Merry Glitchmas to those who celebrate.
In the world of online advertising on big walled-garden platforms – Meta in particular – October through November truly is the season of giving.
Of giving advertisers ulcers and panic attacks, that is.
’Tis the season
The holiday shopping season has barely begun, but Meta already appears to have had major swings in quality, including a few coal-in-your-stocking-worthy stretches of performance.
Several days last week were “historically bad for the majority of our portfolio,” tweeted David Herrmann, president of social and ecommerce advertising shop Herrmann Digital.
Shopify has been spotty as well, one DTC media buyer told me this week. Its live analytics tool was reporting no traffic or checkouts, and Shopify Audiences, its solution for targeting and attributing ads, wasn’t working with TikTok for a spell, he said.
“Happy Q4,” tweeted Rok Hladnik, a social media and DTC ad buyer, after Shopify Checkout temporarily went down last week.
Bu this is all normal platform nonsense for this time of year. Between now and mid-December, online storefronts and social media platforms will be swamped. It’s the same reason why the Amazon site sometimes crashes on Prime Day or retailer sites freeze on Black Friday.
On top of the capacity overload, this is the final code push across all the Big Tech players.
There’s typically a moratorium on new code at the beginning of November at Meta, Google, Amazon and every other major ad platform. Any product launches that aren’t ready to go by November will be put on hold for at least a couple of months, which is why everyone’s trying to push their tests to the finish line now.
So, what’s new?
If these glitches and malfunctions are to be expected at this time of year, then why bring it up?
Well, for one, awareness is a form of self-care. It’s good to be prepared and to understand you’re not the problem. Anyone running ad campaigns on Meta and other large ad platforms are experiencing the platform mishaps and anxieties.
Beyond that, I suspect this year will be a rougher Glitchmas than we’ve seen lately.
And that’s because these platforms increasingly rely on AI-driven ad products and AI-powered customer service. When these AI solutions fail themselves, who can advertisers turn to?
For instance, one buyer, who requested anonymity because their brand is part of the Meta Partner Program, told me there are very new mechanisms advertisers must bear in mind when trying to reach new customers. (As a member of the program, this buyer has early access to beta testing on Meta and is separately also in closed beta testing with Amazon for some new ad products.)
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC), Meta’s AI-based ad product, the buyer said, has been bringing in a whole new dynamic when it comes to reaching new or incremental audiences. The system does more than just respond when an advertiser sets ASC to prospecting rather than retargeting, he said. The creative itself is an important form of steering now, too, since the advertisers themselves don’t control the audience or behavioral targeting, like they do with other Meta campaigns.
He found, for example, that ads where the copy seems written as if for repeat customers – using words like “loyal,” “our offers” or “return” – are steered to retarget known customers. To target new shoppers, the ad copy should be framed around attracting people who don’t know the company by using words like, say, “first purchase.”
“I don’t think many Meta advertisers understand that that could be a better way to steer toward incremental customers than the targeting options when planning the campaign,” the buyer said.
But Meta’s ad creative and editing tool was down this week, he said, which he discovered when he went to edit some of the copy for upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns being tested now in the run-up to the holidays.
He acknowledged that Meta typically addresses its ad platform issues over the course of the holiday season. It’s not that the platform doesn’t perform. “But you have to be prepared for the fact that it’s going to go haywire at times,” he said.
