Facebook will let users hide ads targeted via Custom Audience lists

January 10, 2020 • Facebook, users

Facebook quietly announced a new feature coming later this month that will allow users to control whether or not an advertiser can show ads to them using a Custom Audience list.

“People have always been able to hide all ads from a specific advertiser in their Ad Preferences or directly in an ad. But now they will be able to stop seeing ads based on an advertiser’s Custom Audience from a list,” Facebook wrote the corporate blog.

Why we care

Custom Audiences are often comprised of a company’s active and best customers. Not being able to show ads to a critical mass of those users could potentially hurt campaign performance. However, this kind of control could be a net positive for advertisers as well as users. When users have the ability to opt-out, marketers have greater incentive to think carefully about the relationships they have with the customers on their lists and the messaging they’re serving them.

Facebook has made a number of changes to how Custom Audience lists are managed in the past year. This latest update is a more proactive feature — moving beyond simply giving users information on why they’re being targeted and letting them control if they see the ad or not.

The announcement was included in news related to allowing users to hide political ads, but the soon-to-be released feature applies to all campaigns using Custom Audiences.

More on the news

With the new control feature, users will also be able to make themselves eligible to see an ad even if the advertiser has excluded them from the Custom Audience list.
Last April, Facebook added information on when a Custom Audience list had been uploaded to the platform to the “Why am I seeing this ad?” feature.
The company later updated the terms around how advertisers and their agencies could use Custom Audience list for transparency purposes.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

Facebook tells senators it still uses location for ads despite user location services opt-out

December 21, 2019 • Facebook, Location

We might soon see another FTC investigation of Facebook for “consumer deception.” The company acknowledged in a letter to two U.S. senators that it continues to capture and use location to serve relevant ads even if users have turned off location services.

Bipartisan inquiry into Facebook’s user of location. Senators Coons and Hawley sent a letter in November to Facebook “raising concern that Facebook ignores the wishes of users who don’t want their exact location to be tracked,” The Hill first reported.

Facebook, in September, pledged to be respectful of user choices around location tracking. In a blog post, the company said, “You can control whether your device shares precise location information with Facebook via Location Services, a setting on your phone or tablet. We may still understand your location using things like check-ins, events and information about your internet connection.” So Facebook is explicitly saying it will still use location.

Facebook not technically ‘deceptive.’ This caveat and the word “precise” may wind up saving Facebook from legal consequences. Mirroring the language in its blog post, the company explained in response to Coons and Hawley that it continues to use location (though not precise location) from other sources such as user check-ins and IP address. So, as laid out in its post, the company isn’t technically “deceiving” people, though they may not have caught that point.

Google was similarly embroiled in controversy over location tracking after it was discovered that the company captured user location even if location history was turned off. Google subsequently made changes and offered more transparency and user control over user location.

Why we care. As an aside, research has shown that locally relevant ads outperform ads without location. People generally prefer “relevant” ads. The real issue here is trust; and on that question, Facebook is still in the dog house. The company continues to struggle following the post-2016 revelations surrounding Cambridge Analytica and the exploitation of user data by third parties on the platform.

About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes about the connections between digital and offline commerce. He previously held leadership roles at LSA, The Kelsey Group and TechTV. Follow him Twitter or find him on LinkedIn.

Facebook rolls out updates to its App Dashboard, giving developers more control over app permissions

December 19, 2019 • Facebook, rolls

Facebook on Tuesday announced new tools in the App Dashboard to help streamline the app review process for developers. The updates will enable app developers to only request the necessary permissions for apps.

The new tools will also help Facebook better understand how developers are using and accessing its platform, the company said. With the updates, developers are able to request access to only the required permissions and information from the platform. These updates include:

More clarity around permissions. In the app review process, Facebook has made it easier for developers to understand which permissions they need with a new tool that sees beyond API calls and commonly used endpoints.

Remove unwanted permissions. Currently, Facebook notifies developers with messages about the permissions requested, along with the action needed by the developer. With the new feature, developers are able to remove permission access from the dashboard and will no longer receive messages related to it.

View App Review requests. Facebook has launched a new page where developers can access past permission requests made in App Review. This information gives teams insight into what permissions have been requested before and improves submissions moving forward.

Why we care. The new updates will enable developers to only access the permissions that they need, marking another step in Facebook’s efforts to create a more privacy-focused ecosystem for users in the wake of heightened scrutiny following years of playing it fast and loose with user data in its app ecosystem. The tools will streamline the app review process and help protect sensitive data in the long run, but it’s likely it will also require developers to jump through a few extra hoops at first. Facebook said it plans to continue releasing new features to make the process simpler.

About The Author

Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.

Facebook rolls out ad reporting updates for cross-account, custom metric measurement

December 10, 2019 • Facebook, rolls

Amid the holiday campaign season, Facebook has introduced updates to its reporting tools to help advertisers better measure ad performance across accounts, channels, and devices. These updates include a new cross-account reporting feature and a custom metric building tool.

The two new reporting features are designed to give advertisers more insight on cross-channel and cross-device measurement – especially crucial during the holiday season.

Users can access these new features from the dropdown in the Ads Manager dashboard:

Cross-account reporting. A reporting dashboard can display metrics across multiple ad accounts. According to Facebook, “this reporting surface serves as a one-stop-shop for a clear, concise report on your business’ performance and will allow you to save time that was previously spent manually building reports.”

This dashboard can show de-duplicated reach (unique people reached across accounts and campaigns) to help better express the types of audiences targeted. Additionally, advertisers will be able to see and analyze unique reach across accounts – a feature that isn’t available on exported reports.

Here’s how it looks:

Custom metrics. The platform has also added a custom metric building feature (pictured below), which allows advertisers to formulate and save custom metrics. They can be applied to reports directly within the Ads Reporting manager, eliminating the need to export data for metric-based analysis. Advertisers can apply custom metrics to cross-account reports.

Why we should care. The cross-account reporting feature will be most useful for enterprise-level advertisers running multiple campaigns across various accounts. These reports show an aggregated view of all ad accounts, giving advertisers the ability to quickly measure performance without having to pull reports for each account. The single-view dashboard gives businesses and advertisers a more streamlined way to reference performance more holistically across different ad accounts.

The custom metrics tool, on the other hand, can be used by both small businesses and enterprise-level advertisers to build reports based on the metrics that best align with the company’s goals. The tool provides a more efficient alternative to manually exporting and analyzing reports, and will likely save a significant amount of time and effort while delivering insights tailored to your objectives.

About The Author

Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.

Facebook tests tool that lets users transfer photos to Google and other platforms

December 3, 2019 • Facebook, Tests

Facebook is testing a new tool that gives users the ability to move photos and videos between Facebook and other platforms, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The test is initially rolling out with support for Google Photos, with other platforms to follow in the coming months

The move is part of the Data Transfer Project, a joint initiative among Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft aimed at making it easier to transfer data between online services.

Why we should care

The initiative underscores Facebook’s effort to give users more data portability, but brands can benefit from this change, too. For social marketers, the new tool will be a welcome convenience with the ability to bulk transfer media, rather than manually saving and re-uploading assets one-by-one.

Many smaller businesses use the Facebook Photos feature as a media storage hub, much like a free DAM. Those teams, in particular, will be able to take advantage of the tool to cut down on the time and effort it takes to move assets between platforms. Additionally, the bulk transfer tool could provide a more user-friendly way to organize and archive media between channels with far less effort.

More on the news

The tool will first be available to users in Ireland and will be refined based on user feedback, with plans to roll out globally in the first half of 2020.
With privacy top-of-mind, Facebook said the media transfer process will use encryption and password authorization before a transfer can take place.

About The Author

Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.

Pro Tip: Leaning into Facebook’s automation for the 2019 holiday season

November 27, 2019 • Facebook

After much bluster and a snowy Halloween (for some of us, at least!) Holiday 2019 is here, and I’m sure that many of you are working through strategies to maximize your campaign performance while also maintaining your sanity. To that end, I’d like to remind you of a few features available within Facebook Ads Manager: Dynamic Creative Optimization, Campaign Budget Optimization and Automated Rules.

Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) is part of Facebook’s “Power 5,” which collectively are optimization features that allow advertisers to scale growth efficiently. Implementing DCO during this busy season means that you can continue to test into messaging and creative concepts while ensuring stable performance by keeping your hero creatives/messaging enabled. If you would like to test into DCO right now, a few things that you can think about to develop your creative tests are:

What type of promo messaging do my customers like to see? Percentage discounts? Monetary discounts?
Does holiday-specific creative convert my customers best? How does that stack up compared to non-holiday creative this time of the year?

Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) is also a “Power 5” optimization feature, which allows you to allocate budget to top-performing ad sets within your campaign dynamically. While a controversial feature (some advertisers have reported drops in conversion volume and increased costs after implementing CBO), I’ve found that opting into this optimization feature can deliver some pretty fantastic results for clients. The key when turning the key on CBO is to:

Keep your daily budget high enough so that your ad sets can get out of the learning phase within the seven-day optimization window
Group “like” audiences together – this means keeping lookalikes within one campaign, interests within another campaign, etc.

Automated Rules have been available within the platform for some time, but I’m still surprised by the relatively few advertisers who use this tool regularly. As a refresher, automated rules can “automatically check your campaigns, ad sets and ads, and then update or notify you of any changes. In addition to these automatic checks and notifications, the tool will also take the necessary actions for you.”

As a hand’s on advertiser, this means that you can create a series of rules to ensure that when you’re not online, your campaigns are still at optimum performance and delivering the right message to the right user. Ways that you can implement these rules include:

Enabling and pausing time-sensitive promotions
Increasing/decreasing budgets based on ROAS/CTR/CPA
Pausing ads based on performance
Adjust audience bids during high-demand times

In short, embracing automation will be key to maximizing Q4 performance, which will give you more time for both 2020 strategic planning, and eggnog with the family by the fire. Happy Holidays!

More about retail for the winter holidays

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Zenia is an account lead for 3Q Digital, where she develops strategy and manages paid media for clients in a wide range of verticals. While she is knowledgeable in all aspects of digital marketing, her passion is in paid social marketing. She has contributed to Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, and Marin, and has spoken at Janes of Digital, SMX Advanced and SMX East.

Facebook considers political ad limits after Twitter and Google take action

November 27, 2019 • Facebook

Facebook has encountered serious backlash for the way it’s chosen to go about dealing with political ads – in some cases allowing ones that purposefully told blatant lies. Zuckerberg has fallen back on the ‘free speech’ argument, implying it’s not the company’s role to dictate which ads run on the platform. Many aren’t buying it.

Since recent attacks on Facebook, Snapchat has verified it will fact-checks ads while Google imposed strict limits on ad targeting, and Twitter banned political ads altogether.

Now it appears Facebook is finally relenting. Well, a little bit anyway. According to a Wall Street Journal report, sources within the company say the social network is considering increasing the minimum ad target size from just 100 people to a few thousand.

This may not seem like much, but it could have a significant effect on how precisely ads can target specific demographics, theoretically limiting their effectiveness. The company is reportedly seeking feedback from major Republican and Democratic ad buyers about the new minimum, as well as other ways to change its policy. Unsurprisingly, the discussions picked up after Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress in October.

When asked for comment, a Facebook spokesperson simply told the WSJ “as we’ve said, we are looking at different ways we might refine our approach to political ads.” With the 2020 primaries coming up in a few months, that refinement can’t come soon enough.

Facebook to pull location from ad set when creating new Lookalike audiences

November 22, 2019 • Facebook, Location

Facebook is testing the removal of the location field that advertisers use to create Lookealike audiences – Facebook’s tool for reaching new audiences based on how they compare to existing customers. In the test, Lookalike audiences use locations from ad sets – eliminating one extra step in the targeting setup process.

The update, which appears to still be either in beta or rolling out, was spotted by Duane Brown, who heads digital agency Take Some Risk, this week.

What to know about the update. When creating new lookalike lists, advertisers will see a notification stating that lookalike audiences now use the locations from your ad sets. Facebook will make copies of existing lookalikes with the locations removed to use in future campaigns. Active campaigns with previously created lookalike audiences will continue to run as normal.

Lookalike audiences ad set locations test in Facebook — A notice about the feature spotted by Duane Brown in Facebook Ads Manager.

Why we should care. For brands that target audiences across multiple geographic locations, inputting locations to build a lookalike audience can be a time-consuming and duplicative effort. Pulling location data from ad sets can help advertisers speed up the Lookalike setup process and reduce the potential of missing a key target location.

About The Author

Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.

Facebook rolls out new brand safety tools for publishers, creators and advertisers

November 21, 2019 • Facebook, rolls

Following waves of criticism for its political ad policies, Facebook has launched a new set of tools designed to bring transparency and brand safety to the forefront. These include:

Streamlining access to controls. Now, in Business Manager and Ads Manager, advertisers will be able to create blocklists, obtain delivery reports, and set inventory filters at the account-level, rather than applying it one campaign at a time.

Improved delivery reports. The more robust reports allow advertisers to search by account ID or publisher without having to download it. Facebook said it will soon be adding content-level information to the delivery report.

New brand safety partner. Contextual data company Zefr is Facebook’s newest safety partner, joining alongside the ranks of DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, and OpenSlate to help ensure the brand safety controls and tools can continue to serve advertisers’ needs.

Dynamic content sets. Facebook is testing in-stream placements that use a content-level white listing tool for advertisers working with Integral Ad Science, OpenSlate, and Zefr. This initial test allows brands to routinely update and adjust the videos available to advertisers based on what works best for the brand.

Publisher White Lists. The company said it’s also testing white lists for advertisers in the Audience Network and with in-stream ads, allowing advertisers to white-list certain publishers for ad placement. Facebook said it plans to roll out the tool more broadly next year.

Why we should care. Facebook has generated concern about its decision not to fact-check political ads as well as the content and news sources that will be featured in the dedicated news section it is testing. The new set of brand safety tools are an attempt give advertisers added controls over how, where, and in what publisher inventory their ads may appear in in-stream and Instant Articles on Facebook or via the Audience Network. These controls add to earlier brand safety initiatives.

About The Author

Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.

Facebook releases several ad personalization capabilities

November 16, 2019 • Facebook, releases

Facebook is bringing more machine learning-driven capabilities to its ads platform to improve personalization, the company announced this week.

Dynamic formats and ad creative for Dynamic Ads. Advertisers will now be able to automatically serve different ad formats to audiences based on the machine learning model’s prediction of a user’s format preference. Campaign managers can access this capability from the Facebook Dynamic Ad unit when creating ads for the catalog sales, traffic and conversions objectives in Ads Manager or the API.

“The dynamic formats and ad creative solution aims to meet people where they are in the customer journey by delivering a personalized version of the ad to everyone who sees it,” Facebook said.

Multiple text optimization in single-media ads. As we reported last month, Facebook has also rolled out a responsive ad feature that allows advertisers to input multiple text options for the primary text, headline and description fields when building single-media ads for traffic, app installs, and conversions objectives. Facebook said it uses this data to optimize for delivery and performance using variations of the text options provided, based on individual preferences identified by its machine learning models.

Auto-translated languages for single-media ads. In Ads Manager, advertisers can now add different languages to be auto-translated for international audiences. By automatically producing translations for key languages, this feature can help speed up the campaign setup process while still giving advertisers control over the review process.

Why we should care. For smaller organizations, creating highly personalized content can be challenging if time and resources are limited. By leveraging machine learning to dynamically select ad formats, creative, and text on the ad impression-level, advertisers can more efficiently deliver campaigns that reach the right audience, at the right time, with less effort.

More on the news. Facebook machine learning blends data from its platform with target audience insights in order to predict which people might be most receptive to a brand’s message. As people take different actions on and off Facebook, the company explained, intent signals are created to help achieve a more one-to-one experience for consumers served with both organic and paid content. Facebook said it’s committed to its investment in prediction models that can help build stronger business outcomes and better digital experiences for customers.

In a test of 12 e-commerce and retail advertisers, Facebook reported that dynamic formats and dynamic ad creative outperformed carousel-only ads in driving lift across content views, add-to-cart, purchases, and sales. Facebook said the showed an average of 34% improvement in incremental ROAS, 10% improvement in lift and 6% lower cost per incremental purchase, compared to carousel-only ads.

About The Author

Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.