Meta’s announced some expanded brand safety and placement tools for its ads, which will help brands manage how their promotions are shown across both Facebook and Instagram.
First off, Meta’s launched a live test of the capacity to deactivate comments on ads before publishing, providing more control over how your promotions are displayed in the app.
As you can see in this example, those in the test will be able to switch off comments on their ads within the ad setup process, with your options being either no comments, or open to all. You won’t be able to restrict comments to followers only or any other segment/s at this stage.
As explained by Meta:
“We understand this functionality can be important for brands when running sensitive campaigns or during periods of heightened sensitivity.”
Which is true, restricting comments can have benefits if your brand is in the news for the wrong reasons, or the promotion is ill-timed, etc. But still, switching off comments can also be seen as overly protective, and even deceptive in some instances.
To be clear, you’ve been able to switch off comments on your Facebook and IG promotions after publishing for a long time, this will just add the capacity to deactivate them before the campaign goes live.
Really, I would think that most brands would prefer to leave their comments active to help maximize reach, and really, if you do feel the need to switch off comments before your campaign goes live, the fact that you’re anticipating negative remarks that far ahead seems like a broader branding concern.
But the option is coming. Meta says that comment controls are currently available “to a limited number of businesses”.
Meta’s also rolling out additional ad placement controls, to ensure that brands can manage where their promotions are displayed in its apps.
“Last year, we started rolling out the ability for businesses to run ads on Facebook and Instagram profiles, which is a great opportunity to reach more customers while they’re deeply engaged. To give businesses more control over which profiles their ads can appear on, we tested the ability for them to block their ads from appearing on certain Instagram profiles by applying a “publisher block list”. Based on the interest in this feature, we are expanding the control from Instagram to Facebook profile ads.”
So now, brands will be able to specifically manage which user profiles their promotions are or are not displayed on within each app.
That could be helpful for avoiding problematic identities, or those who you don’t feel are a good branding fit.
Meta says that businesses will be able to upload a list of any public profiles on which they don’t want their ads to appear.
On another front, Meta’s also enhancing its block lists option, with Meta now supporting third party created block lists for brands working with Meta partners.
“Businesses will work directly with Meta Business Partners to determine which specific categories they may want to block – these decisions happen directly between businesses and their chosen Meta Business Partner because businesses should ultimately decide what their own suitability preferences are. In early testing, when pairing Meta’s inventory filter for Feed and Reels with this third-party content block list, businesses are seeing their brand suitability rate increase with this added layer of control.”
So Meta will now enable businesses to implement third party created block lists, giving them more control over ad placement. That’ll mean that Meta will honor listings created by approved partners, so if you’re working with one of these groups, and they have lists to exclude problematic placements, Meta will now facilitate that in its systems.
Meta says that it’s working with Integral Ad Science (IAS) as its initial test partner on this project.
Finally, Meta’s also updating its Brand Safety and Suitability Center with enhanced listings that will better enable brands to control where and how their promotions are displayed.
The enhanced display will make it easier for advertisers to manage each element of their ad placement, which will once again provide more control over how your promotions appear in Meta’s apps.
So some additional control options for your Meta ads, which will help to ensure that your paid promotions are being shown how you prefer in each app. You do need to exercise a level of caution in implementing such, but there could be some helpful expansions within these updates.
