Today in Digital Marketing - The Meta ‘Discount Code Fiasco’

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, June 20th. Today, a crazy new bug on Meta's ad platform is selling products at big discounts, and the merchants have no idea it's happening. Also, sorry, why can't I exclude past buyers from my Facebook ad campaigns now? Amazon's huge sales database is being put to work, and Instagram expands its live streaming by letting you restrict it. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. It is time to check in with our Meta Ads correspondent, Andrew Foxwell. Andrew is a

Starting point is 00:00:35 veteran Meta Ads buyer and has visibility into $300 million in Meta Ads spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders. Andrew, I want to get to this crazy discount code bug in a second, but I see Advantage Plus shopping campaigns are changing again. As far as I can tell, the UI is sort of like a standard ABO setup, but now you cannot exclude existing customers. You also don't appear to be able to add caps. What is happening? Yeah, it's interesting. It's a brand new rollout. And like, as of today, is what we're seeing. So, you know, basically, you have to set your engaged audience and exist in addition to your existing customer audience, like you've already done for ASCs. And so you have to, the engaged audience is what you're essentially like, what you're trying to exclude. So it's a very, you know, it's a very weird setup. So they're trying, I think, to change basically the ability for you

Starting point is 00:01:40 not to be able to exclude as much as you used to be able to. This feels like a real step back since what they I had been hearing was there was going to be more features added on to ASCs to make them more like a normal campaign. And it seems like now we're losing out on potentially exclusions, we're losing out on potentially even bid caps. So that you can't, I can't tell yet, honestly, is if this is happening to everyone now, and this is the way it is moving forward, or if this is a test in the US, this is so new that I haven't been able to figure that out. So it seems to be that this is causing quite a bit of destabilization. Certainly ASCs have been a real push for most folks have been where the majority of the spend is going and traffic. I just saw another report

Starting point is 00:02:33 where basically the traffic quality is like peaks and valleys from a guy who was spending about 15k a day. So and he had 80% of his spend going into an ASC. So when these things destabilize it, creating a ton of issues in the ecosystem, I don't really know what's going on with this at this moment in time other than trying to rebuild, trying to potentially try to move away as these are just don't seem to be what's delivering the best traffic at this moment in time or the most consistent traffic. You have contacts inside Meta at fairly senior levels. What is their thinking behind these kinds of decisions? Not letting us remove past buyers from a product ad just seems like the most basic thing in digital media buying. Where's their head?

Starting point is 00:03:27 Are they just so obsessed with AI right now that they're just not thinking straight? I think a lot of the project managers that work or product managers that work on these particular pieces are working on only one piece. So they'll be a product manager on ASC audiences or on ASC ad serving. These things aren't connected. So I have a feeling that there's pieces of this that the UI has changed and they have eliminated, at this point, exclusions. That wasn't told to the rest of the ASC team. And now it's likely that the campaign or the account managers for Meta are scrambling. I mean, as far as I've heard, that's the case. They don't seem to have any answers. So I think a lot of them is that

Starting point is 00:04:16 there's different people working on different pieces of this, and they're not necessarily cohesively talking to one another, which is obviously a major issue. So it's been really challenging. I mean, the month of June has been really challenging from a traffic standpoint because of this destabilization and within ASCs across most of the Western world, honestly. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about this crazy bug where Meta on shopping ads is putting discount codes onto ads without the permission or knowledge of the

Starting point is 00:04:47 marketer behind that ad. What is going on there? Yes, this is a bug. It's supposedly has to do with generative AI. We, you know, I heard about, I mean, this has been happening to community members for a while. No, there are certain places you can turn most of this stuff off. But then there, even if you have everything turned off within the commerce manager, it still turns, it still seems to come back on, or they're showing codes that you never agreed to for 20% off, things like that. So this one is a bug. It has been confirmed by reps as a bug. But they aren't they don't it takes a little bit for them to admit that it's a bug. In some cases, they say, Oh, did you turn off these all these options? Yeah. So have you tried increasing your budget? Yeah, that is something that if you've

Starting point is 00:05:35 experienced that, that is that is not supposed to be happening, where it'll give a 20% off code or something to to an advert or a potential customer. And what happens, by the way, with that 20% code? Does it actually, like, I guess it doesn't work because it doesn't go through to your back end. No, sometimes actually it works. Oh, God. Yeah, because it's actually on the shop itself. Right.

Starting point is 00:05:59 Because you're allowing the shop experience, it actually work which is a obviously obviously an issue so it's kind of like an intern gets drunk it just starts you know taking the the price label sticker a little too much um yes before you go i want to talk a bit about meta web and shops like some there's some traffic problems uh we were chatting just beforehand about this um what have you noticed there yeah this is a real issue there was a a lot of places that I would say are, you know, sending traffic to a shop and to the site itself. And there was a lot of people and advertisers that were having a decent amount of traffic going right into shops. And that is now that seemed to shift that, you know, 90 percent of traffic was going into to shops. And then it seemed it's around somewhere in the middle of the month. This flipped back entirely in month of of of June.

Starting point is 00:06:57 This flip back entirely. And now it's going to there's no shops. And so those that don't have the shop traffic seem to be really stirred that we did and no longer do seem to be struggling. And so this, this is happening. Meta hasn't confirmed this isn't, is an issue. There's no, I mean, we can show Meta like, hey, this is happening numbers wise. You can see, but you can't actually see technically the breakdown of shops, traffic, you have to set up a custom calculation. And if you have a custom

Starting point is 00:07:32 calculation to do that, which is like unique clicks versus unique outblown clicks, you can look at that and find out but it's essentially that is a big, I think, contributor to as well, the traffic quality that's been coming. So I don't really know what to do about this one either. Honestly, we don't have any control over it. Hopefully, this continues to stabilize and continues to come back into line. But it's been a pretty tough month, I think, because of all these pieces, the ASC issue having, you know, the ASC serving issue having problems, the shops issue having problems, and the ability for more control being removed from us. It's just very difficult to have any hands on the lever that can even stop, you know, to try to force it to do something you don't want it to do necessarily right at this moment in time. So trying to kind of honestly

Starting point is 00:08:24 troubleshoot it as we speak. Well, Andrew, I look forward to having you back in a week where we will be discussing how they had fixed all of the problems and there are no more bugs with the platform and everything is hunky dory. I hope so. I really do. I hope it's better. Andrew Foxwell is our meta ads correspondent. You can learn more about Andrew's digital ads training at todayindigital.com slash Foxwell or his Slack community of senior meta ad buyers at todayindigital.com slash founders. Both of those are affiliate links, and you can find those links at the bottom of our show notes.

Starting point is 00:08:59 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. Amazon is rolling out a new ad targeting system which doesn't rely on cookies or other third-party information. They call it ad relevance, and it

Starting point is 00:09:31 pulls from all the purchasing and streaming data across Amazon's large platforms, looking for a match between who an advertiser wants to reach and what content a consumer is viewing. The company says it's been working on this for two years now and claims it saw CPMs drop by as much as a third in testing. Of course, Amazon doesn't need to use third-party data given its enormous pool of its own data of online consumer behavior. It knows who its users are. It knows what they do and what they like. That means they don't need to infer that data from other platforms. In fact, the company says it can extend addressability on up to 65% of impressions that had previously been anonymous. This move, and others like it, of course, are on high priority given Google's promise to remove third-party cookies from its Chrome browser. The deadline for that keeps getting pushed back, the latest postponement putting

Starting point is 00:10:21 the cookie-pocalypse to next year. Amazon itself is on a bit of a tear. Ad revenue grew 24% year over year last quarter, much of that driven by demand for its sponsored product ads and video ads on Prime Video. Amazon is also expanding its generative AI tools to more merchants. Now sellers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK can use the tool set, which will help brainstorm product descriptions, titles, and other assets. Quoting TechCrunch, quote, the launch comes nine months after Amazon first revealed plans to bring generative AI technology to sellers.

Starting point is 00:11:05 The company hasn't been overly forthcoming about which market the tech will be available in. It's largely been limited to the US so far. That said, the company did quietly launch some tools in the UK earlier this month, unquote. If you have this, you want to try it out, go to the list your products page, enter some keywords that describe your product and then hit create. Or you can have it create a listing by uploading a photo to the product image tab. Of course, Amazon recommends you double check it before letting it actually publish live, given the tech's proclivity for hallucinating. Again, quoting TechCrunch, quote, while Amazon is no stranger to AI and machine learning across its vast e-commerce empire, bringing any form of AI to European markets raises some potential issues around regulation. This GDPR on the data privacy side, for starters, not to mention the

Starting point is 00:11:52 Digital Services Act on the algorithmic risk side, with Amazon's online store designated as a very large online platform for the purposes of ensuring transparency in the application of AI. For context, Meta last week was forced to pause plans to train its AI on European users' public posts. Amazon itself has faced the wrath of EU regulators in the past over its misuse of merchant data when it was alleged that Amazon tapped non-public data from third-party sellers to benefit its own competing business as a retailer. Just this month, UK retailers hit Amazon with a 1.1 billion euro lawsuit over similar accusations, unquote. A couple of nice updates to Instagram to pass along. First, the app is expanding its live streaming abilities.

Starting point is 00:12:46 Soon, you will be able to go live to only the people you have marked as close friends in the app. Some brands use that subset as a way of keeping track of VIPs or ambassadors or people who've won a contest or employees and so on. Quoting social media today, quote, live video has become a key connector for younger users, as reflected in the popularity of DM video chats, TikTok live, and even Omegle before it shut down late last year. Close friends on live aims to tap into the same, providing another way for Instagram users to connect in the app and maintain community within more close knit groups, unquote. Instagram is also adding music to carousel posts that include video clips. In the past, we've been able to add music to posts with only images in a carousel.

Starting point is 00:13:38 But if that carousel had an image, your music option was blocked. Now you don't need to remove the video card to get music added. All right, that's it for today. See you tomorrow. you you you Thank you.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Meta ‘Discount Code Fiasco’

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