Facebook Ad Changes: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you run Facebook ads?

Are you familiar with the latest changes?

To explore a number of recent changes to Facebook that will impact all advertisers, I interview Jon Loomer.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Jon Loomer, a marketing expert who specializes in Facebook advertising. Jon is host of the Social Media Pubcast and blogs at JonLoomer.com.

Jon explores Facebook ad changes and what you need to know.

You'll discover updates to the 20% text rule, custom audiences, and more.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Facebook Ad Changes
The 20% text rule change

Jon explains why the 20% rule was created and says that until recently, any Facebook ad image with more than 20% text would be rejected. The text ratio was measured by placing a grid over the image and if there was text in more than 5 out of the 25 boxes, it was considered over the 20% text limit.

Since Facebook has abandoned the rule, advertisers can have as much text as they want in their image. However, the more text in the image, the less reach it will receive and the more it will cost to run such an ad.

Now, when you upload an image to the Text Overlay tool, Facebook will rate the image as: OK, Low, Medium, and High.

Facebook is general about the guidelines, Jon explains, but there is no longer a grid. Basically, zero text means it's OK, and 20% text is considered Low. However, if you compare Facebook's example for 20% to the actual 20% rule, it's actually a little bit more than 20%.

Facebook says if you have been following the 20% rule until now, you probably won't see any changes. However, Jon thinks the system for detecting the text is a little buggy, although it's still early on. For instance, he talks about an image of nature that was flagged for having text.

Jon says the best approach is to test it. Experiment with little or no text in your images, and compare the results. You'll need to determine what text you absolutely need.

The logo is another potential issue since not all logos are created equal. Jon's logo has never been flagged. However, sometimes they detect it and sometimes they don't.

Many advertisers and users love memes and big call-to-action text, and now they can boost them. Jon says you probably need to do a manual bid and bid really high to get that ad seen, but you never know. It may be extremely effective.

Listen to the show to discover whether the text scale is at play on organic posts.

Facebook custom audiences

Jon is a big fan of Facebook custom audiences, which is creating audiences of people who have visited your website. It's powerful since these people already know who you are. However, Jon explains, there is a weakness in those audiences.

All audiences aren't created equal. In an audience of people who have visited your site over the last 180 days, some visited once, others visited 50 times. Some people bounced after three seconds and don't even remember being there, while others have spent hours on your site. Until recently, you couldn't differentiate the two.

With the new website custom audiences' advanced feature, you can create an audience based on frequency. For instance, base it on how many times someone has visited your website or performed one specific action, such as a purchase or a registration.

Now, when Jon promotes his blog posts, instead of targeting all of his website visitors from the last 180 days, he focuses only on those who visited at least three times. The quality and the cost per website click have been much better.