Meta's Ad Platform: Half-Measures Availed Us Nothing

[00:00:01] It is Monday, July 1st. Happy Canada Day, fellow Canadians! Ah, for the rest of you as well. It is a stat holiday that means no episode today. Well, no regular episode. But I am going to play you an interview that I did on Friday afternoon

[00:00:13] with our Meta Ads correspondent Andrew Foxwell. Andrew, as you know, joins us about every week to go deep into the Meta Ads platform. He has watched over 300 million dollars of Meta Ad spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders. There really is no one better.

[00:00:27] I started by asking him on Friday, you know, we do some ad work, some Meta Ad work at our agency. So we don't do a ton, but the little that we saw, June was just a complete disaster.

[00:00:40] Seemed to be anyway, a bit of a shit show. And I started by asking him if he saw that too. Yeah, it's been really, really tough. I mean, I think it's been an error like every day,

[00:00:50] every other day. It's been issues with ad serving. The newest one that came up really we started to see it on Tuesday was that if you had an ad on Instagram, you would click through to it and it would bring you to the Facebook login page.

[00:01:07] Which is terrifying too, because like sometimes when that happens, it means that your account's been hacked. Correct. Yeah. So I mean, it's terrifying for a whole bunch of reasons, brand spending money without knowing it. You know, it's just been a month. I mean,

[00:01:20] it's been really tough this year. I don't think there's been a week or let's just say a two-week period that there hasn't been some sort of issue. And it's caused a lot of problems, obviously.

[00:01:35] And you can't really be in a situation where you're scaling at this point in time because there just continue to be issues across the board. The other one that I continue to hear about that

[00:01:47] may have happened is if your store was very overly dependent upon shops, meta shops, there's was a huge shift sometime in early June. Some people say it was as early as mid-May where the shop itself would stop, essentially stop serving. So if an account was, you know, 80% of

[00:02:09] the traffic was going through shops, it tends to, the pendulum has shifted back and those accounts then lost optimization. So this is an ongoing one. We brought it up with meta and they are, you know, quote looking into it. So it's one of these things where you feel

[00:02:27] really gaslit because you're like, I see this happening and oh yeah okay can you send the video and all this stuff. So it's been really tough on people and it's been a shit show and it's

[00:02:40] been really hard. And I guess I'm here to say you're not alone if you've been experiencing definitely a tough June. When it works has performance been so good? Like I'm assuming that when the campaigns are running and things seem to be chugging along and meta is machine

[00:02:56] learning is delivering what it should like is meta's performance still head and shoulders above the rest that this kind of inconvenience is worth it in kind of the long run? Ultimately it's not

[00:03:09] that it's head and shoulders above the rest. It's that there's not another choice at the scale that meta is at. So they're, I mean it's definitely a monopoly and there's not really another place that people can go with the same level of scale especially within a new customer

[00:03:29] standpoint. So it's not as if all is lost there are certainly people that things are growing and they're doing okay but certainly the numbers aren't what they used to be you know we used to see

[00:03:42] things in the 5x range right? I mean years ago and you're now looking that that's not really the case it's very common to look at you know a campaign that would be maybe at a 1x over a

[00:03:55] 7 day period that then turns into a 2x or 3x later on. I think a lot of the work that's been done this year continues to be done this year is on looking at the knowing your true financial numbers of

[00:04:09] understanding you know here's what your cost of goods is going to be, here's what your hard here's what your fixed and variable costs are and you're having to do that as an agency to

[00:04:17] work with brand owners on that which is obviously not something we used to have to do necessarily although potentially we should have been doing that all along and so that's one part of it and

[00:04:26] there seems to be the hard part is if you say to someone depending on who it is all things aren't going well they'll say well what's your creative like? And you know creative is one of these

[00:04:34] pieces that is a major optimization point I actually just got a sheet from a colleague that they do a lot of creative work with brands and they had for one brand over 50 different angles that they were in the process of testing of different pitches

[00:04:54] and hooks that they're making on behalf of this brand so this was a pants brand that were for short men okay like that was their particular thing and it was all of these

[00:05:07] different angles and hooks I mean that's an insane amount of things that you have to test and so it's sort of one of these things of well it doesn't look good the numbers don't look great

[00:05:17] we're doing it's tough and then you get a creative audit or you look at it from a creative angle and you're like we could be doing more so it's always tough it's like is it that I'm not

[00:05:26] making the right pitch or is it that um you know actually it's our product isn't resonating or have we just not found the right person and so that sort of dichotomy and that well that situation

[00:05:39] is really where I think a lot of people find themselves and those that are successfully you know spending more month over month a big part of it is creative diversity that's a that is definitely something that they're doing along with landing pages and white listing and

[00:05:53] things like that as part of the journey as well but um I think for those that are kind of alone in that journey themselves without a big agency without big spends it's really tough to

[00:06:05] make that work because you're having to balance 17 things when you just didn't used to have to do that and it looks just like you're losing money and people don't necessarily know what to go where

[00:06:15] to go let's be honest retros can be boring and if you're the organizer you know it's more than just running a meeting you have to synthesize and categorize themes get the team involved design next steps and make it all a fun safe space where teammates want to participate

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[00:07:54] you know 50 pieces of creative it almost reminds me back in kind of the good old days where you would run you know 30 ad sets and each ad set had 50 different ads in it and then we kind of got away from that

[00:08:24] because you know Miro was saying listen just let our machine learning just give us a budget and tell us what your landing page is and we'll create variations for you is the old strategy coming back

[00:08:35] well I mean I think it's your test you're not testing those all at once you're testing them all in a certain you know over a period of time depends on your budget I mean you may be

[00:08:45] testing them all at once but most of the times you're going to be testing it in tranches of five or six and then going to do that for two weeks and keep going and I do think that that unlocks a

[00:08:54] lot of growth for folks and is a valid strategy I think that the place that a lot of people that probably are listening to this find themselves in that I mean I think that's like a small percentage

[00:09:06] of advertisers and most people find themselves in this that they're doing it themselves they're trying it on their own and they just get really you know feel really astray in the current

[00:09:15] climate and the way that it goes through and it's like well it could be creative could be landing pages and it's when you combine and throw in the fact that you know shops had a big error

[00:09:23] the checkout error it just is it's this constant barrage where you feel like you can find no steady footing to go on and you're not sure if it's you or your brand or if it's actually

[00:09:34] that things aren't going well and so that will continue to happen and you know we've had we had one brand owner that had to stop subscribing to the Foxville founders because the business wasn't going well it just was like he finally went through and did all the numbers

[00:09:49] and he finally admitted to himself like this isn't going well I have to cut back on everything and I'm really gonna just gonna try to go to be a wholesale business and I think that

[00:09:57] we've continued to see this stringing along a folks that like things have been bad things have been bad is like how you know how long are those that were potentially sort of artificially propped up by meta being overly good at its job early on now within competition

[00:10:14] is higher you know cpms are higher getting into the news feed is higher attention is you have to really be on point to get the right amount of attention and the right qualified attention and you have to have everything working and I think that we'll just continue

[00:10:27] to unfortunately see some brands that will drop off that are just not able to compete in that environment mostly because of cost I want to bring you back just briefly before I let you go

[00:10:37] about the about the errors that we're seeing the bugs on the platform you know you've got the phone numbers that some of the engineers working on that at meta we do not for the average marketer listening to this who is you know running up against these errors

[00:10:49] what can we do like I mean does you know meta will say they go to this web page and fill in the form yeah like level with me also go anywhere do anything ultimately like the one of the best things that you can do is actually

[00:11:04] document it and take a video and send it to meta because it does go in the error log like that is send it where sent through meta support through like the form yes you through either

[00:11:15] through the form or through chat support like sending it that way actually is useful because they do catalog and if they see a number of people saying it that's one thing so like I often

[00:11:25] myself I just want to scream into the universe and be like how's nobody else seeing this and like everybody on Twitter will say yes I'm seeing it too and it's like what percentage of those people have actually gone in and submitted the fact that it's there

[00:11:36] and it might it's not the perfect solution it's not but that is how they will track to try to fix something so it's important that even though we can do both we can bitch and

[00:11:45] complain on meta or on Twitter all about it or on x rather and then we can also submit a report and I think that's a lucrative thing to do because it does help them see that hey there's

[00:11:56] 10 people that have done this or 20 people that have submitted this in the last hour that's a major issue especially if it's documented and things like that well I will say this of those two options you presented one is much more fun than yeah of course

[00:12:08] absolutely absolutely Andrew thank you thank you Andrew Foxwell is our meta ads correspondent you can learn more about Andrew's digital ads training at today in digital.com slash Foxwell or his slack community of senior meta ad buyers at today in digital.com slash

[00:12:26] founders both of those are affiliate links you can find those links at the bottom of our show notes that'll do it for this Canadian holiday Monday I'll be back tomorrow with the day's news