In the world of advertising walled gardens, Facebook is making several changes in the interest of user control and future lawsuit mitigation.
Facebook and Instagram Account Links
Facebook announced that it will no longer link a user’s Facebook and Instagram accounts for advertising purposes without an opt-in, effective immediately. The key idea here is opt-out by default, so the majority of users will automatically be opted out as not many people actually navigate their ad privacy settings. Historically, Facebook allowed users to control access to Facebook and Instagram through the Accounts Center. If a user had signed up for both Facebook and Instagram with the same email address or phone number, Facebook could then have a deterministic match that these 2 accounts had the same user. According to Graham Mudd, Facebook’s VP of product marketing for ads, “the update aligns with trends of offering people more control over how their information is used for ads and is consistent with evolving advertising, privacy and regulatory environments”.
So what will be the impact to advertisers? Advertisers may now see slightly more scale for their media buys, as now a single user may be considered as 2 or more users, depending on how many Facebook owned apps they have. The caveat here is that this will be an artificial increase in scale, since there actually isn’t an increase in users.
Facebook is Updating Audience Forecasts to be Less Specific
Facebook will now provide a range instead of more specific numbers when it comes to audience estimates. Facebook says that “These updates are part of an ongoing effort to improve the way it shares pre-campaign ad estimates and metrics with advertisers and has nothing to do with other ad and measurement-related changes it’s making as a result of iOS 14 and Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework”. In the image below, the Facebook platform provides a very wide range, with an Estimated Audience Size of 10M-20M.
A major driver behind this change may be lawsuit mitigation. In 2018 Facebook had a class action lawsuit filed against it for inflating its audience reach numbers. From AdExchanger – “According to one example cited in the suit, Facebook supposedly told advertisers that it had a potential reach of 230 million US adults, out of the 250 million adults in the US as counted by the census in 2018. Problem is, a Pew Research study from that year found that only roughly 68% of US adults in the US – around 170 million people – use Facebook.” With broader audience estimates, Facebook can better defends itself against potential audience estimate claims.
Sources
- https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/facebook-will-no-longer-link-a-users-facebook-and-instagram-accounts-for-ad-related-purposes-without-an-opt-in/
- https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/facebook-is-updating-its-pre-campaign-audience-estimates-to-be-less-specific/
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