Today in Digital Marketing - Huge Meta Bug — Those Sales You See May Not Be Real

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

A huge bug on Meta's ad platform is massively over-reporting purchases... App marketers will soon get better performance... Google says they're not mass-denying ads... Four steps to increase your conversion rate... Go Premium! No ads, more stories, audio chapters, and extended weekend episodes — https://todayindigital.com/premiumADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia (TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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. Today, how does Meta fix under-reporting conversions? at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. a huge security hole in two of the largest e-commerce platforms. And on the premium podcast with no ads, more stories and extended weekend episodes, tap the link in the show notes for more. Four steps you can do today that will increase your conversion rate. It's Tuesday, February 15th. I'm Todd Mathen. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing. In an unexpected turn of events, Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox

browser, has revealed it is collaborating with Meta to create privacy-preserving ad technology. Yes, that's right. I said Meta and privacy in the same sentence. They're calling it Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA. It is a proposed measurement solution that would let advertisers track campaign performance across devices and browsers without collecting user data. According to the announcement, the IPA has two key privacy-preserving features. First, it uses multi-party computation to prevent any single entity, website, browser maker, or advertisers from learning about user behavior. And second, this is an aggregated system, meaning the results cannot be linked to individual users.

The companies say those two features will ensure that the IPA cannot be used to track or profile users. The proposal aims to make these features available to all websites. The IPA has been proposed to the Private Advertising Technology Community Group, which is a part of the World Wide Web Consortium, designated to work on improving advertising without compromising privacy. Last September, Meta revealed that as a result of Apple's privacy changes, it had been under-reporting iOS web conversions by about 15%. Well, yesterday the company announced that it has almost halved its under-reporting iOS web conversions by about 15%. Well, yesterday the company announced that it has almost halved its underreporting to around 8% now.

The platform also revealed that it corrected a bug last week that temporarily underreported off-site conversion metrics for some web and application campaigns. They notified advertisers at the time and the fix improved measurement for those metrics. And the company doubled down on the features they say will improve your campaign performance. For one, they really, really, really want you to leave detailed targeting expansion on. That's the checkmark that expands your targeting if it thinks it can find better results. And two, not surprisingly, they also want you to leave auto placements on. They say showing your ads across six or more placements gives the system, quote, more flexibility to control costs, unquote. Generally speaking, I think most media buyers these days agree with Meta's recommendations on those two, but really only at scale and with large budgets.

The jury is still out on budgets the size of the average small business. So while the under-reporting of iOS conversions seems to be better, a new bug is apparently now over-reporting conversions. A few days ago, some marketers noticed purchases seemed unusually high. When they went to double-check whether Facebook was removing duplicate purchases, it wasn't. Duplicate purchases happen when both browser-based and server-based tracking cookie code

both report an event. Facebook is supposed to catch that and remove the duplicate, but since February 9th, some advertisers have reported that's not happening. In response, Facebook support reps have asked people for their pixel ID numbers in what seems to be

a copy and paste template response with those advertisers saying, no, this isn't just an issue with my account. This is across your whole platform. One person reported Facebook's support technician told him to restart his computer. In other sort of hilarious news, one e-commerce marketer reported today that he tried to run an ad for President's Day in the US.

The ad was denied because Meta's computers thought that the ad was about political content. So the advertiser requested a human review and Meta denied it again. Apparently a human being looked at it with their own eyeballs and used their own brain and still concluded that the mere presence of the word president always means the ad is about a political campaign. We laugh because we're tired of crying. Still with meta for a moment and a few small items that are actually quite welcome. First, the ad platform's reporting side has added conditional formatting. This means you can have positive results show up in a green cell, negative in a red cell.

You can't get too fancy. You also get gray and blue, and that's it. You'll find this in ads reporting, by the way, not the actual ads manager. Once you're there, click format above the reporting table or use the dropdown menu next to a metric name. A toolbar will open on the right-hand side, then click Create Rule. Also today, Meta announced that it had some changes in the works

around ad performance and measurement. One item I thought notable was the expansion of AEM, Aggregated Event Manager. Quote, we'll be extending AEM to consider conversions from all advertiser-associated web pages in auto-redirect scenarios. For example, when a user clicks on an ad and lands on Jasper.com, but later purchases through Jasper.com.uk. Also, for businesses that do not own the top-level websites that their advertisements direct to, we are beginning to enable them to get advertiser-level reporting, which they didn't have access to previously. For example, Jasper's Market runs ads that direct users to a partner platform called Marketplace.com.

Jasper's Market was previously unable to get reporting as they did not own Marketplace.com. However, with this update, Jasper will be able to get reporting on their own campaigns, which were previously only available to Marketplace.com. They've also started working on adding AEM to app campaigns to let you measure, in this post-iOS 14 world, actions that people take while using your apps,

like making a purchase or achieving a new level in a game. Initially, the feature will be available if you run catalog sales app event campaigns. They say they're also working on adding more AI-generated recommendations. Because, you know, that's what we've asked for. To Google now and reports that search ads are being disapproved en masse. In the past 24 hours, there appears to be an increase in the number of complaints from advertisers about Google Ads' disapprovals. The company said today there is no bug with its ad policy enforcement, and it has not seen any mass disapprovals of search ads.

The disapprovals mostly pertain to a policy called Government Documents and Official Services, and could indicate that the search giant has stepped up policy control. However, Google is denying that is the case and said, quote, the teams are keenly aware that policy flags are disruptive and work incredibly hard to strike the right balance. Safety is critical to a healthy system. Advertisers can request reviews and or appeals. 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. First, no authentication is necessary in order to execute a successful exploit, meaning an attacker does not need your user login, and admin privileges are not required to exploit this. Adobe has rated this exploit as having a priority level of 1, which is the highest level. Level 1 means the vulnerabilities are being actively exploited. Unpatched versions of Adobe Commerce and Magento are vulnerable to being hacked, which is the worst-case scenario for merchants. To resolve the vulnerability, Adobe has released security updates

and recommends users update their installation to the newest version. Can someone work for a brand if their views do not align with the brand's ideology? And what if it's the brand chief? Yesterday, Jennifer Say, Levi's brand president, announced her resignation due to disagreements over her pandemic-related activism. She claimed she was forced out after vocalizing her opinion that schools should remain open during the pandemic. She was offered a $1 million severance package but refused it so she could speak out publicly, which she did in a guest post on Substack.

Quoting the post, Levi's is trapped trying to please the mob and silencing any dissent within the organization. In this, it is like so many other American companies held hostage by intolerant ideologues who do not believe in genuine inclusion or diversity, unquote. Yes, in case you missed it, that through the Qualtrics XM marketplace. And I know you're thinking zero party now. Yes, zero party usually describes any data that a customer proactively and deliberately shared. This is different from first party data, which comes from implied preferences. By using this new connector,

brands will be able to instantly feed Wing's zero-party data to Qualtrics Experience ID, where it can be analyzed and activated to personalize customer experiences at scale. What kind of experiences? Well, they're calling them micro-experiences, things like onboarding quizzes, guided shopping, personalized forms, and so on.

The companies also say this should increase conversion rates as more relevant experiences can increase consumer engagement. Well, here's a lesson to plan ahead if you're going to advertise on Facebook and Instagram, Meta's most recent victim of ad bans is the bidet company Tushy, which had 34 of its ads rejected just two weeks before Valentine's Day. Adweek reports that the company found itself scrambling on February 3rd after Meta rejected the company's Valentine's social campaign

for including the words butt and fart. Even though the company was able to find workarounds by submitting booty for butt. God, I can't believe I'm reading this. The company's click-through rates were 33% lower than its typical rates during promotional periods. But the major blow to Tushy was that it was unable to use its promo code

I fart you in its creative assets, which gave customers 14% off its products. Yes, Meta's policy prohibits adult content, adult products, and adult services, although there is no policy against using the words butt or fart. And, as you can expect, Meta did not specify which policy Tushy violated. from newsfeed to feed. Fess up. How many of you had money on For You? This afternoon, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg held an all-staff meeting in which he announced that they would be devoting

major resources to fixing and upgrading the user experience. I'm just kidding. They're changing their mission statements instead. Move fast is becoming move fast together. Be bold will now be build awesome things. Be open will become live in the future. Let's all pause for a moment and recognize

how many people were likely involved in this. From Zuck to his lieutenants to policy people, communications people, the folks that run the intranet. What do they say about shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic? Well, we will be closing new admissions into our Slack community in the coming days as we prepare to transition it to a paid community. So now

is the time to get in and be grandfathered in with a lifetime free access account. More than 800 of your fellow digital marketers are in there. There's great advice on campaign setup and scaling, some exclusive content, jobs get posted there. Tap the link in this episode's notes or go to todayindigital.com slash slack before it is too late.

Talk to you tomorrow.