Facebook and Instagram event digest: April 2019

5 min read
30 April 2019

The announcement of the “Why am I seeing this post” feature on Facebook

April 1, 2019

The feature will work like the Why am I seeing this ad feature. The user will understand why they see a post on the feed.

Facebook informs that by this the network officially discloses the information about ranging posts.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/31/why-facebook/

Law cases

April 1, 2019

Several American companies have brought a group action against Facebook. The reason for it was the fact that Facebook promised higher potential reach of advertising posts. Higher figures force advertisers to place advertising at a higher price.

Facebook representatives do not agree with the action and emphasize that only particular actions (CPA) affect advertising cost: switching to the website, clicks, impressions of the advertisement and so on.

Source: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/333880/advertisers-press-claims-against-facebook-over-po.html

Facebook announced disabling 7 advertising metrics. The changes will take effect on April 30, 2019

April 5, 2019

What we lose and how to replace it:

Such metrics as Offers saved and Cost per offers saved will be replaced with the Post saves metric.

The new Post saves metric will count how many times the advertisement was saved, including all times the advertisement of the offer was saved. The metric is to be released on March 12, 2019, and will count the times when the advertisement was saved since February 4, 2019.

The Relevance score feature will be replaced with Quality ranking, Engagement rate ranking estimation and Conversion rate ranking.

Facebook recommends using both metrics at the same time to evaluate if the advertising is relevant for the targeted audience or not. The metrics will be released step by step, the analysis will be related to auction advertisements held since March 19, 2019.

The metrics Messaging replies and Cost per messaging reply metrics will include New messaging connections and Messaging conversations started features. The metrics New messaging connections analyses only new users and does not include those who used to communicate with the company. The metric Messaging conversations started counts the number of new conversations with your company after at least 7 days of the activity absence.

The Mobile app purchase ROAS and the web purchase ROAS will be consolidated into one metric the Purchase ROAS. It is connected with the non-linear behavior of buyers while making decisions on the purchase.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/metrics-removal

Facebook has disabled the Creator App

April 11, 2019

Facebook has disabled the Creator app for creating content, managing pages, and monitoring user activity. To replace it, Facebook recommends the Pages Manager app which has no functionality to post stories from apps to the brand page.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/help/publisher/201383520677220?helpref=faq_content

Facebook has changed the feed algorithm

April 11, 2019

Facebook has changed the feed algorithm and lowered the rating of some communities with the features Remove, Reduce, and Inform (used to work with dubious and disputable content).

Source: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/04/remove-reduce-inform-new-steps/

Facebook has renewed the Brand Safety Controls feature for advertisers

April 11, 2019

Advertisers will be able to choose how the content accomplishing the advertising campaign will work. There are three settings options for it.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/updating-our-brand-safety-controls

The option of coming back from the Messenger to the main app

April 15, 2019

Jane Manchun Wong, an app researcher, has paid attention to testing the option of returning from Messenger to the main app. Facebook confirmed that it is working on improving user experience. But at the same time, Messenger will remain a separate app.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18307443/facebook-messenger-app-integration-manchun-wong-standalone

Facebook is testing the new design of the news feed

April 16, 2019

Facebook is testing the new design of the news feed; the Stories feature is added. Again Jane Manchun Wong, an app researcher, reported about it. She noticed that Facebook was testing the new design of the news feed. Now the Stories feature is added. You can switch from one view option to another by swiping left, like on Instagram. So, the feed is switched to the horizontal view.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebook-tests-integrating-stories-into-the-news-feed/303533/#close

Facebook is launching a new strategy of managing bets

April 16, 2019

The Cost Cap Bidding feature will allow increasing the number of events for optimization to stop the average price to exceed the stated amount. It gives an opportunity to provide the CPA directly, and due to it Facebook can optimize the price and get the maximum possible number of conversions based on the advertiser’s budget.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebook-introduces-cost-cap-bidding-to-maximize-cost-efficiency/303607/#close

Facebook has updated Ads Manager

April 17, 2019

The updates will affect the interface making it more user-friendly, and the navigation will be simplified. The tools for managing companies and estimating results will appear.

Later the updates will also involve Business Manager: it is planned to simplify the adding companies of the customers and gathering data on them.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/improving-ads-manager-and-business-manager

Facebook is developing a voice assistant

April 18, 2019

It looks like a successful market launch of Alexa from Amazon and Siri from Apple really bothers the Facebook team.

Nominally, the assistant has been developed since the beginning of 2018. The Facebook AI-assistant will probably be used for Oculus VR, smart screens for Portal video calls and so on.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/08/facebook-portal-first-impressions.html

Instagram wants to start hiding Like counts

April 19, 2019

So far, this feature is hidden. Instagram representatives say that this way they want to improve the quality of the content motivating users to react to good content using comments.

If the feature passes the testing, very many bloggers will have to struggle for advertisers ‘ budgets improving their content, because many likes will not be the reason to spend money on advertising anymore.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/18/instagram-no-like-counter/