Many Facebook advertisers woke up frazzled on Sunday morning due to a bug in Meta’s ad delivery system causing a significant overspend on a number of accounts. It may not sound like much to the average user, but for paying accounts and business profile holders, it’s quite concerning.
Significantly
Back to the topic of the error, some ad buyers reported CPMs up to 200-500% compared to what they were the day before, while all ad performance metrics were seemingly affected. Other advertisers also reported that their ad sets well exceeding their set daily budgets, with no way to limit the damage.
Meta acknowledged the issue within hours of it being reported and quickly worked to implement a fix. At the same time, it also took extra steps to ensure ad partners that credits will be issued to correct the situation.
As of 9:45 PM ET, Meta has supposedly resolved the issue, and all systems were functioning as normal. Meta says that it’ll communicate directly with impacted ad account managers in the coming days. It’s a significant error for the platform, especially during these tough economic times, and as it continues to work to improve trust and reliance in its ad products in the wake of Apple’s iOS14 update. With many users opting out of data tracking, Meta has had to re-align its ad delivery process around machine learning and improved detection of the best audience for each campaign.
Those efforts have been delivering results, but it’s issues like this that will make ad buyers more wary and hesitant to put 100% of their trust in Meta’s systems. It can potentially prompt the scaling back of ad spend, which Meta has constantly tried to maintain.
The Wrap
In all likelihood, those impacts won’t be long-lasting. Essentially though, they’re another headache that Meta doesn’t need as it works to reform its ad systems in line with new requirements. It’s recommended that you check your Facebook ad sets and ensure that you haven’t ended up overspending across the weekend. Hopefully, Meta provides a full transparency report once it wraps up its own investigation so that it can help all users better prepare counter-measures in the future, saving it a lot of backlash from would-be anxious and frustrated advertisers and marketers.
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