If you’re in digital marketing, you might have got a shock come Monday morning, given that Sunday was filled with chaos on Facebook. An error in the social media platform’s ad delivery system was causing significant overspending on a range of accounts, with some ad buyers seeing CPMs that were 200% to 500% up from Saturday.
Within hours of reports of the glitch in the ad delivery system reaching the company, Meta, the umbrella company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, was on the case, with Yoni Levy telling Twitter: “Seeing everyone’s messages. Escalations sent. Product & engineering teams are on it. We take these matters seriously. I don’t have more information right now. When things go wrong, Meta has a history of making things right.”
Meta is still communicating with impacted ad account managers directly, but as of 9.45 pm Sunday, the matter was apparently solved.
But as Social Media Today pointed out: “It’s a significant error for the platform, which has been working to improve trust in, and reliance on its ad products in the wake of Apple’s iOS14 update. With many users opting out of data tracking, Meta has had to re-align its ad delivery process around machine learning, and improved detection of the best audience for each campaign.”
And we can imagine it will have hit some marketing budgets hard.
