Howdy again Haveaclues! TWO NEWSLETTERS IN ONE WEEK?! What’s happening?!

This is a kinda sorta emergency newsletter since (as you’re probably already aware), there was a big Meta ads outage yesterday causing most advertisers to overspend extremely inefficiently.

(If this didn’t affect you, you can probably skip reading the rest of this email, but please hit reply and tell me why you’re subscribed if this isn’t relevant to you!)

Even if you already caught me talking about this on Twitter, LinkedIn, Foxwell Founders Slack, or TodayInDigital, I wanted to make sure you saw this and I added even more extra bits for my loyal Haveaclues subscribers:

The last YouTube video I made was about a nearly identical situation last year. Check it out and I think you’ll be surprised to see how my guidance from that situation is the same as my guidance for this current situation:

Yesterday’s Valentine’s Day outage was confirmed on Meta’s status page at 5:56pm EST.

From the accounts I could see and what I’m hearing from others, it appears to be mostly impacted campaigns and ad sets using cost caps and it seems like the caps were removed entirely, spending full budgets regardless of any actual performance.

The issue was marked resolved at 12:38 AM EST and I have not seen or heard any signs of the issue remaining today, but the damage was done yesterday and the performance sucked.

Valentine’s Day 2024 will forever be a bad performance day in ad accounts, which will also make the week, month, and quarter look bad. Do your best to remember this when analyzing those periods and consider excluding the day’s data when looking at performance. (Too bad there’s no way to annotate this in Ads Manager!)

Btw, if you don’t already have that status page bookmarked, BOOKMARK IT NOW! If you’re on Twitter and want to follow the updates in your feed, I made an automated account that tweets out when the status changes, turn on notifications for that account.

Another big tip I recommend for anyone responsible for or depending on Facebook ads:

If you use Slack, I strongly recommend that you add the status RSS Feeds to a Slack channel in your org.

To make it super easy for you, I went ahead and grabbed them all for you, so you should be able to copy and paste each of these one at a time into the slack channel where you want to get these updates (I typically recommend making a new Slack channel for this purpose)

Just copy the whole thing in the right column into the Slack channel and hit enter!
If you want to do it yourself, Grab the RSS Feed link for each tool in the MetaStatus.com page that you want:

My standard guidance in these situations is to do nothing annnnd hope/expect you'll get a refund if you’re financially impacted.

I don't recommend pausing in these types of situations typically because in the past, there have been times of recalibration after similar outages where performance caught up extremely efficiently to make up for the inefficient performance. If your ads are off, you account can't get that catch up boost.

If you feel unsure about like what's actually going on, there's nothing wrong with turning your ads off. You might want to minimize any larger potential immediate losses that day, if you turn off your ads, you’re doing more work and adding more variables to the situation, which makes it harder to understand the pure impact of the bug.

In the case of yesterday’s issue, I don’t really see any difference for the people who paused versus those who didn’t. It seems like anyone who paused did it after the damage was already done and I didn’t see any sort of catch up last night or so far today either.

In reality, Meta doesn’t expect you to be managing spends hourly and media buyers shouldn’t be responsible for hourly performance. Meta benefits from advertisers being more hands off, so they shouldn’t punish advertisers for not being at the helm 24/7, which is another reason why they typically issue refunds in these situations…

Based on my past experience with similar outages, I would expect Meta to pay out refunds for this. The bug was not something advertisers could have done anything about and Meta doesn't want advertisers to lose money for situations like this. There might also be legal concerns if refunds are not issued for this issue. Technically, this could be considered ad fraud if they spent our money without actually delivering the ads as promised.

While we all might get annoyed and think Meta isn't on our side, at the end of the day what's in our best interest as advertisers is typically in their best interest in supporting us.

They want to get our money fairly, not unfairly.

Meta makes more from successful businesses than it does from failing businesses.

This is annoying, but if you want to get that money back, you need to take action now.

To increase the likelihood of a refund for you and for everyone, you must…

To make it simpler for you, I've put together instructions, screenshots, and what you can say to support to make it easy and less painful. Please bookmark this!

Remember that Meta does not read tweets or care what's happening in the community.

The only way Meta can understand the scope of this issue is if we all report it through their appropriate channels.

Meta employees believe in ruthless prioritization so if you're not bringing it up they're not going to think about it.

If you have a Meta rep: complain and demand a refund.

If you don't have a rep, please go through the support channel. Here’s the most recent direct link to FB support, should save you a minute or two. Meta changes these links periodically, so this might not work in the future.

The only way Meta can understand this issue is if we all report it.

Paste in this bit (or something like it) here:

You should then see this option to “claim refund for ad spend”

Then you choose your ad account, and pick “other ad issue”

You’ll then be able to write another message, where I would just paste the same blurb from earlier and then include this screenshot of the Meta Status Page.

Start the chat with support where you should confirm your ad account ID and again paste the same blurb from above, and I would also include something like this:

Start uploading any screenshots of evidence of your bad performance.

If you have multiple accounts, you might want to provide all of the account ID’s in case they can help for more than just one.

Then politely answer any questions support asks and remember that they probably are not as familiar with Meta ads as you are and are likely not aware of the outage yesterday.

Hopefully, you’ll get to a point where they ask for the amount you are requesting for a refund. If you have estimates of what you think was lost, share that amount, but don’t be greedy, use a realistic estimate based on recent past performance.

My support rep was quite helpful today and asked me this:

This is our best chance of getting the refunds we deserve.

We have to be patient! It usually takes 4-8 weeks for them to analyze the situation and come up with a proper way to offer and communicate the refund.

They’re in no rush to provide the refunds to advertisers and I often think they try to be mindful of Meta’s quarterly revenue impact and/or stock price, but I have no way of proving that.

After a day or two go by, we'll all forget about it. We'll all feel better about it in like a day or two. Tomorrow you'll feel better than you do today and then probably by next week we'll all have forgotten what even happened on Valentine’s Day 2024 at all.

Make calendar reminders every week or every other week to make sure you're following up with your Facebook rep or with chat support to see what the status of that refund is and keep making noise about it.

Keep those reminders going. Make sure every email at every touch point you have with your Meta rep brings this up. Don't let them off the hook because they're hoping and thinking that you're going to forget about it. They're hoping and thinking that you're not going to care about this in a month or two months. Keep pushing them for it, keep it top of mind.

I hope you found this valuable! If you did, I’d really appreciate if you shared this with other people you think might find it useful, or just smash the reply button and say “thanks!” or let me know any feedback you have to make this newsletter more valuable for you.

Please consider supporting me by booking a 1:1 call with me on Intro or on my own site directly, buying my ad account audit template, or buying my CreativeOS ugly ads templates.

Also, if you’re looking for performance creative for your brand, let me know if you’d like an intro to the incredible team of performance creative wizards at Adcrate.co!

That’s all for now! Thanks again for subscribing. Have a high-performing week!

Hott regards,
Barry Hott