcement? Are we all supposed to disable our ad accounts if we don't plan on using them for a month? And also, what kind of bullshit is that anyway? What other platform says you've got to deactivate your ad account or lose it entirely? So anyway, he tries to do what the Facebook rep tells him to do, disable his ad account. And he gets a pop-up saying, if you'd like to stop your ads but plan to run Facebook ads in the future, we recommend pausing your existing ads and keeping your ad account enabled. Huh?

Starting point is 00:02:50 So he did that, and now that ad account has been permanently disabled. Facebook, get your shit together. On Reddit, one poor agency had all of the ad accounts in their business manager disabled. All of them. All 838 of them. And the decision, says Facebook, is final. Of course, they were never told what policies Facebook think they violated. A good friend of mine works for Canada's largest private sector employer of veterans.

Starting point is 00:03:19 They were running an ad in advance of Remembrance Day. Facebook took it down because it said it was deceptive. You get the idea. And Facebook can't blame this on the US election. This has been happening for more than a year now. Facebook's ads platform is broken. Sure, they've put out a statement saying, well, sorry, it was a bug. We fixed it now. But A, it's not fixed and people still have this issue. And B, nobody believes anything that Facebook says now about its ads platform. Also, CPM and CPC costs have been rising the last couple of years. People have concerns about the platform's compliance with privacy regulations, the demographic it serves as getting older and

Starting point is 00:03:55 thus less valuable to marketers. One guy on Twitter today actually started a Facebook account ban pool. For $5, you get to pick the day that you think your accounts will be falsely banned through Q4. Look, if Facebook were a nation, it would be a failed state. And the best part, tweeted DTC marketer David Herman, quote, Facebook will bring it back and you'll hear nothing else of this. Getting refunds will be impossible and the ads you do still have running are now thrown off the algo for days, unquote. So if you're caught up in this, I really don't know what to tell you. Take your budgets to Snapchat, or TikTok, or Google, or YouTube, or Pinterest, or LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Microsoft, because the Facebook ads platform is falling to pieces before our very eyes.

Starting point is 00:04:44 If you do decide to take part of your spend over to Microsoft, you may be interested to know about their recent improvements to their ads platform. This week, they announced a test of mixed campaigns in Microsoft advertising. What is a mixed campaign? That's one that can include both standard ad groups with text ads, responsive search ads, and keywords, and dynamic ad groups with dynamic search ads and auto targets. What does this mean for you? It's faster now to manage your campaigns. You can import mixed campaigns from Google Ads. That's also a really nice touch. In case you're curious, your existing DSA campaigns will continue to function as is. Microsoft has also upgraded its keyword planning

Starting point is 00:05:20 tool. There's now a section where you can get keyword ideas from your landing pages, either your entire site or by specifying a certain page. And that planner has now expanded from just six markets and three languages to 34 markets and 12 languages. And finally, Seasonal In-Market Audiences. These are lists of consumers who Microsoft's algorithm believes are ready to buy. There are three segments available now around Black Friday. Also helpful, the Microsoft Ads platform is not falling to pieces before our very eyes.

Starting point is 00:05:53 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. A concerning trend happening with Google My Business profiles. In the last few months, a large increase in the number of GMB profiles that are getting hijacked. This from SEO pro Joy Hawkins, who owns the Sterling Sky Agency.

Starting point is 00:06:30 Quoting from her blog post today on localu.org, quote, a hijack is when a malevolent user gets a hold of a listing that they don't own and changes the core information on it to something they can benefit from. How are users hijacking these listings? One of the ways is to request it via the claim this business label. We're seeing a huge increase. So yeah, if you get one of these emails, Joy recommends just deleting it.

Starting point is 00:07:00 Also, she notes, it's a good idea to keep the number of admins you have on your brand's GMB profile low because every additional person who's a manager is one more person who might accidentally click that confirmation button in the email and give an unauthorized party control of your business listing. Here's two things about the location company Foursquare I'll bet you didn't know. First, their CEO is stepping down. And second, Foursquare is still around. I'm kidding, of course. It's just gone away from its consumer roots as an app where people would check into restaurants and gyms. And today it sells location data to brands.

Starting point is 00:07:37 That data can do a number of things, like confirming whether ad campaigns were successful and getting consumers to walk into a bricks-and-mortar store. Seems to be doing well. The company reported its first profitable quarter in the final period of last year, and it's been profitable all this year. Similar story over at Vimeo. They started by trying to compete with YouTube, but then switched focus to build tools that digital marketers would like. Video tools for large brands, custom embeds, better analytics, that sort of thing. In this past quarter, it too had its first profitable quarter. Vimeo says it has one and a half million paying customers. It just raised 150 million bucks in new funding. And finally, a nice change for those of

Starting point is 00:08:20 you who spend a lot of time in Google Tag Manager, you can now use bulk actions with triggers. You can now select multiple tags and then pop triggers or exceptions onto them. Of course, you can always use this bulk thing to remove triggers or exceptions. This is quite helpful. Sometimes, sometimes you've got hundreds of tags to manage with a detailed structure, made even more detailed if you are using a consent management platform. So my wife and I are considering buying a hot tub. Any advice for us? Good or bad? Please tweet me at Todd Maffin. You can find a link in this episode's notes. And that's it for this week. Our production assistant is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis, music licensing by Source Audio.

Starting point is 00:08:59 And this podcast is produced by our agency, EngageQ Digital. Find us at engageq.com. Full transcripts to every episode are on our website, todayindigital.com. I'm Todd Jaffin. Have a restful and safe weekend, friends. And I'll talk to you I'll see you again Through all weapons of your friend Ooh, I'll see you again Ooh, I'll see you again

Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook’s Ads Platform is Falling to Pieces

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