Today in Digital Marketing - Why Did Meta Turn Off Ads Last Night?

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

A huge bug at Meta turned off thousands of ads... How to turn those ads back on safely... Why you might want to reconsider your Reels' strategy... TikTok's ad revenue is on track to surpass Twitter and Snapchat's combined... and Pinterest launches a huge API upgrade.Go Premium! No ads, more stories, audio chapters, and extended weekend episodes — https://todayindigital.com/premiumGet each episode as a daily email newsletter (with images, videos, and links) — b.link/pod-newsletterADVERTISING 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- Twitch: https://twitch.tv/todmaffin  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

Today, a huge bug at Meta turned off thousands of ads. How to turn those ads back on safely if that happened to you. Why you might want to reconsider your Reels strategy. TikTok's ad revenue is on track to surpass Twitter and Snapchat combined. And Pinterest launches a huge API upgrade. It's Wednesday, April 13th. I'm Todd Maffin. Buckle in. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. I'll start today with agency owner Rock Hladnik. The day started out for him

like it usually did. Got some coffee, checked Twitter. Except today, everyone in the DTC Twitter community was like, hey, did your Facebook ads get turned off overnight too? And he thought to himself, I hope this time it's not a bug that's affecting us as well. I went straight to the computer, checked the first three ad accounts, and there was like no ads turned off. On the fourth ad account, I found like 60 ads. On the next one, another 50.

So we had to check the whole agency ad accounts. In total, more than 1,300 ads of Rock's clients had somehow been turned off overnight, presumably by Meta's AI. And that's a nightmare. A nightmare indeed. One that another agency owner, Jacob Geddens, noticed too. My clients reach out to me and just and say like, hey, I couldn't help but notice that like we're not getting page likes and we're not getting purchases. And we saw a 20% dip in sales today. Do you know what's going on?

And I had to go in and audit four different accounts, and most of them were very well-performing accounts, and two of them went back into learning after. And I was like, that's cool. Thanks, guys. Media buyer David Herman saw it as well, but worse. Instead of just turning off the good ads, apparently Meta started turning up the bad ads. He tweeted, quote, many of you awoke to your best performing ad shut off and a

shift in your spend to underperformers by Meta last night. Because your ads served, likely there won't be refunds, despite it being their fault. Hold them accountable. This is a big mess up, unquote. Andrew Foxwell, who owns a great Facebook ad training and support community, did a Twitter poll. When I checked it, 50 people had voted. Nearly two thirds reported having ads randomly shut off last night. Meta does not have a tool that they use to let us know something is wrong. Barry Haught is a marketing consultant in New York. I was one of the few advertisers who helped advocate heavily for them to build a status page.

And they used it a little bit to sometimes agree, hey, there's a widespread issue. But this was one of the many cases where they didn't do that. And for me, the bigger problem here is, yes, there was a big ad pausing issue. But also, when a widespread issue hits the internet like this, it's all over Twitter. Tons of people know that this is a problem. Why is it taking a gigantic org a half day to acknowledge and respond to this when it took me seconds to see that something was wrong. If someone's listening to this right now and they had their ads caught up in this and their ads are off, do they have to be careful about the timing of when they turn this on? You know, in some cases, when you turn a campaign on at the end of the day, the platform will kind of panic spend. It'll try

to push through everything in a big chunk at the expense of good quality people, it'll just try to get up to its quota. How do we turn those ads back on safely? It depends on the scale. I've seen this in accounts where it was a handful of ads in a handful of campaigns. And so like turning them back on is negligible. I've also seen it where it was like a lot of the ads in a lot of the campaigns. From what I've seen, it's also some of the best performing ads. So having them off is actually more damaging than like waiting to turn them back on. So I would get them back on in most instances as quick as possible.

And take whatever performance hit comes with that? So I think for most of what I've seen, that's a great point. So if you had all of your ads off in an ad set, then yeah, maybe lower your budget to account for that. But I think for most people experiencing this bug, it's not all ads in an ad set. So their ad set is still live, meaning that the budget's been spending and that it wouldn't just explode the rest of the budget now. It would still be pacing the budget as usual. Incidentally, while we were speaking, Meta did update its ad platform status page some 17 hours after the first reports of the issue. As for what now, Rob Pladnik reminds people on his Twitter that you can actually filter by ads that have been turned off under the filter by ad delivery setting.

Just add yesterday or this week. We reached out to Meta this morning for comment or an explanation. We did not hear back by deadline. Also today, some marketers on Twitter were reporting that the connection between Shopify and Facebook also dropped out. Apparently, it's Cappy that went out. That's the conversion API provided by Meta. Rock Kladnick is the CEO of performance agency Flatsircle.agency. That's the conversion API provided by Meta. racing marketing. And Barry Haught is a marketing consultant in New York. His website is Barry Haught.

That's Haught with two Ts dot com. Well, with all that, is it any surprise that media buyers and marketers are moving their ad dollars to other platforms? And one platform in particular seems to be benefiting. No real surprise. That platform, TikTok. According to a new report, TikTok's ad revenue is projected to triple this year to $11 billion, leaving Snapchat and Twitter in the dust as it surpasses the two platforms combined. Snap is expected to make $5.5 billion and Twitter $4.8 billion. TikTok's ads business grew 175% worldwide last year, and it's expected to grow 200% this year. The platform is also threatening one of its biggest competitors, YouTube. By 2024, TikTok's ad revenue is forecast to reach $23.5 billion. That's right behind YouTube's 23.6 billion.

By then, each company's share of the worldwide digital ad market will be over 3%. The data provided by Insider Intelligence. 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. So while Facebook's ad platform keeps breaking and TikTok's keeps rocking, you might forgive Meta's executives for panicking a bit about the state of their ad business. This is partly why the company keeps pushing reels. After all, short-form video is part of Zuckerberg's attempt to keep Facebook and Instagram relevant. But it turns out advertisers don't really care about the push to Reels. There's a great piece in Adweek today about why the majority of social marketers aren't dedicating a significant amount of time or ad budget to the format. The number one reason? It's just not driving sales. Advertisers indicated that Reels have failed to achieve performance objectives,

especially for lower funnel goals like sales and conversions. One marketer noted that click and swipe up metrics for the format were below every other meta ad format, including in-stream and in-feed ads. But doesn't mean you should give up on Reels. Some marketers suggest the TikTok clone is an effective tool for driving engagement like comments and shares and likes. Advertisers also noted that Reels can drive significant levels of audience interaction, sometimes more than other formats on the platform, especially around content marketing strategies. For some reason, Adweek says the short form video format can be a tool to promote brand awareness and build audiences for retargeting, but not necessarily for driving performance goals.

Turning to other platforms now, Pinterest has launched version 5 of its API, and this is a big one. It'll let developers build applications for merchants, advertisers, and creators more effectively. With the updated API, developers will be able to build separate applications to facilitate pin creation, presentation, and management, and will be open to all developers. Previously, there was a revenue number that you had to meet to get access. The new features include creating and managing image and video pins and boards, access to user and organic analytics, ad account, campaign, ad group, product group, and ad analytics, and the ability to manage catalog items through the Pinterest API for shopping. As this is an API and not a forward-facing tool,

you will need a developer to integrate it into your agency's or brand system. So big, busy, ugly news day with the meta ad bug. So we're going to leave it there. I know yesterday I talked about a study that we will be talking about. We intended to run it today. Of course, we'll do it tomorrow. That is whether or not you're using words the right way in terms of enunciating and emphasizing when you do your product video or your YouTube ad or your TikTok promo. Turns out most of us have been doing it wrong. So I will have the study author on tomorrow to explain that. Apple has released a new version of iMovie that looks very interesting, pretty good for content creators. And it turns out, according to another study, the software you use for video conferencing, even when you press mute, it is still sending audio.

So, you know, just to put the cherry on a nice day. Talk to you out.