Meta

Meta place restrictions on customer lists in the US

Meta is placing tighter restrictions on customer lists relating to housing, employment, financial products and services.

According to Meta, ‘Starting January 2025, there will be restrictions on customer list custom audiences for housing, employment, and financial products and services (including credit) campaigns for advertisers based in the US or reaching audiences in the US. These changes are designed to help you follow Meta Advertising Standards.’

‘Ad accounts within the same business portfolio that share customer list custom audiences should make sure that all people with permissions to manage ad campaigns have the same business email domain. If the domains don’t match, then those shared customer lists will be unavailable for ads about housing, employment, and financial products and services.’

From January 2025, any new campaigns not following the new restrictions may not be able to be published.

From March 2025, any existing campaigns not following the new restrictions may be paused.

Expert opinion

Jenny Byrne, paid social manager at Embryo

"With Meta's ever evolving changes to not only the ad platform but more specifically it's targeting, we have to be more savvy as advertisers in ensuring we can still serve ads to the most efficient and most relevant audiences. The change in US targeting coming in 2025, only further enhances the relevancy of audiences by adding layers of security and restrictions of which we must adhere to, protecting both the user as the receiver of the ad and the advertiser themselves too. Advertisers will now need to ensure their internal processes for using custom audience data is streamlined, but also adjust their approach to targeting audiences within the limitations by leaning on elements of advertising like broad audiences and specific creative, lookalikes and other targeting approaches."

Meta adds a new ‘in-app ad impressions’ conversion event

‘You can now optimize App campaigns to maximize the value of in-app ad impressions.’ 

You can select ‘in-app ad impressions’ as the conversion event when you use ‘Maximise value of conversions’ as the app promotion goal.

According to Meta, ‘This metric counts impressions on ads from a third-party platform that are visible within your mobile app and are attributed to your Meta ads based on information received from your Facebook SDK.’

The metric related to this will be ‘Cost per 1000 in-app ad impressions’- this is calculated similar to regular impressions by taking the total amount spent on an ad campaign, divided by in-app ad impressions, multiplied by 1000%. 

This update will allow marketers a more granular view of in-app activity.

Meta introduces ‘quick view’ reporting

Meta have introduced ‘quick view’ reporting, giving marketers an easier way to share a snapshot of their reports with colleagues and clients. 

According to Swipe Insight, ‘You can now share Quick Views in Meta Ads Reporting. When creating a Quick View, you can edit its settings and share it with others who have access to your ad account, allowing them to save and manage the view as well.’

The Quick View config panel enables you to edit and share the following:

• View Name
• View Description
• Columns for ads reporting
• Sorting
• Attribution settings
• Breakdowns
• Selected Filters

‘To share a view, use the new create/edit/share buttons located at the top right of Ads Manager. By clicking to share, you can copy a link to send to clients or colleagues, who can then save a copy of the view on their end.’

This will allow for more collaboration on accounts, giving everyone an easy way to clearly and quickly look at data.

Meta introduces new AI tool ‘Andromeda’

Meta is stepping up its AI offerings by introducing a new tool called ‘Andromeda’.

Meta is already heavily pushing AI, with features such as Advantage+ campaigns, Advantage budgets etc…but the new feature will level this up and allow for more personalisation of targeting.

The new tool is ‘a machine learning system for ad recommendations, aimed to improve the value of ads for both advertisers and users. This means that it should be able to deliver ‘more personalized’ ads to viewers and to maximize the return on ad spend for advertisers.’

According to Meta, “Andromeda significantly enhances Meta’s ads system by enabling the integration of AI that optimizes and improves personalization capabilities at the retrieval stage and improves return on ad spend. Its deployment across Instagram and Facebook applications has achieved +6% recall improvement to the retrieval system, delivering +8% ads quality improvement on selected segments.”

This new update aims to drive efficiency of ads and increase ROAS for brands.

Meta: Traffic campaigns can now direct users to your Facebook Page

An exciting update for Meta means that advertisers can send traffic directly to their Facebook Page. This was only previously available for Instagram profiles and is only available for Traffic campaigns.

If you’re an advertiser looking to increase traffic to your Facebook Page, this new update allows you to run ads that optimise towards maximising the number of Facebook Page visits. You will also have the option to send traffic to your Instagram profile or Facebook Page – or both!

This update will be useful for marketers looking to drive more traffic to their Facebook Page and could potentially result in an increased number of followers. It’s also a great way to build a pool of users you may want to retarget at a later date. 

Here’s how to select the option:

1. Create a Traffic campaign
2. At the ad set level, select Instagram or Facebook as the ‘Conversion location’
3. Select your chosen Instagram and/or Facebook page
4. At the ad level, you can create a single image, video or carousel ad
5. The CTA button will be automatically selected as ‘Visit Page’ and will appear next to the headline of your ad

Meta: Instagram Reels now optimised for video view campaigns

Meta has expanded its video advertising options, enabling Instagram Reel placements to be optimised for video views. Marketers can now select the ‘Maximise 2-second continuous video plays’ performance goal and select Instagram Reels as a placement option. This was previously limited to Instagram Stories and Facebook Reels when optimising for video views.

Here’s a breakdown of what advertisers can now utilise:

• Instagram Reels placement
• 2-second continuous video play optimisation
• Integrated performance tracking
• Cross-platform video campaign management

This update proves Meta is looking to enhance its video advertising options while providing more precise optimisation options for advertisers. With this update, the option to ‘Maximise ThruPlays views’ as a performance goal for Instagram Reels would be the perfect follow-up.

Frequency controls added to Awareness campaigns on Meta

Meta has introduced an update that provides marketers with a new way to manage frequency when running brand awareness campaigns.

When using the Awareness objective with a performance goal of ‘Reach’ or ‘ThruPlay’, you may see a new section for Frequency Controls. There will be an option here for Target Frequency.

The ‘Reach and Frequency’ or ‘Reservation’ buying types have been here for more than a year, but it’s now available on Awareness campaigns when using the ‘Auction’ buying type.

Before this update, there was only the option for a Frequency Cap–which has been available since 2016–and was used to set a maximum number of times you want to reach people. It will still be available in the Awareness campaign.

Target Frequency–the new update–allows you to set an average number of times you will reach people, meaning you can still go over that number for some users.

Expert Opinion

Harriet Tuite- Head of Paid Social, Embryo

"We've never had frequency controls for awareness or engagement campaigns, so it's an interesting development for Meta to release. This could be useful for engagement or reach campaigns where you specifically want to reach a wider audience and not just those that are highly engaged, however with the restriction that your campaign has to be using lifetime budgets it limits the options quite a lot. Most campaigns run on daily budgets - so I'll be interested to see how many advertisers actually start using this new feature!'"

If you still can’t see this update, it will be rolling out to you soon.

Meta to offer ‘less personalised’ ads option for free in the EU

Meta has announced that it is making changes to its ad-free platform options in the EU due to further demand from regulators that their current offering doesn’t go far enough to comply with GDPR and the DMA. 

Meta announced their ad-free subscription offerings last year in order to combat the complaints, however, they have this week announced that they will be halving the cost of this subscription upon request.

Perhaps the biggest update for advertisers within the EU is the new introduction of a ‘less personalised’ options for users. Over the coming weeks, EU Meta users will be asked whether they would like to opt out of their current personalised ad experience and move to a ‘less personalised’ option that uses less personal data. 

Meta is still emphasising that they will be promoting the personalised option heavily, as ad revenue is the backbone of their business and without functioning ad targeting this all goes out the window.

We are yet to see how many users adopt this new feature, however, it’ll be interesting to see if we see increased costs and lower engagement as advertisers, with ads potentially now reaching people who are not in the target market. 

Advertisers – let’s wait and see!

Meta ads new feature: Flexible media

Meta is rolling out a new feature called Flexible Media, and it’s not to be confused with Flexible ads.

When uploading an asset at the ad level in a manual Sales campaign (specifically, a single image or video), you may see a discreet button in the ‘Ad creative’ section. Be warned–it will automatically apply this unless you toggle it off!

It reads…

Here’s how it works in simple terms: Meta takes your existing creative in each placement and depending on where it thinks it will perform best, will automatically decide when to share across other placements.

But in our experience so far, it honestly looks bad, putting story-sized placements in the Instagram feed placement and cutting off text. Not good!

This update is different from Flexible ads, where marketers can upload up to 10 images for an ad, giving Meta permission to choose which image to use based on the user. Flexible Media on the other hand distributes the asset across various ad placements. 

Meta is now including the ‘1-day engaged view’ as default

Meta has introduced a new default attribution setting for conversion campaigns, ‘1-day engaged-view’. Meta’s standard attribution setting is 7-day click, 1-day view. But it may now apply 7-day click, 1-day engaged view (new), 1-day view. 

The engaged-view attribution is designed to improve campaign performance by focusing on users who are likely to convert after engaging with your video for at least 10 seconds or higher (or 97% of the ad if it’s shorter). 

It’s important to be aware that it may influence ad delivery and the conversion results of your campaigns as your ads will be focused on reaching more people who engage with videos than necessarily convert.

If you don’t want to include this new setting, make sure you double-check the attribution settings before launching your meta campaigns. You can find this at the ad set level in the ‘conversions’ section.

Meta launches opportunity scores

Meta has launched a new feature within Ads Manager that shows just how closely you’re working with the platform to keep campaigns, ad sets and ads optimised. 

Meta often makes recommendations in ads manager from budget suggestions to pushing advantage+ and Opportunity Score measures the extent of which an advertiser is applying these recommendations. Ranging from 0 to 100, a higher score is achieved when the advertiser is closest aligning with these suggested best practices. 

Is this another platform gimmick or is it a game-changer for those running ads?

Meta: changes to special ad categories

A change is coming to special ad categories on Meta. According to Meta, in Autumn 2024, a new special ad category “Financial products and services” will be introduced, replacing the previous credit ads category.

Advertising promoting financial products and services will be able to select this option during campaign creation like other special ad categories. When selecting this, they will have access to a limited set of audience selection tools and will not be able to refine by age or gender. Lookalike audiences will not be permitted and many detailed targeting options will be unavailable.

Examples of financial products and services ads included in this category are:

• Insurance
• Bank accounts
• Investment services
• Payment services

Meta tests option to turn off comments on ads

Meta has announced they’re testing the option to turn off comments on their ads. This new filter will give marketers more control over ads, as they will be able to turn off comments on all Facebook and Instagram feed ads via the ad set.

With the option to set comments as Public or No one, this provides marketers with more control over their advertising efforts. If a brand uses particularly sensitive content or is experiencing a high amount of spam via their comments, it’s good that Meta is introducing an optional feature.

However, there may be some downsides to it. With users more interested in authentic content than ever, advertisers opting to turn off their comments may cause more harm than good. While some industries may celebrate this new feature, consumers may be a tad cautious of brands who choose to turn off their comments. Both negative and positive comments can be very useful to brands. Negative comments highlight areas for improvement and positive comments are fantastic social proof. 

New platform announcements following Meta Connect 2024 conference

At Meta’s annual conference, they announced lots of new features, mainly surrounding AI.

A lot was announced including new hardware: Meta Quest 3S and Ray-Ban Meta glasses, as well as updates to Metaverse avatars. However, the primary focus was on AI developments and how Meta plans to integrate them.

Here’s a breakdown of some key AI features announced at Meta Connect 2024:

• Meta is testing an AI translation tool to break down language barriers by dubbing and lip-syncing Reels’ audio into other languages. It will mimic the speaker’s voice in another language, syncing their lips to match.
• Meta plans to expand its chatbot feature across Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. You can speak to Meta and it will reply; even featuring recognisable celebrity voices like John Cena and Judi Dench.
• Meta is expanding AI solutions to help businesses improve customer service and commerce. These business AIs can answer questions, discuss products, and even finalise purchases – attempting to offer seamless customer engagement.

Cross-posting is now available across Meta platforms to Threads

In August 2023, Meta announced users will be able to cross-post across both Instagram and Facebook to Threads – the option to do this can be found within your Facebook and IG composer settings. This change aims to help creators amplify updates across all three apps at once.

Meta had been testing this feature over the past few months but now it’s available for all users when turned on in settings. A few things to keep in mind, though:

• Reels cannot be cross-posted.
• Facebook videos can’t be cross-posted – only text and link posts.
• When crossposting from Instagram, the caption becomes text for the Threads post and hashtags are converted into plain text.

The upsides to this update:

• Saves time.
• Followers across multiple platforms will see your latest updates.

The downsides of this update:

• User behaviour is different across platforms, so certain posts may not be ideal for every app. This is why marketers should create unique posts for each channel that align with their brand personality.

Meta introduces new promo code update for Lead Forms

Meta has introduced a new option for lead generation forms that allows advertisers to include Promo Codes as an additional action. These reward or help people after they complete your lead form and is a great opportunity to nurture that lead further.

Previously, the only options for this feature were:

• Go to website
• View file
• Call business

This new option rewards people with a promo code that they can redeem on your website. It’s a really interesting new feature that can turn your leads into conversions, giving them that extra push.

Here’s how to set this option up:

1. Provide the URL link where the offer can be redeemed
2. Add the promo code e.g. ‘DISCOUNT50’
3. You can even edit the call to action to say what you’d like it to e.g. ‘get our discount now’

Once the lead form has been completed by the user, they will see a CTA button prompting them to copy the code and paste it online at checkout. They can easily click a button on the ad to drive them to your website for a seamless conversion journey.

Meta introduces some big campaign optimization updates

Meta announced they were introducing some new features on the platform to help improve advertiser performance and make sure users are increasing the value of every conversion.

These updates are part of Meta’s efforts to improve AI-enabled automation solutions, allowing any business to grow while ensuring every business’ objectives can be customised to achieve success.

To start, Meta will be rolling out a few initial ways for businesses to customise their campaigns by outlining what they value in their advertising efforts.

Defining the conversions businesses value most

Meta will launch a new feature called Conversion Value Rules which will help advertisers express which audiences or conversions they value.

This is what Meta has said on this…

“An advertiser may determine that certain customer segments have 30% higher lifetime value and are willing to pay more to reach these customers. Previously, they would have to segment these customers into a separate campaign, but with this new feature, they can define a higher bid for just these customers without having to create a separate campaign, enabling greater automation and performance.”

Supporting new attribution models

Secondly, Meta plans to introduce an opt-in attribution setting that reports and optimised for incremental conversions. To put it plainly, incremental conversions are ones that Meta does not believe the user would have made without seeing your ad – the purchase would not have been made if they didn’t see your ad.

This new setting is designed to shift ad delivery to focus on driving more incremental conversions, and when Meta tested earlier this year they said advertisers saw an average improvement of more than 20% in incremental conversions.

More powerful analytics integrations

If you know anything about Embryo, you’ll know we’re huge fans of the Messy Middle – the idea that the customer journey to purchase is anything but linear, it’s a lot messier! Meta has acknowledged this in their latest update, saying that it’s common for users to click or interact with several ads from a business across a variety of platforms and publishers before they’ve even considered adding to basket.

It’s common for most businesses to use external analytics tools to evaluate cross-publisher performance. But Meta wants to help advertisers understand what is working and where they see the most value in their advertising efforts. 

Meta will be introducing the ability for advertisers to connect their analytics tools directly to their ad system through a simple API setup. They will start with Google Analytics and Northbeam, but there are plans to expand this to Triple Whale and Adobe soon too.

By sharing analytics tools and incorporating an integrated approach to campaign information, Meta hopes to give advertisers a better understanding of what conversions an advertiser may value across their marketing mix. And over time, Meta’s AI models will be able to use this data to help fine-tune campaign optimisation.

Meta introduces AI chatbots

Meta has introduced 3 updates to chatbots/messaging tools:

1. Meta has introduced chatbots on Messenger that can chat with customers and provide support. It is built with a large language model (LLama 3). The change aims to save businesses money on service costs.

Meta says ‘We’re training AI on the most popular questions businesses receive on Messenger, built with Meta Llama 3, to understand and respond to customer messages about products in engaging and natural ways.’

A case study on the business ‘White Coat Manila’ showed this feature saved at least 20% of customer support costs.

Customers will still have the option to speak to a human and businesses can manually enter the conversation at any time.

2. Paid marketing messages are now on Messenger as well as WhatsApp for select advertisers. Advertisers with access to the feature can send paid marketing messages to opted-in customers.

3. Introduction of Threads API. According to Meta the supported features include:

• The ability to authenticate, publish posts, and fetch their own content via the API.
• Management capabilities so businesses and creators can retrieve and engage with replies to their posts, set reply controls and hide or unhide specific replies.
• Media and account-level insights, such as the number of views, likes and replies

Meta says their continuous investments and updates to AI features have helped increase average ROAS for advertisers by 12% since 2022.

Meta introduces ads for Instagram broadcast channels

Meta has introduced a new update that allows users to run ads to grow their Instagram Broadcast Channels.

If you’re unsure what Broadcast Channels are, they were released in September 2023 and are a way for creators and brands to share messages like announcements, content and any other information with others on Instagram. These channels are found in the direct messages tab on Instagram and are available to anyone. As Instagram put it…

“Anyone that joins your channel will be able to react and reply to messages you send or vote in polls you create in the channel, but they will not be able to send messages. Since your broadcast channels are public, they are discoverable by anyone on Instagram.”

To invite members to your broadcast channel, it’s simple. When you send the first message all of your followers will receive a notification inviting them to the channel. The other ways to invite people include:

• Sharing an invite link to your channel
• Adding the channel to your stories
• Sharing a message from the channel to a story
• Sharing a QR code for the channel

With that in mind, Meta recently launched an update that allows users to run ads to grow their Broadcast Channels. This option will allow marketers to increase awareness and membership while adding to their community.

Here’s how to set up an ad for Instagram Broadcast Channels:

1. Create an ‘Engagement’ objective campaign. Ensure your Instagram account is linked to Meta; you should see a message that reads, ‘Invite people to your Broadcast Channel’.
2. At the ad set level select ‘Broadcast Channel’ as the conversion location. Please note that any ads created in this ad set will invite users to join your channel.
3. At the ad level, select your Broadcast Channel as the ad’s destination.
4. Optimise the ad, as usual, filling out primary text and headlines, etc.

Meta introduces new creative enhancements

It’s no shock to see that Meta is adding even more creative enhancements to its Advantage+ creative section. When using this feature, Meta automatically optimises your images and videos to versions that it believes your audience is more likely to interact with. Depending on the format or placements of your ad, different enhancements may be available.

Advantage+ creative is a feature Meta wants users to utilise, and more often than not rewards you for trying things out–even if some of the options (looking at you “Music”) are a bit hit-and-miss.

Meta’s latest addition to creative enhancements is “Adjust text length”. The description of this is as follows…

“We will only show the first line of your primary text when it might improve performance.”

To make an impression on social media, marketers only have seconds, which is why the first line of copy is always the most important. This feature could be useful in improving the overall performance of certain ads. Our tip? Be sure to provide enough information and context in the first line of your primary text when this feature is enabled to make the most of it.