How Facebook is trying to recover the money it lost during the outage (opens in new tab)

If you've set a campaign-level budget, Facebook's system paces delivery to spread that budget from the start date to the end date. It automatically adjusts pacing to fluctuations in delivery, this 6 hour outage is just a drastic version of that, where there was zero delivery across the board vs. more localized fluctuations in consumer behavior that usually impact pacing for individual advertisers.

So it has to accelerate delivery for the remainder of the campaign to compensate, and since it's doing that for all ads with this type of budgeting configuration it's resulting in an auction grab for available impressions and temporarily bumping up CPMs as a result.

Which isn't necessarily a positive for advertisers, but sounds like their system doing what it normally does, and just having some unanticipated second order impacts when faced with an extreme event (compensating for global lack of delivery for 25% of an entire day).

If your budgeting/bidding/optimization configuration doesn't require a specific spend within a specific timeframe, you're not going to see this sort of acceleration. But you will see higher CPMs due to the increased auction activity from others having their pacing accelerated. And they weren't collecting FB pixel data for 6 hours either, so conversion activity will also be underreported and show higher CPAs. But CPA-based optimization configurations are still in place and doing what they normally do, and frequency caps if you use them are still limiting how many times your ad will show to the same person. So even those seeing accelerated delivery and not wanting to could adjust their ads' settings to avoid it.

> The "accelerated delivery" that Facebook quoted in its response only applied to the remainder of the day that the outage took place -- not future days as the article suggests.

It does actually impact future days, just to a far lesser extent than day-of. Pacing jacked up the day of to attempt to compensate for expected pacing that day, but for those that didn't achieve it they'll continued seeing accelerated delivery beyond that to hit the spend target by end of campaign. Plus second order effects as their optimization see-saws around until things settle back down.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1619591734742116

Do you actually need to spend that much..?

You buried the lede with things we already know for some reason.

Two things:

- It's 6 hours and 60 million dollars to them, which is absolutely nothing, but they risked harming their customers (advertisers) over it. This was Facebook's screw-up, and now they're passing it on to their advertisers. When you view advertisers as captured, you worry less about their experience and attempt to extract as much value as possible.

- It's systemic. Someone in another thread mentioned there are good people at Facebook, and they can't reconcile the behavior exposed in internal documents with those good people. This is a great example. When your performance is tied to metrics like advertiser spend, even when you had the largest outage in your recent history, you'll immediately hop on afterwards to direct your team to try and extract the most money out of advertisers possible to make up for it. These individual incentives add up to form the predatory company that we see externally.

In the limited experience I have in this arena, it does improve performance. Hitting someone a second time about t+2weeks had the biggest bump, and then the next biggest another month later at t+6weeks.

I don't know if it's universally true, and the optimization may vary depending on the context and content, but pacing can definitely make a difference for some.

Yea, that's FBs new business model :D

I suspect that it has less to do with actual profits and more to do with some wanting to keep their quarterly ad impression numbers up

"We can also confirm that ads did not deliver during the time the systems were offline, and advertisers were not and will not be billed for ads during the outage. Ads have now resumed delivery and some advertisers may see accelerated delivery as our services recover from the outage. We encourage advertisers to review your bids and budgets to ensure they accurately reflect your marketing goals."

One way of looking at this is that Facebook is notifying its advertisers that the outage will affect how advertising is delivered in the following days, and if advertisers want something else to happen, they will have to make the changes themselves. Facebook could reasonably claim that it does not know how any given advertiser would prefer the situation to be handled.

Of course, if it is expensive or inordinately difficult to make such adjustments, then Facebook would come across as dissembling (and not for the first time.)

It would be rational for advertisers to pull down their spend to avoid getting hit with devalued impressions. Ironically, if enough folks did, that could cause a panic, which would make things worse for FB.

I know the example mentioned is facebook, but I feel like a similar development is going on with other ad networks as well. Even on YouTube around 40-50% of all ads I get are by some guy trying to sell me on his dropshipping, forex trading, crypto or tax evasion course.