Europe Deals Meta A Huge Blow Over The Weekend

Europe Deals Meta A Huge Blow Over The Weekend

The European regulatory commission has restricted the data that Facebook can use for its lucrative advertising business.

Starting yesterday, no longer will clients of Facebook ads possess the direct marketing data. Instead of creating an advertisement for a niche group. Advertisers will have to make do with much more general and less related groups. As a result, cost per landing page views will skyrocket. At Rebellion Research, some of our sponsored articles on Machine Learning saw a 5x increase in cost per delivery.

So we had to immediately scale back our promotional activities on Facebook. In addition, almost everyone we have spoken with has done the same.

When faced with uncertainty ahead, the natural human reaction calls for regrouping. Which is what we shall do and every other Facebook advertiser. As a result, Facebook will see a massive drop in advertising revenue.

Where The Coca-Cola Company could spend 5 cents on a click now can be as much as $5-8 per click, insane jumps in cost per click in some cases. In the “Better” cases advertisers are only seeing their cost jump 3-8x. There is just a lot less data available. Once you could write an article on the Pakistani Air Force and market it to just people interested in the Pakistani Air Force. Now you can choose Pakistan as a geography and Aviation as an interest. So instead of 500k extremely curious eyeballs, you now have 70m who mostly just want to book a spring break trip for cheap. Hence their “interest” in aviation.

Here is the announcement from Facebook/Meta on their site:

Updates to Detailed Targeting | Meta Business Help Center (facebook.com)

Taken from Meta:

“Updates to Detailed Targeting

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Starting Jan 19, 2022, we’re removing some Detailed Targeting options because they are either not widely used, they may be redundant with others or too granular, or because they relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as targeting options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation.

Existing ad sets with impacted targeting options will continue to run until Mar 17, 2022, but may require you to update your targeting selections. After this date, impacted ad sets may be paused to prevent misdelivery, if the impacted targeting options are used for exclusion purposes. Impacted targeting options will automatically be removed if they are being used for inclusion purposes. We will provide alternative targeting recommendations within Ads Manager when possible.

Alternative Targeting products to reach your audiences

Beyond the remaining Detailed Targeting options, you can still use other available targeting products such as:

• Broad targeting, which includes gender, age and location. Targeting broadly essentially means that you’re mostly relying on our delivery system to find the best people to show your ad to. This approach can lead to us finding potential customers you never would’ve known about otherwise.
• Custom Audiences, which lets you find your existing audiences among people who are on Facebook. You can use sources like customer lists, website or app traffic, or engagement on Facebook, to create Custom Audiences of people who already know your business.
• Lookalike audiences, which are created from an existing audience, and can help optimize audience reach.
• Lookalike expansion, which will be automatically applied if you leverage lookalike audiences and optimize for conversions, value or app events using the conversions objective. You control the audience used to create the lookalike audience. However, we may deliver ads beyond the selected 1-10% lookalike range. We do this if our system predicts it’s likely to improve performance.
• Targeting expansion, which uses advertisers’ Detailed Targeting inputs as a guide to delivery. We may deliver ads beyond your Detailed Targeting selections if our system predicts it’s likely to improve performance. Targeting Expansion is available for opt-in on all objectives, except Brand Awareness and Reach.

Note: Starting Jan 19, 2022, you can view your Ads Manager account to see your affected campaigns. Impacted ad sets and targeting options may no longer be available for new campaigns.

Update your ad set

To review and edit your affected ad sets, you can take the following actions:

1. Open Ads Manager.
2. Select See Affected Ad Sets at the top right. If your ad sets need to be updated, you’ll see a notification that we’re removing some detailed targeting options.
3. Hover over your affected ad sets to make edits.
4. From within your ad set, go to the Audience section and replace or remove the affected options.
5. To update your ad set targeting, select the Remove Highlighted Options button at the top to update your targeting. Publish the changes.

Note: In some instances, you may be prompted to Confirm and Publish Edits, which automatically removes the affected targeting.

When possible, we’ll provide suggested alternative targeting options. To use a suggested alternative, hover over the flagged option and select the Replace button.”

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Europe Deals Meta A Huge Blow Over The Weekend