Major Facebook Updates: May 2019

Published in

Trapica

7 min readApr 19, 2019

With spring in the air and summer just around the corner, it’s time to reassess our marketing strategies and come at the whole process with a refreshed energy and attitude. Especially for seasonal businesses who will rely on the sun to make sales, we’re going to pay particular attention to Facebook and the changes they made to their platform in March.

Many of your marketing and ad campaigns may rely on Facebook, so the information we have today could be the difference between success and failure in 2019. As well as changes to the relevance score, we’re also going to be discussing subscription fees, premium video advertising, and more.

In recent weeks, the updated relevance score is something that has attracted much attention, so it makes sense to start there.

Relevance Score Cut in Three

For the longest time, the relevance score has been a single number (and one that advertisers use heavily). In case you haven’t used it yourself, this one number would be a great indication of predicted success and the estimated quality of ads. What’s more, it had a direct interaction with CPCs and ROI.

Rather than just one relevance score, Facebook has announced that we will soon have three different metrics. Described as ‘granular ad relevance diagnostics metrics’, it sounds incredibly fancy but they’re actually very simple.

Engagement Rate Ranking — When compared with ads that are targeting a very similar audience, how will your ad rate in terms of engagement? Will it perform better, or will it be worse? With this simple piece of information, you can adjust your ads and constantly compare your own ads with the competition to see what works and what doesn’t.
Quality Ranking — This time, the perceived quality of your ad is the main metric. As a comparative metric, it won’t be in your control as such, but it can be useful to see where you are in the market with regards to quality.
Conversion Rate Ranking — Finally, we all want a high conversion rate. If you’ve ever wondered how your conversion rate compared with similar ads in your niche, this is your chance. Although only an ‘expected’ conversion rate, you’ll be provided with a ranking alongside those with the same audience and optimization goal.

Has anything else changed? Well, the algorithms on Facebook are still critical and you probably noticed that all three metrics are proactive rather than reactive. In other words, they make predictions, and this means these rankings can change as the campaign progresses.

Is the change a positive or a negative? Immediately, you might feel a little stressed because this is now more data to which you have to pay attention. On the other hand, splitting the relevance score into three will allow for specific feedback. As time goes on, you’ll be able to use these scores when improving campaigns and becoming a more effective advertiser.

Rather than being confused why a campaign with lots of engagement is only showing a relevance score of ‘6’, you can see what’s not quite going right. Instantly, potential issues are highlighted, and you know where to focus your attention to improve results.

Facebook Showcase

Aside from the relevance score, Facebook is also busy with the so-called ‘Facebook Showcase’. As a premium ad program, there will be new opportunities for ad buyers in the upfront selling cycle. Whether TV or online video ad buyers, the ability to target specific audiences with high-quality ads will be stronger than ever.

So far, Facebook has announced the following ad types for Showcase;

In-Stream Reserve — When people are watching videos from platforms with quality and large viewership numbers, advertisers can step in and reach this audience. Whether they’re watching on Pages, Watch, or their News Feed, the ads will be available whenever the very best quality videos are being viewed. We should also note that, to be delivered to in-target audiences, the placements will have a fixed price to be purchased in advance.
Sponsorships — Just as we’ve seen with television for many decades, a US program will now carry sponsors in the shape of advertisers. For the luckiest brands, their name will appear alongside specific shows and this allows them the exposure and brand awareness they desire.
In-Stream Reserve Categories — With this third type, it allows advertisers to be more specific with the content and context in which they appear. If you want to show in sports videos only, this will be available. This hopes to ensure that the viewer will at least have some interest in what you have to offer. Further categories include beauty, fashion, entertainment, news, and food.

Rather than advertising food products on a beauty video or beauty products on a sports video, advertisers can target the right category and increase the chance of conversion.

When first introduced, this new feature will be available for advertisers targeting US audiences. Depending on the success of Showcase, it could then expand worldwide. According to Facebook themselves, it will be useful for most; however, it will have a particular effect on those targeting younger audiences. Why? Because they’re more likely to watch video content after already being attracted to content regarding the same topic.

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History Removal for Users

Did you know that Facebook is planning to introduce a feature that allows users to clear their history? This has actually been requested for many years from users and it would work in a similar way to what we see with internet browsers.

On the surface, this seems like an innocent addition and one that wouldn’t cause too many problems. However, it’s fair to say advertisers are concerned because it could skew the targeting features. As soon as the activity of a user is wiped, they no longer have a profile of interests. As advertisers, this means there will be a section of the audience who are unreachable.

In our opinion, we don’t think the worry is justified as of right now. Even after users have this ability, advertisers can still retarget through custom audiences and site activity. Additionally, we have to ask the question of how frequently users are actually going to use this feature; it’s unlikely that a significant percentage of Facebook users will remove their history every single day. If there’s an option to prevent this information from being stored completely, then we have a cause for concern.

Yes, the audience sizes may shrink a little, but we don’t think this will spell the dramatic end for Facebook Ads as some have been suggesting. As the year goes on, we’re sure to learn more about this feature so be sure to look out for news.

More Selective News Programming

On Facebook Watch, it seems only the scrutinized and trustworthy sources will pass through the growing filter. In a recent move, around 66% of news programming content lost its funding from Facebook and some rumors suggest this was a result of transparency issues. Elsewhere, we also can’t ignore the reduced viewership and political debates in recent times.

It seems that Facebook wants to play around with the content in Watch and improve the reputation of the feature. We believe, over time, that long-form Watch-oriented videos will lead the charge. For creators who want to build a following, this could create a wonderful opening.

Subscription Fees

Finally, the Facebook policy documents were recently reviewed by an industry specialist and it seems we can learn more about the subscriptions feature. Currently, Facebook users pay a certain amount per month and they receive content from known influencers. In the policy documents, we can extrapolate Facebook’s plans to take 30% from net subscription revenue.

If we look around similar markets, this is on a par with both Twitch and YouTube (both of which also charge 30%). However, we shouldn’t assume this is the norm because we also have Patreon who only charges 5%.

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While there is a lot of conversation around the subscription system, we need to remember that it is new and will go through many changes as it finds its feet. Will content creators take part in the program with these high fees? Only time will tell, but Facebook could have a number of other advantages that outweigh these high fees.

Summary

In just one month, Facebook has announced huge news for their platform, and it shows their intent in the coming months. Not settling with surpassing 2.3 billion active users, they continually improve their platform, and this means keeping up with the times for advertisers.

For us, these changes should be welcomed with excitement. As well as improving the relevance score system, the premium video advertising could also be a hit with marketers. How will the metrics affect CPCs? Will the category-targeting system work with premium videos? Will the subscription feature generate enough interest to become worthwhile of our attention?

In 2019, these questions will be answered, and we look forward to it.