Facebook Updates that you Can't Afford to Miss - May 2019

Some changes are small, some are big and this month, the #FacebookChanges are tsunami size proportion! If you are looking to get more traction for you business using Facebook Advertising or still trying to figure out how to get any traction at all, check out the latest updates before you start any of your planning.

1. New Ads Manager & Business Manager

Facebook just announced that by the end of the year, there will be a new and improved Ads and Business Manager and they've started rolling out the new Ads Manager interface to select accounts.

This new design has:

• Simplified navigation

• Cleaner design

• Improved campaign management

• Easier to access reporting

• New copy and paste feature in the campaign creating process

• New auto naming feature (you can still do your own naming if you wish)

• Easier access to historical reporting

All of these features have been designed to speed up the processes and save time for the advertisers, with the goal of a more streamlined and significantly better experience.

2. New Cost Cap Bidding Option

With the release of their new cost cap bidding strategy, Facebook is looking to help advertisers focus on maximizing conversion volume while maintaining cost predictability. This optimization strategy will look to create a balance between getting the best results while still being cost and budget friendly.

Facebook has said that this strategy will be the way to go when you are looking to maximize your volume conversions and still maintain your budget. The Bid Cap, on the other hand, will be best when you want to set a specific limit on how high you're willing to bid, and target cost will be the best choice for when you want to keep your costs consistent regardless of whether your budget goes up or not.

3. Facebook Adds Inventory Filter

This is Facebook's solution to allowing you to have better control over what your brand may be associated with and increase your own protection if needed.

Here's how it works - You can have your content excluded from moderate to sensitive content by selecting 'limited inventory', which is as far as you can go to protect your brand even though your audience will be more limited and it may impact your costs. You will also be able to choose 'standard inventory' or 'full inventory' which, like it says, either excludes only sensitive content or pretty much excludes nothing.

This filter will apply to Instant Articles, Audience Network and In-Stream video placements and is part of Facebook's new policy for new brand safety control measures.

4. New Steps to Manage 'Problematic Content'

Recently Facebook has been hit with some serious transparency issues and with fake news spreading all over the place, it has had a negative impact on Facebook's reputation and affected number of users.

Facebook has implemented these new steps to manage 'problem' content to try and put a stop to it's bleeding reputation and get things back on track. This being said, they are working to clean up users' feeds by trying to promote higher quality, trustworthy news organizations while slowing down content from sources not quite so reputable or reliable.

They will be:

• Removing content that doesn't meet their policies

• Launching quality control features for feeds and for groups

• Reducing the reach of groups that share misinformation

• Adding in trust indicators to news feeds through context buttons

• Help guide users to more reliable information.

It's still not clear on how exactly they are going to be doing this so I guess the proof will be in the experience to come.

5. Clear History Feature - Launching late 2019

Facebook announced earlier this year that it will be launching a Clear History tool later in 2019. It has been a heavily requested feature which will allow users to completely clear their browsing history on the platform, same as they are able to do on any internet browser.

So what does this mean for advertisers?

Potentially, it could make it drastically harder to accurately target the right audience if users are regularly wiping out their browser and activity history on Facebook. This will make the Facebook targeting system a little less effective.

Of course, users would have to actually wipe out their history for it to become a large problem and the consensus is that most people just don't do it. Plus, advertisers will still have the ability to retarget based on site activity or custom audiences so there will be still be a good potential reach to your audience.

What do you think? Will any of these changes have an impact on your business and audience reach? Share your thougthts and questions in the comments below!

#facebookadvertising #facebookads #facebookmastery #facebookpage #facebookmarketingtips