Dear Meta: An Open Letter From Direct Response Advertisers
Dear Facebook, err, I mean, Meta. Wait, can I still call you Facebook?
For years you helped us as advertisers build brands and agencies, but lately it feels like you don’t care at all. I understand that you think the Metaverse is great, and look, if you end up convincing folks to live primarily in an alternate universe, that’s fantastic news for you. But that doesn’t help businesses and marketers now. We need your help ASAP.
I run a membership of 300+ social advertisers who’ve spent billions on your platform. We are a diverse group of business/agency owners, consultants, freelancers, and creatives spanning various industries and verticals from dozens of countries around the world. In short, I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the FB/IG ads world. And it’s not pretty.
We’re mainly a group of direct-response advertisers - meaning we spend a dollar and need to make that dollar back within a reasonable timeframe. It’s important to note this group is very different from app-advertisers and those who are only running reach campaigns, or driving traffic. We’re a different breed because we need to prove sales and revenue.
We want this relationship to work. To that end, here are a few suggestions that can correct various issues and improve communication over the coming year and beyond. These suggestions come from a place of love and in the spirit of collaboration.
Create agency and brand councils of truly diverse businesses, not just the biggest spenders, and really LISTEN.
We’re the tactical advertisers clicking the buttons and pulling the levers. Why can’t we speak to you directly? Facilitate this conversation and make it public. Heck, have your ads executives go on a listening tour and just hear our concerns and take our feedback seriously. We are your biggest assets. Just by listening and showing action on challenges, possible improvements, and how we think you could work better for SMBs and agencies would go a long way to repairing our relationship.
These councils shouldn't just be made up of folks who hold the biggest purse strings. We understand that you have to cater to the CMO's of giant brands and agencies, but they're not the ones in the weeds like we are. They don’t use the tools; they very rarely get their hands dirty.
Fess up to technical errors (and their severity) quickly.
When ads platform errors occur, an advertiser normally checks the Foxwell Founders membership group discussion and/or Twitter and just tries to see what support or that person’s Meta rep says. Then if you just so happen to have two hours wide open you can sit on support chat and explain the error to someone who literally doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do, who says they’ll follow up which they do sometimes 3-21 days later. It's often then followed up by someone else who doesn't understand, doesn't believe us, and we have to explain the situation all over again. This can repeat infinitely. Good times!
We really appreciate the status dashboard, but it’s completely worthless if it’s delayed and/or not reporting the actual errors taking place. You can start by simply listing any technical errors, what products they’re affecting, and if you’re working on them today, this month, or this century.
For example, this past week we had an issue with events over reporting and not properly de-duplicating. It took you more than a week to admit there was even an issue while billions of online spend flowed blindly (and possibly increased due to advertisers perceiving this issue as an improvement of performance). Frankly, in any other industry this would be seen as outright fraud.
Above all, it should be much, much easier to report bugs without going through useless chat support or waiting on reps to get back to us. We just want to feel less alone.
Have us train your people, or hire people who actually run ads. Wild, right?
Some of us are lucky enough to have reps who care and actually get it. But let me tell you these reps are legit diamonds in the rough.
Here’s what we typically encounter:
Advertisers get a dozen calls from a Facebook “marketing expert” who suggests a traffic objective or “moving for something up the funnel” (Which is something we've already tested and know that it actually hurts overall efficiency). Every single time one of these people suggest something that doesn’t work it lowers overall credibility and trust among advertisers.
A new rep every few months who hasn’t ever used the platform and has a goal internally of product adoption - i.e. Facebook Shops.
What if as part of the agency and brand councils, we also were required to share a list of what was “working right now” and then explained these tactics to your support people? And hey since you’re a gazillion dollar company, pay us for our time when we give you advice because we’re helping you be better. It’s a great investment! There's no reason why I should be spending my clients’ money and then my personal time working on Meta bugs. That time spent doesn't generate revenue for us but we're begrudgingly helping you fix your own platform problems, simply because no one else is leading the way on this issue.
Fix Facebook and Instagram Shops.
This is an absolutely huge issue. Advertisers need accurate engagement and audience metrics for targeting, and ecommerce business owners need an actual online shop that can compliment their site. The fact that Shops is built on dynamic ads is a lovely idea but here’s the honest truth: without cache data, dynamic product ads (or ads for broad match on prospecting) don’t work nearly as well as they used to. Plus setting up a product catalog isn’t easy even for the most advanced advertiser. If you developed Shops into a more viable, engaging, and useful tool for advertisers and users alike, it would be a win all around.
There's also an education gap for customers. We've heavily invested in our landing pages and funnels because we know that an ad driving directly to a product page isn't always the optimal customer experience. We know that a landing page can be the connection point between an ad and the product page that gives the customer the information that fuels their action. All advertisers, shops, and products are different. J. Crew might be able to sell a shirt quickly without explanation based on how it looks and what customers generally understand about shirts and the price they see, but many products, particularly newer/innovative products require much more education, information, and motivation. Different tools for different jobs.
We know that you've provided millions of dollars in ad credits to businesses encouraging them to try Shops, and we know that many (if not most) have failed to beat their non-Shop ads counterparts and yet you haven't listened or learned that users need more information and context to buy. It's not just about shortening the journey to checkout, it's about improving it.
Build a real attribution tool and tell us the roadmap.
We know you have it in you. Facebook Attribution and Facebook Analytics were incredibly useful and underutilized, so please take that energy and harness it into a new attribution solution that takes data from multiple accounts and gives us clearer answers (federated learnings), combine that with CAPI and maybe a payment solution and boom – you have begun to win our hearts back. So much of the reporting we get nowadays is so delayed and so over/under reported, we have no idea which levers to turn up or down.
Bonus points if you tell us the roadmap so we can know when it’s coming and what to expect.
In Closing
It's been a difficult and unusual time for both Meta and advertisers: a global pandemic, Apple's iOS changes, shrinking DAU on Meta, and the boom of TikTok. If we want to succeed, we need to work together more than ever before.
This relationship is symbiotic. We depend on you and you depend on us.
Many of us advertisers want to help you. Will you let us?
To fellow advertisers reading this, please:
Share this letter with your Meta partner if you have one.
Be vocal to Meta. File bugs with Meta when you catch them. We've seen that we cannot trust that "someone else" will. Meta depends on the quantity of reports to determine the existence and importance of an issue.
To Meta employees reading this, please:
Share this letter with your coworkers and managers.
Try buying some ads yourself. Use your own platform to better understand how it works. Don't just spend money for the sake of it, make ads that drive users to take actions from your ads. Maybe help a local business or nonprofit organization. Learn how difficult it is to run ads well.
Listen to your advertisers when they have feedback and if they don't have any, ask them directly for it.
Think about the last time you asked someone "how can I/we do better?" Start asking that question more internally and externally, and really listen to the answers. (If you work directly with advertisers, this should be your main job, not just getting us to spend more!)
Take time to fix things that are broken.
Give us your feedback, tell us what we got wrong, and tell us how we can help you.
Facebook, Meta, whatever you want us to call you, consider this letter a friendly poke. Poke us back so we know you're still there.
Thank you,
Andrew Foxwell with Gracie Foxwell, Barry Hott, Shane Cicero, Courtney Alexander, and many other direct response advertisers around the globe