Meta

Opportunity scores are making a comeback on Meta

About a year ago, Meta began testing opportunity scores. The tool ranks marketing campaign efforts, giving them a score between 0 – 100 to showcase how their campaign is set up to maximise performance. The closer to 100, the more optimised your campaigns (in theory). The score is influenced by various factors; however, Meta is now planning to push heavily towards utilising the Advantage+ suite.

With the rollout of the new tool, you can expect this to become a common addition to Advantage+ campaigns, featuring visual cues across the platform that encourage you to optimise your ads. We can expect to see a big shift towards Advantage+ optimisation.

We spoke to Emma Sowersby, Senior Paid Social Executive at Embryo, about her thoughts on the update:

Expert opinion

Emma Sowersby, Senior Paid Social Executive at Embryo

"It makes sense for Meta to be biased towards its features, but I’m not sure this push towards the Advantage+ suite is the best thing for everyone. Specific brands that are meticulous about their visual presence may find opportunity scores unhelpful. In my experience with the opportunity score tests, there was a significant focus on implementing creative changes, which was not an option for some clients. Advantage+ creative and flexible media doesn’t lend itself well to a brand that values consistent branding across its marketing channels. Additionally, broader targeting isn’t always better–particularly when testing different audiences to inform a wider strategy. My worry is that if brands are penalised for not using the Advantage+ suite, they would have to sacrifice their branding in order to maximise performance. For a lot of brands, this simply isn’t an option."

Advantage+ will now be default for Sales, App, and Leads campaigns

Meta has announced it’s testing a new streamlined way for Advantage+ setup for Sales, App and Lead campaigns. Currently, the campaign setup allows users to choose between Automated or Manual options. From now on, the default selection will be Advantage+. This means that by default, the following optimisations will be turned on:

• Advantage+ Audience
• Advantage+ Placements
• Advantage Campaign Budget

There is still the option to override these optimisations, which may disable Advantage+. Originally, we had the choice to switch from Advantage+ to original audiences, and now we can unselect a box to remove suggestions for certain audience types. 

It’s important to understand the shift that Meta is currently making towards removing all ‘traditional’ methods of targeting and replacing them with Advantage+ options. We expect to see more changes like we’ve seen over the past week.

‘Advantage+ Shopping’ campaigns will become ‘Advantage+ Sales’ campaigns

Advantage+ Shopping campaigns will now be known as Advantage+ Sales campaigns, emphasising a shift towards performance-driven advertising. 

Meta has launched a refreshed Meta Advantage+ campaign setup, removing the choice between ‘Advantage+’ and ‘Manual’ during campaign creation. When you create a new ‘Sales campaign’, you will notice that ‘Advantage+ sales campaign’ in the top right is toggled on. Any alterations made to this will disable it, transforming it into a ‘Manual sales campaign.’

Currently, when setting up a Sales campaign, Meta allows you to choose between creating an ‘Advantage+ shopping campaign’ and a ‘Manual sales campaign.’

This new update will remove this choice, and when setting up a new Sales campaign, it will default to configuration settings equivalent to those for creating an ‘Advantage+ sales campaign’. This implies that Advantage+ budget, audience, and placements will be enabled.

However, you will still have the option to disable specific Advantage+ controls, converting it into a ‘Manual’ sales campaign. Additionally, the usual features of a ‘Manual’ campaign will continue to be accessible in the new setup.

Meta is removing inactive admins from Meta Business Suite

Meta has begun automatically removing admin users from Meta Business Suite profiles if they’re inactive. This update will help businesses keep their accounts secure, preventing unauthorised activity.

Anyone with access to a business portfolio who has not logged into business tools like Meta Business Suite, Business Manager, Ads Manager, or any related app or integration in the past six months may be removed.

Additionally, any ad accounts that haven’t run any ads within the last 15 months risk being closed due to inactivity. If this happens, the primary payment method is removed, ads are turned off, and the account won’t be able to run or publish new ads. It’s also worth noting that ad accounts can’t be deleted from the portfolio.

After an inactive user has been removed from the account, someone with full control over the business portfolio has three months to reverse this action. This can be achieved by navigating to ‘Security Centre’ and ‘Completed Actions’, where you will find a list of recently removed users. You can select ‘Review’ and choose which users to re-add.

Meta launches updated affiliate link displays

Meta is increasing affiliate link exposure within reels, videos, photos and text posts. Prior to this update, affiliate links had to be included in comments instead. This update increases the visibility of affiliate links, which mirrors what we’re already seeing across TikTok, where affiliate links are front and centre, driving sales in the TikTok Shop. For brands, this could be an opportunity to expand affiliate offerings with creators, as it’s likely to get more reach. For creators, they’re going to have to find the balance between genuine content and content that appears to be overly commercialised and revenue-driven, as it very quickly highlights when they are working as an affiliate.

Expert opinion

Olivia Jones, Affiliate Manager at Embryo

"For brands, this update will have a positive affect on reach, click through rate and conversions and will make it easier to measure success more accurately from influencer campaigns. For influencers, especially micro-influencers who are still growing their audiences and building their platform, it enables them to monetize their content in an easier way. However, influencers need to ensure they still create a healthy mix of organic content as well as promoted content to remain authentic and relatable to their audience."

Threads test individual post analytics

Threads is testing more granular ways of analysing performance, by introducing individual performance analytics, as opposed to overall performance analytics.

According to threads: “People in the test can sort posts by the highest or lowest number of views, likes, and replies. People in the test can also see the breakdown of views and interactions (likes, replies, reposts, and quotes) by followers and nonfollowers for a specific post, and the number of new follows that resulted from it.”

Threads Chief says the new update should help people to build communities on the app by seeing whats resonating with their followers. It also goes hand in hand with a recent Threads update, which puts ‘more emphasis on posts from profiles that you’ve chosen to follow in the app’.

This will impact the level of analysis marketers are able to carry out on the platform, and will give them a closer look at whats resonating with different audiences.

Expert opinion

Megan Atkinson, Senior Paid Social Executive at Embryo

"It's really interesting to see the granular level of analytics Threads has introduced. In Paid Social, data is essential to allow us to understand what's working and what's not, so we can optimise accordingly and avoid wasting budget. An update like this will allow us to dive deeper into posts and decide which type of messaging is working with which audience. It will be interesting to see if other platforms such as Meta follow suit in 2025 and give us this level of insight."

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.