Meta is About To Break Your Music Ads (here's how to fix it)

So, Meta in their infinite wisdom for trying to make life much harder for any musicians trying to market their music on their platform has decided that soon you are no longer going to be able to turn off certain placements. Meaning, you will no longer be able to use manual placements. And this is what it's all about. Changes to placement settings are coming soon. Excluding placements or platforms will no longer be available for your ad sets. And understandably, a lot of artists are freaked out about what this is going to mean for their ads. >> [music] >> All right. So, let's dive right into this feature. Now, if if you have been running ads for a while, you probably know that Meta changes things all the time. And I guess just a reminder, if you aren't subscribed, make sure you subscribe because every time Meta changes stuff like this, I generally talk about it fairly quickly on this channel. So, make sure you subscribe and ring that bell if you're not already subscribed. But, this is a big one. This is like it's been pretty well known for a long time for those of us advertising their music in Meta ads that a lot of the placements in here can just completely ruin your campaign. Uh for example, there's this placement called Audience Network. Actually, let me let me rewind a bit. Uh if you've never heard of this before, >> [laughter] >> um essentially, what what the way it works now is let's say you only want to run your ads on Instagram. That's really what most people do nowadays. That's what I do for almost all my campaigns. I just run on Instagram. So, I come in here and I go to platforms and I turn off everything except Instagram. And generally, I do this configuration. And I realize that was a lot of clicks, but moral of the story, I'm leaving on Instagram feeds, explore, and stories and reels. And the exact combo isn't like important. Like some people skip the profile feed or skip the explore home. That doesn't matter. Most people are converting in Instagram Reels nowadays followed by Instagram feed, I would say, and then stories. Um Audience Network is under apps and sites. This placement is a gigantic waste of money. It just burns money for a living. Um so, this is a big one. You don't want it. Now, the tricky part is Facebook placements sometimes work and sometimes do not work. So, because what I do here on YouTube, anything I time and time I talk about something, it results in like hundreds or even thousands of artists running campaigns, um because of the unreliability of Facebook, I generally recommend people just don't do Facebook placements because if I say to use it, and then all of a sudden, you know, 100 people use it and it ruins their ad campaigns, that that that causes a lot of pain and suffering. So, my default is just use Instagram only unless you really know what you're doing. And this feature that they're going to be making it so you can't uh change your placement settings makes it so that it sounds like you're stuck with Audience Network and you're stuck with Facebook ads or in other other placements, right? Like you can't just do Instagram only is my point. And um there's been a lot of people kind of fearmongering as as people do, and honestly, the the title and thumbnail of this video is probably going to play into that just be >> [laughter] >> just because I got to play the game. That's the game on YouTube. Um if I want you to watch this video to learn about something you want to know, I got to make it enticing enough for you to click on. Um but the reality is there this isn't as devastating as it sounds like it might be. I'm going to give you the ways that you can fix it that make it not devastating. So, let me zoom in. They outline three things here. So, one, you can increase or decrease your bid for placements in placement value controls. You can customize your creative for each placement in ad creative, and you can manage account-level placement exclusions in account controls. So, these three things allow you to effectively set manual placements. It's annoying, but it it makes it work. Now, I want to point out the ad account I'm in, obviously you just saw me customize my placements. None of my ad accounts have this transition yet. I know a couple people that their ad accounts have switched to this new system, so they can't customize placements anymore. And so, what I'm showing you here, this ad account doesn't have it yet, but I can still show you all these things. But, I have confirmed these things with people who whose ad accounts can no longer customize placements. So, uh this is how it will be for everyone, unless Meta reverts this change. Now, let's get into these fixes. The first one I'm going to point out is the um the account controls. So, if I scroll down a little bit, you're going to notice that there is this account control section here, excluded placements none. Um there is a place, like over on the left, on this like navigation thing over here, some there's like there's a what's it called? I think it's advertising settings. You can also find this uh excluded placements thing. Um but, going in here, I click excluded placements, edit placement controls, and this is account controls. This is what they were talking about up here. So, I can do account controls, edit placement controls, and then my business can only advertise on specific placements. Then here, for my whole ad account, um I can turn off Audience Network and Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Home. I don't know why they don't just let you specify everything on here. My theory is that Meta has an ulterior motive, and they want people to use placements that aren't as valuable, so they can sell those inventory slots and make get a higher profit margin. Um don't quote me on that, but that's my [laughter] theory. So, but like it would be really nice if I could just set like hey, I only use these placements in this ad account. Let me just pick this and then every campaign I do just defaults to that. That'd be lovely, but they won't do that. So, I can do that. I can do review changes and then I can just do confirm. So, that solves the audience network problem which is by far the biggest problem. That already is like huge sigh of relief. But, Facebook is a genuine concern still. And that's where these placement value rules. This is the other big fix they announced. I can go here to placement value rules, create a rule set. Let me zoom out. This just explains how the value rules work. Um I'm just going to say I understand my overall cost per result may increase when using value rules. That's fine. Create a value rule set. And this is where we set our value rule. So, if you've ever run ads before on Google, you'll know that they are often or not often, but in several places they they talk about bidding and auctions and and all that. And And it's a little scary, but all these online ad platforms are essentially auctions. So, you are bidding to show your ad in a certain place. You're saying I'm willing to pay this much to put my ad here. If someone else outbids you, their ad's going to get stone shown instead of you. Meta does a great job of hiding that and abstracting that bidding network. And the reason they do that is to make the whole system way simpler and also to give them more control over where things are shown. Um Google has always made it visible. Which is why it's even like if you thought Meta was a nightmare to work with, Google is mhm. Um but, in here we can select a placement. So, we for example can select all these Facebook placements and we can just choose audience network down here even though we already know it's blocked. And I can decrease the bid for that by 90%. Uh for some reason you can't go 99, you can't go 100, which is a just also absurd, but what what you're telling Meta here is I'm willing I'm only willing to pay 90% less for these placements. So, that dramatically scales these back, right? Um cuz they're going to see you're willing to pay effectively 10 times more for Instagram placements and that these Facebook placements aren't 10 times cheaper. Like, they're often half the cost in my experience. So, by decreasing it by 90%, that mostly solves it. And from what I've heard from the people whose ad accounts are already set in this new system, it does mostly solve it, but you will see trickles of Facebook stuff come through, which we we haven't fully tested to see like is it converting to streaming, is it causing problems, etc. So, again, mostly solves it. So, like doomsday scenario is fully averted at this point, right? We have audience network blocked. We have Facebook severely pulled back. So, the doomsday scenario is gone. Um now, how do we further optimize this? Well, one thing that I've seen people talk about doing, and this I don't have confirmed, is you could go to ad rule and we could choose the Instagram placements and we could increase the bid on them further. Um and we could go and say I want to uh to double my bid by saying increase bid by 100% or whatever. Um I don't know if this will cause an increase in costs though, right? Because you're you're saying you're willing to pay way more for this. I don't know if that's going to raise cost or if it's all proportional. You know, like if if if it doesn't compare like what I put here to other people, it's only looking at me inside the scope of my ad account. So, I can't confirm that, but if you're having problems once this becomes public, that might be worth trying. Now, there's another thing that I want to show you. And this is what they mentioned as this middle option for customize your creative for each placement of that creative. If I jump over to the ad, I can go down to the ad creative. So, I just pre-loaded a video here, but I can go into customize media and placements. And so, here, changes to placement settings are coming soon. And this we got to like read really carefully. Soon, excluding placements will no longer be available for your ad sets. So, this isn't the ad set, right? This is the ad. The ad set was where we were looking at placements. You will be able to customize your creative for each placement. So, they're saying soon you won't you'll no longer be able to customize your stuff in ad sets, but you'll be able to customize your creative for each placement here. What I what I'm kind of inferring from this, and I might be wrong, and I don't have confirmation about this yet, is I kind of do. I'll I'll explain. But, placements that you exclude here will apply to the selective media when it appears in this ad. So, what I'm inferring with this is if I exclude a placement here, like apps and sites or search results or whatever, right? Facebook feed, that exclusion will apply to the media when it appears in this ad. Meaning, the ad's not going to show here. Okay? So, that's what my assumption is, and there could there it feels pretty cleanly laid out. What I was told from someone who has also like already has this rolled out to their ad account, is they had trouble getting it to work. So, I don't know if that means they didn't figure it out, they didn't didn't didn't like understand how to set it up, they didn't even look here in the first place, or did they actually um actually have a bug where they couldn't do it. So, that part I don't know, but this is another layer of protection. And And like what I want to kind of stress is we already solved the doomsday scenarios and this is about just like locking it in. And if this works the other two things don't even matter. Because essentially that means that your ad is now locked at the um at the ad level. Like the placements are locked at the ad level instead of being locked at the ad set level which is honestly better. Like if this becomes a thing where you define your placements at the ad level, it's the reason why it's kind of better is because you can set for each individual piece of content you have exactly where that specific ad runs which there are certain circumstances where that's very useful um because you in previous instances you would have to have different ad sets with different types of creative in them if you knew a certain creative wouldn't work in let's say a horizontal format or vertical format, you'd have to come up with the kind of clever way to organize your creatives. This solves that which would actually make this whole shift from ad set level placement adjustments to ad placement adjustments quite logical. So we don't know that 100% yet. I'll certainly be talking about that when the update comes. But moral of story don't panic and everything we already know how to do from running ad campaigns that you learned in this video right here still applies minus some very small tweaks with placements. And if you haven't seen that video right here then go click it to learn how to run meta ads campaign meta ad campaigns to promote your music from start to finish. And uh make sure you subscribe if you haven't already and click this video to see whatever YouTube thinks you should watch. Anyways, thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next video. And yeah, let me know in the comments what you think about this change. Bye.