Inside Facebook

For performance advertisers, unexplainable differences in delivery rates happen all the time – and have a big impact on the bottom line. However, today, Facebook has issued a note to advertisers in the Facebook Ads campaign management dashboard letting them know to expect lower traffic today. Advertisers may be seeing the following notification:

There is a large targeted campaign running 6/8/2009 that may impact your delivery for this one day if you are targeting the same users. We advise that you do not drastically change your bidding behavior.

There’s no mention of who the campaign might be for, or what the targeting segments are that it will affect, but the message is interesting and helpful nonetheless. A large campaign like the one Facebook describes is likely to push up the minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bid that any other advertisers with campaigns affecting the target segment would need to enter in order to ensure that their ads are shown. As a result, many advertisers may see lower impressions and clicks today.

It’s particularly interesting that the notification has been put out as it’s not necessarily something Facebook is duty-bound to communicate. Without it advertisers would likely interpret a drop in impressions during the day as a need to up their CPC bids. The one-day spike would result in a short-term financial gain for Facebook, as bids across the board would rise, but may have resulted in advertisers eventually decreasing their spend if advertising suddenly become less cost-effective.

The notice should help advertisers to interpret any traffic dip as a one-day event and reassure them that Facebook is likely to be open about future events that may affect them.