Facebook or Meta celebrated 18 this year, and reminds us every year that it is still a strong player in the world of advertising. Or Seglovitz, a lecturer in the marketing courses at the Technion Continuing Studies, presents 5 innovations that will affect every campaigner for the better in the coming year and another 5 points for improvement that may keep Facebook relevant in the future.
In March 2022 we also saw how it cut about 25% of its value, on a day that will be remembered as the largest daily market value loss in history.
5 innovations and strengths in Facebook’s advertising system for 2022
1. Adding new locations
Facebook does not stop adding new ad locations, in order to open advertising openings for advertisers that did not exist until now. For example, in the last year it added the search on Facebook (as an attempt to use the large amount of information from searches on Facebook, similar to Google), the new Reels location that is already available to everyone, advertising within Explore on Instagram and more.
If in the past many campaigners chose to multiply the locations themselves, today it is possible to make a personal adjustment for each chosen location and also see the effectiveness of each location and make a wise decision what to leave and what not.
Locations that we never imagined would work, give some campaigners not bad results at all. And if we’re talking about locations, then of course many advertisers are eager to find out how we can use Meta’s virtual reality world, known as Metaverse, which may open us up to new and diverse advertising avenues.
Every location you add will help us a lot and allow us to raise the campaigns and their measurement one level higher.
2. Strengthening Facebook’s machine learning and lowering the dependency on advanced targeting
If there is one thing that Facebook excels at, it is the excellent machine learning ability, so that even if we chose too broad an audience (and some say that the target loses its meaning from year to year) Facebook knew how to correct and refine the campaign while running.
The most significant function in the campaign was and remains the creative, the right message to the right audience. As soon as we have it – you can trust Facebook that they will know how to reach the right audience, even if it will take them some time.
The method is simple: as we gathered more information about conversions and performance in the campaign, Facebook knew how to pinpoint the audience more and more thanks to very advanced AI, according to hundreds of common characteristics of those who have already converted, or at least started to express interest in the ad, according to various functions of the actions he performs – yes, Even if he is not actively active or involved in the ad, sometimes even the few seconds he devotes to it from the average user can indicate a certain level of interest, and Facebook are champions in analyzing this data in real time.
3. Improved campaign types and offering new features
Facebook continues to offer new features to advertisers, some of which are in beta stages and look very promising.
For example, Facebook is expected to offer integrated campaigns based on user preferences. For example, if Facebook knows that the user does not often enter his details in lead forms, they will offer him to talk to the business on Messenger or WhatsApp. As for WhatsApp, the forecast is that we will find more and more productive tools for working with WhatsApp and other types of campaigns that will allow us to take advantage of this very productive tool for work – we’ll wait and see.
4. Entrance to structured ecommerce in other countries in the world
For more than a year we have been waiting in anticipation for the launch of Facebook’s killer feature that already exists in the US and in other selected countries, which is our ability to purchase directly from the Instagram or Facebook application, independent of a physical store. This move is expected to be so significant that it will compete directly In giants such as Amazon and independent stores such as Shopify and WooCommerce.
The direct meaning is that any store owner will be able to sell directly from Facebook, without developing large and complex websites, thus also shortening the user’s purchase time and simplifying the process.
There is no doubt that once this feature is launched worldwide (and hopefully soon in Israel) we will witness a kind of small history, and it will be very interesting how this will affect the old stores and whether the sellers will be quick to adopt it. As far as the marketing people are concerned, we will probably be able to significantly shorten processes and perhaps increase the return on investment in campaigns.
5. Professional profiles on Facebook
The world as we know it on Facebook until today was divided into 2: personal profiles and business pages. Facebook realized that there are personal profiles that are defined as business for everything, i.e. – professional for everything, so they started a pilot called “Professional Profile” (currently only available on Facebook USA) – this means that content creators will be able to use the huge power they have gained also to make money from the personal profiles ( as part of Facebook’s monetization plan), and some say that Facebook is aiming for us to be able to use their profiles for sponsored campaigns for anything and use all the data that is accumulated on a personal level as well.
It will be useful mainly for campaigners who do campaigns for various service providers who have accumulated a lot of information in the personal profile, all we have left to do is wait and see once the pilot reaches us as well.
5 weak points for Facebook campaigns and features we expect to see in 2022
1. Unnecessary blockages and disqualifications
Facebook is still one of the platforms with the largest amount of unjustified blocks in the world, and the solution is still not in sight.
We all know (and maybe it even happened to us ourselves) at least a number of people who were mistakenly blocked and released, for no injustice. Quite a few businesses woke up one day and discovered that they could no longer advertise in the system, and sometimes even needed legal intervention to free them from the unjustified blocking, just because they missed a verification email that was swallowed up among all the emails, or even just because they had not been active long enough at the sponsored level.
Let’s hope that in 2022 we will witness efficiency, because otherwise Facebook could find itself under the mass abandonment of businesses that will move to other alternatives.
2. A multitude of unnecessary advertising tools
In the distant past, Facebook did wisely when it combined the Power Editor with the Ads Manager which offered similar features, while there was no justification for 2 platforms at the same time that do the same thing.