There have been some major changes to Facebook ads in Europe recently they don’t just apply to advertisers based in the EU they apply to anyone that is running ads to people within an EU country no matter where you’re based also I’m pretty sure that these changes are going to be rolled out to other countries very soon so what am I talking about what is he talking about I don’t know now Facebook has started actively asking users within the EU to check their privacy settings in regards to ads now unfortunately I can’t show an example because I’m based in the UK which is no longer an EU country so we’re not getting this sort of privacy prompt here and also the examples that I’ve seen aren’t actually in English because the majority of you countries the native language isn’t English so they’re popping up in other languages
but I have seen these examples and we are getting reports these are popping up more and more and it’s basically asking users if they are happy to be tracked if they’re happy for their online activity to be tracked by meta you know once they click on ads and whatever they do and go to other websites and that sort of stuff now the pitch from meta because you might think what everyone’s just going to say no the pitch for matter is that if you allow us to track you we’re going to be able to serve you ads that are more personalized too so it’s going to show you ads for things that you’re actually interested in based on your online activity if you say no I don’t want to be tracked then you’re not going to see those personalized ads with products or services that you might find interesting you’re just going to see the generic ads that are pushed out to everyone the similar sort of stuff that people might have seen on on TV watching TV you know 10 15 years ago just the generic stuff that’s pushed out to everyone right now from what we’ve seen so far this prompt is a required action in terms of if it comes up to you as a user you have to respond to it you can’t just sort of click off and ignore it are you running you have to say yes I’m happy to be tracked or no I don’t want to be now this is obviously very similar and it reminds me of the iOS 14 prompt that was only sent out to iOS users this applies to people
within the EU no matter what device they are using but except that iOS users and it basically had the same sort of pitch it was like look if you’re allow us to track you we’ll be able to observe your personalized ads you’ll have a better experience when you’re using Facebook and Instagram and we know that roughly the data that we’ve got back from that was about four percent of people said yes they were happy to be tracked 96 of people said they weren’t and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the same with this prompt which is certainly not ideal for advertisers so what’s the likely impact on ad performance now obviously at this point it is really hard to say when I was 14 I was introduced people thought that was going to be the death of Facebook and Instagram advertising that no Advertiser will be able to see any results and if you can’t see results how do you optimize campaigns how do you improve performance do all that sort of stuff it wasn’t that it wasn’t ideal for us advertisers but it wasn’t that there’s more money spent on Facebook Instagram ads now than there ever has been there’s more advertising there’s more users the platform is very healthy lots of businesses are still growing scaling using this platform so it wasn’t as bad as people predicted and I think that this change in Europe is probably going to be a similar thing where yes a lot of people are going to opt out of tracking that’s going to affect the data that we see within Facebook ad accounts that’s not ideal Facebook advertisers but is it the end of the world does it mean that you no longer want to advertise anywhere in Europe if that’s important to you no that’s not the case right you want to be still taking advantage of those markets
if that’s a core part of your business model where you want to reach these people to sell your products and services if the data you get through isn’t perfect maybe there’s other things you can do to supplement that you can use utms you can use the conversions API there are things you can try and do that I’ve talked about before in relation to the iOS 14 changes I think we’re going to be looking at making some of those same adjustments when we’re advertising within the EU also depending on where you are advertising this may or may not have a smaller larger impact on you remember it’s not where you are whether you’re in the US or you’re in Germany it’s where you’re advertising that matters whether or not this is going to affect you from an ad performance because it’s the users in those locations that are going to see this prompt and have to decide either way whether or not they want to be tracked okay so just depends do you advertise to the EU is that a core Market of yours if it’s just a fringe um audience for you and your main core markets or elsewhere maybe you just decide to not advertise in those locations that probably wouldn’t be the end of the world for you if it is a core Market you don’t want to sort of go I’m never advertising mayor we can’t track the data there’s no point I certainly don’t think that’s the case and as I said it’s going to be more like the iOS 14 situation where we don’t have ideal data this is not something that we want but it’s not going to be the end of the world either so in terms of performance just keep an eye on the various locations you’re advertising
in see how performance changes over time it’s not something to panic about but something to be aware of okay it’s happening everybody stay calm foreign are you going to see a drop off in your EU targeted ad sets let’s say versus your non-eu targeted ad sets keep an eye on that maybe you will maybe you won’t and if you do then you can make adjustments along the lines of what I’ve said diverting budget um really cracking down on being able to track and adding in some edit elements there are things that can be done there but just something to be conscious of as an Advertiser and one other thing I need to mention about this is that we may well see this rolled out to other countries we know the way in which the world is headed they’re headed towards more online privacy that being more important for users so platforms like meta and other platforms we are having the tracking capabilities curtailed not being able to track the actions that people take once they leave the platform see what they’re doing all that sort of