Huge change by Facebook 😮

(and it's not good...)  ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Hey, I want to get ahead of a Facebook meltdown for once. A huge change is coming and people will probably freak out about it – and they should, because Facebook is taking away control of Placements, which could destroy performance for anyone running ads to Amazon, or direct to any other retailer. Yeah, I know. But before you reach for the grog, I have a solution. I know you probably want to scroll to the payoff, but it’s helpful to break things down in order: What is happening (and why now) How to take back control Or you can just skip ahead, I guess. I’m not the boss of you. (I’m barely the boss of me…) why now? As you should know by now, broken robots are taking over the world and Facebook Ads are no different. Ha ha! I’m joking obviously, I would never make such a comment when all my content is being hoovered by unceremoniously by our digital overlords. What I meant to say is that Meta is increasingly embracing AI and machine learning – a trend that has been going on for several years now. A lot of the stuff that used to happen quietly in the background has most certainly spilled into the foreground now and the trend is undeniable: Facebook Ads are becoming increasingly automated – which has positives and negatives. Unfortunately for authors who want to run ads to Amazon, the negatives are particularly relevant because, in simple terms, the new system works best for generic products and for companies who are running ads direct to their own websites. I won’t go into the details on all that here but I have covered it in a series of emails before which you can find on your subscriber-exclusive Facebook Ads Resources Page, which I built just for you. The nub is that we have to (a) understand when these automated systems are working for us and (b) know how to circumvent them when they are working against us. And a great example of the latter is Placements. what exactly? Placements are one group of settings at the Ad Set level which have a huge influence on the success or failure of your ads because it decides where your ads are shown on Facebook (and Instagram, and the wider web). A few years ago, the default was to give advertisers detailed control over where their ads would be shown. This meant you could decide to show your ads on Instagram-only, or Facebook-only, or Facebook and also the Audience Network – Meta's massive array of partner websites. You know those annoying ads on mobile when you are trying to read a news article? Yeah, that’s probably a Facebook Ad displaying on the Audience Network. Not only that, you could decide to show your ads in Facebook Messenger, or not, in videos, or not – even determine whether they showed up in the slot on the right-hand side of the Facebook interface on desktop, or just in the primary News Feed on mobile. And this granular level of control was crucial because News Feed placements were and are incredibly valuable, with a very high conversion rate, and everything else is varying levels of junk. (Some people found value in that junk but… it’s complicated. Let’s just paint with broad strokes today.) This might have been less true for advertisers sending traffic to their own websites, but it was almost always true for the typical author who was sending readers direct to Amazon or another retailer. In other words, savvy authors tended to show their ads on News Feed only. This did lead to higher click costs – this is a grand auction after all, and those are the slots in highest demand. But they are in highest demand for a reason. They convert better. Much better. And savvy authors new that the total cost-per-sale ended up lower when you showed your ads on News Feed only. Much lower, in fact. I did extensive testing on all this back in the day, and periodically would revisit that, and all my data confirmed this also. (And feel free to run your own tests – while you still can! – if you doubt any of this.) But that’s not all. As Meta leaned more and more into automation and AI, the system got smarter in the sense that it got very good at chasing your stated goal – cheaper clicks. But as with a lot of AI, it can be very single-minded, and will pursue that goal at the cost of almost everything else. And when Meta changed the Placements default to include all Placements, the problems began. Because the system would see very cheap clicks in places like the Audience Network – which really was junk traffic – and then serve all your ads there instead of somewhere useful like Facebook, or the primary Feed. Which meant people could spend hundreds of dollars with little or nothing to show for it in terms of sales. However, if you knew your way around the Facebook Ads interface, there was always a way to turn back on the manual controls… and then quickly turn off all these junk placements. Indeed, I’ve produced several different guides to doing just that in various newsletters over the last few years, as Facebook made it more and more difficult to find the right settings to take back control. As a quick reminder, the back door to accessing those manual controls is by turning off Advantage+ Placements – which you really should be doing if you are running ads direct to a retailer, for all the reasons mentioned above. The edit button is often occluded – Facebook can be as subtle as the mob when it wants to convince you of its line of thinking – but it will appear if you hover your cursor where I have placed the red arrow above. Click that edit button, and Manual Placement controls should unfurl, giving you granular control over where your ads appear on Facebook and elsewhere. It’s a very handy workaround, and one that is critical to ad performance in 2026. But now it looks like Facebook is planning and closing those back doors. Permanently. All is not lost, pilgrim. As the old saying (almost) goes: as one back door closes, another one opens! how to fix it The solution here might be familiar to any romance author who suffered a collapse in performance (and a spike in ignorant comments) when Meta started ignoring gender controls and began serving their ads to a load of dumbass men. I covered how to use Value Rules to circumvent that problem in this newsletter last year: The problem with men. The short version is you basically trick the system into ignoring men completely by mandating a super low bid for those eyeballs. Robots looooove an incentive! And we’re going to do the same with Placements so that the system will have no incentive to serve our ads anywhere other than the primary Feed. Clever, right? I’d love to take the credit, but this trick is from Jon Loomer who has a ton of resources for Facebook Ads. His advice is for a general audience (so he’s much more positive on aspects of AI and the Advantage stuff than I would be, for example) but I think he’s the best around; I’ve been following him for years. Anyway, here’s how you do it… with the giant proviso that I’ve had no opportunity to really test this because I only heard the news yesterday and these changes haven’t hit any of my ad accounts... yet. I should note that there is no clear indication of when this change will roll out. If the past is any guide, it will hit accounts in a staggered way. But this is what I’ll do the second the changes hit me. (a) value rules Head back to Placement settings, and hit the Placement value rules dropdown menu, as indicated by the red arrow below. Click the button marked Create a value rule set. At minimum, I strongly recommend applying a value rule to the Audience Network – it’s basically junk traffic. Hit the Select Placment dropdown menu, select Audience Network. Beside that, select Decrease bid by. And then type in 90%. That is the maximum but should insure little or none of your budget gets spent on this awful placement. The click the Add Rule button to confirm it. However, you should also strongly consider doing the same for the following placements: Facebook Stories Facebook Reels Instagram Stories Instagram Reels. I also do it for Instagram Feed as I don’t personally find value in that placement, but you might; some do. I am confident advising you to nix the others, though. But feel free to test any alternatives yourself. Note: you can do this all in the same Rule 1 box – just click Edit and add them beside Audience Network – you don’t need to make separate rules for each placement. When you are finished it should look like this (I recommend ticking the box marked by the red arrow for easy access later). Now hit that blue Create button to save it into the system. You can now access this from that same dropdown menu in the future that started this process, without laboriously inputting all this information again. It will be automatically saved with the rule set name Placement – so simply choose that from the dropdown next time you are creating a campaign. (ii) account controls Value Rules can be a little funky sometimes, not least because it’s easy to make a mistake if you are new to using them. An alternative approach, or a backstop if you like, is account controls. As the name suggests, these are – in theory – hard controls that apply to your entire ad account, so be careful what you mess with here. And don’t switch something off unless you are sure you don’t want to use it. I also wouldn’t recommend using account controls too much (just like I wouldn’t recommend going totally crazy with Value Rules) as an exec at Facebook once told me that the system can go a little screwy if you give it too many hard parameters like these. You can access the Account Controls for Placements by hitting that little blue pen icon below (which only appears when you hover your cursor around where I have indicated with the red arrow). Click the blue pen icon, then the Edit placement controls button, then the click the slider beside My business can only advertise on certain placements and then a rather limited menu will appear. You will note that you don’t have the same granular control as you do with Value Rules, let alone with Manual Placement controls, but at the very least you can indicate that you don’t want to – ever – appear in placements like Audience Network or something like Facebook Marketplace. So, not as useful as the Value Rules method above, but better than nothing if you are struggling with those for whatever reason. thanks facebook These changes are a pain in the ass. Part of Facebook’s hilarious mission to make advertising more straightforward. But at least now you can sidestep the most damaging aspects of this clownshow when it comes your way. We'll talk about this again - and maybe I'll shoot a quick video guide on it if you would find that useful (lemme know by Reply) - but next week we'll get back to building our Welcome Sequence. Until then, Dave P.S. Writing music this week is The Assembly with Never Never. Interesting Paths, Apartado 108, Loja CTT, Lagos, Faro 8601-902 ​Unsubscribe | Update your profile​