Huge Facebook Ads Change In Europe (Affects Everyone!)
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
stuff it’s not what we want as advertisers it does make our job harder but it’s a thing we just have to deal with it move on it doesn’t mean that we need to throw the baby out with the bath water and stop advertising or anything like that it’s just we just need to to roll with the punches and work out new ways of doing things under the new set so right now this is being shown in the EU will this be rolled out to other countries it could well be so I think it’s important to be aware of and maybe
even start planning if you’re just advertising in the US for example and you’re thinking is this going to happen here it could well do so have a think about that and what would we do if that did come in how could we adjust things it’s probably not a bad little forward exercise to go through oh and by the way if you would like the results that we got for this client or for this client you can click on the link in the description below there you’ll be able to find out more about our done for you
Facebook ad Services another big change that we’ve seen to Facebook advertising within the EU is beneficiary and payer and you may have seen this pop up at the ad set level I’m going to talk you through this and explain what you need to do as an Advertiser and what this means okay so I’m in an example Facebook ad account here and I’ve just created a quick example leads campaign but it would apply to different campaign types I’m going to go ahead and jump over to the ad set level and then click edit on this ad set now remember with these changes in the EU it depends where you’re advertising not where you’re based so I’m based in the UK and Right Now the default location is United Kingdom so we’re not seeing any beneficiary and payer information here at the adsa level but if I go ahead and edit this to an EU country let’s say for example ipop Spain in here as my Target location and once I’ve done that if I now scroll down we’ll see this new beneficiary and payer section and pop up and you can see that it says here for any AD set with an audience within the European Union indicate both the person or organization benefiting from the ad set and the person or organization paying for the ad set now a lot of times that’s going to be the same business it’s going to be so for example if I was advertising as Heath media with our own ad account the payer would be us heat media and the beneficiary would be us Heath meter as well sometimes that’s going to differ if for example you’re
working with an agency and they’re paying for the ads and sort of going through their ad account then the pair and the beneficiary will be different and there are some other um cases as well but you do need to now select this information from here and it’s just a quick pop-up here saying that you can set this up in settings so it’s Auto pre-filled you just go to account settings and go through that um quick and easy either way to perfectly honest so the beneficial who is receiving the benefit who is getting
the leads who’s getting the sales who’s getting the exposure who’s getting the engagement from this we need to go ahead and click on this and then you should have at least one option down here below which is obviously the the information that gets pulled through from your account settings if that’s not right how you want to display you could just go with freeform text and pop in so for example we could go ahead and pop in Heath media which is our company name in there and then you need to select
whether it’s a different person or organization is paying if it’s the same payer the same beneficiary so whoever’s paying for the ads absolutely fine to leave that off otherwise if you want to make it different you would select that and then obviously just do the exact same thing pop in a different business or use the freeform text option once again and then put whoever that is so let’s say it was me personally paying for the ads to benefit my company don’t know why I would do that just give you
an example that’s how you would set this up so you need to get this set up for every ad set that has an audience within the EU it’s quick and easy to do but just something that you need to take care of and be aware of to be compliant and make sure that your Facebook ad account doesn’t get disabled because you entered in the wrong things or something like that and that’s definitely something you want to avoid by the way have you seen my new recommended Facebook ad campaign structure I show you exactly what it looks like in this
video here I previously recommended a different campaign structure for years and this here is a big change