Dear Client: Yes, performance is down.

Lately I’ve been hearing from people that it’s hard to describe all the changes and state of the paid social advertising landscape to clients. We share this challenge with you. So, to help out, here’s an email I recently wrote to a client giving them a high level state-of-the-state. We hope you find it useful. If you do, shoot us a note at andrew@foxwelldigital.com.

Cheers,

Andrew

Dear Client,

I know that we’ve had a lot of fun together, think of all that growth we’ve driven! But man, lately things have been tough. Or they look tough. It’s a bit of both, really, and honestly, I know it’s hard to trust us, trust Facebook, or at this point, trust anything anyone is saying about performance online. There’s many factors at play and in this note, it’s my goal to outline what some of those factors are and what we’re doing about them.

Facebook has shifted how they measure the success of our ads.

It used to be measured in a 28-day click/1-day view window, and now it’s a 7-day click / 1-day view. Soon, it’ll only be a 7 day click (no view) and for those that “opt-out” of tracking from Facebook due to iOS14, it’ll be only a 1-day click. And, we recently learned we’ll have to optimize only for 1-day click if we want to see any data from those that have opted out. This obviously creates issues in our optimization process, since we’ll have less data to go off of within Facebook ads manager. Furthermore, higher priced products that we have, that take longer for someone to consider and then purchase, will almost not be measured by Facebook ads manager reporting any more. This creates a scenario where we must be incredibly patient. We have to wait 3 to 7 days at least before really making major changes. However, this further creates issues because….

Facebook is changing their ads optimization process.

Due to less data coming in from Apple to Facebook, shorter reporting windows, and frankly, Facebook breaking stuff all the time within their own internal platform, the effectiveness of Facebook ads will forever be changed. If they have less data on who purchases or adds to cart, then that data being lost will also take away the power of the ad algorithm and optimization that makes Facebook so great. If these two things weren’t enough, on top of it….

Facebook’s Ads Manager and Reporting Products Break Constantly

It’s almost a joke in media buyer communities how much things break. And by break, I mean, literally they stop working. There are times when outages will last for a few hours and we can do absolutely nothing. There are times that things seem fine, but it turns out later they aren’t. More specifically, Facebook seems to be reworking their internal technology quite a bit around these changes, so delays and numbers looking wrong is commonplace. So what are we doing about this?

We’re Optimizing Slower and Looking at More Signals

Our process of optimization has changed. We’ve gone from ads manager being the main place we look at to using ads manager as a part of the larger process of informing the overall picture. We’re looking at blended numbers, our proprietary custom metrics from Facebook like LPV/PUR or uATC/PUR or LPV/uATC and that guides us into looking at overall blended rise or fall of revenue. Then we look weekly at Google Analytics along with Post Purchase surveys to determine what to turn up or down. Actually, we’re working on a new course about optimization now that you’ll no doubt want to pick up when it’s ready.

So, is this perfect? No. Is it all going to hell? No.

There’s a lot of reasons to be optimistic about Facebook. Things like Facebook Shops, Reels, and continued innovation on A/R alongside integrations with Shopify will continue to benefit us. You can bet we’re on top of any idea we hear of along with testing every single thing we can. Thanks for trusting us as your ad buyers.