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FB error leads to spending surge. (12)

06-10-2014 07:57 PM #1 gamble (Member)
FB error leads to spending surge.

Earlier today, I went to refresh my Ads Manager in an account and got the following error message: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can." Ok, no prob, it will either be back up shortly, or the banhammer is coming down. The entire left sidebar of this FB account disappeared during the error, which lasted about 15 minutes.

During the error, I noticed that traffic was surging in my tracker. When the error was finally fixed, I refreshed my Ads Manager again and saw that my daily spend had doubled. All of the oCPM camps that I had started hours earlier had spent nearly their entire daily spend within that 15 minute window. This was multiple camps with $300 budgets and total spend of about $150 each that was allotted for today because of start time. The spend schedule was perfectly normal before the error (initial blast of impressions followed by steady spend for hours.) So my ROI tanked accordingly as a result of the spending blitz.

Someone else I spoke to said that they had the same error happen around the same time, but their ads were retro'd. Mine stayed up (all cloaked btw) but my spend skyrocketed. The Avg CPM didn't appear to change (I could be wrong,) but the CVR for the amount of impressions tanked, which makes me think it was crappy placements during that surge regardless of cpm price. All of my oCPM camps that were started prior to today were unaffected, and are spending normally. CPC camps that were started today were unaffected.

Anyone else ever had this happen to them?

06-11-2014 01:24 AM #2 zerosixty (Member)

Same thing happened to me. Left the office, came home (50 min later) and 30% of the daily budget was spent. CPM's and CPC's increased by about 50% during that time, effectively killing the entire campaign...I spoke with our FB rep this morning and he basically gave me the "sorry we can't do anything - email support" speech. Pretty fucking annoying...

06-11-2014 06:50 AM #3 zeno (Administrator)

Oh wow did this happen in the last 24 hours? Happened to me to - CPMs didn't change much, but spends went way up suddenly and the CTRs of news feed ads were abysmal >> CPCs went from $0.50 to say $2. I didn't experience any ad manager interface errors but don't use it.

I had the worst CTRs on the news feed that I have ever encountered. Thankfully this was isolated to only a few campaigns and ~$100 spend.

I thought it was just because I was upping CPM bids a bit to try and get more traffic, but maybe this coincided with a bomb going off in FB HQ.

06-11-2014 01:30 PM #4 gamble (Member)

Yep, this appears to have been a random glitch in FB's system. Hopefully it was isolated and fixed, and won't happen again. I was going to contact FB about it, but after zerosixty's remarks, (and the fact that I'd rather not draw fb's attention to my accounts) I'll just roll with the punches on this one.

FB was probably tweaking the algos or something again. Fun.

06-11-2014 03:16 PM #5 servandosilva (Member)

Facebug has had a lot of errors lately. First they say you can't create fan pages because you had them banned and now this...

06-11-2014 04:37 PM #6 gamble (Member)

Hey the bugs just keep it interesting!

06-11-2014 04:48 PM #7 zerosixty (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by gamble View Post
Yep, this appears to have been a random glitch in FB's system. Hopefully it was isolated and fixed, and won't happen again. I was going to contact FB about it, but after zerosixty's remarks, (and the fact that I'd rather not draw fb's attention to my accounts) I'll just roll with the punches on this one.

FB was probably tweaking the algos or something again. Fun.
yeah, we are in the same boat, although some compliant stuff allows us access to a rep. I guess this is just the unfortunate side effect of an extremely complex algorithm...everything seems to be better since then though.

06-11-2014 06:12 PM #8 Smaxor (Veteran Member)

We buy CPC and didn't see anything.

06-11-2014 09:18 PM #9 gamble (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by Smaxor View Post
We buy CPC and didn't see anything.
Seems like it only impacted oCPM camps that were started yesterday (for me at least,) and didn't happen to all advertisers.

06-25-2014 04:44 AM #10 gamble (Member)

Well, this glitch just reared it's ugly head again. This screenshot is from 12:20am EST, just a little while ago. It happened on half of about a dozen camps. I saw my tracker going nuts so I looked and saw the surge, tried to reduce the daily budget so it would cap and stop, but it was too late as it kept spending until it hit the original budget. Default oCPM btw. CPC skyrocketed while ctr/cvr tanked. Hoping for some delayed conversions...

06-25-2014 04:56 AM #11 zeno (Administrator)

Ouch.

Have a look at the reports for that time window and see if there is anything out of the ordinary - particularly frequency and average news feed position, and CPM paid.

I have talked to a PMD rep about this and he was also baffled - intuitively, there is little reason why CVR should go down along with CTR if ads move further down in the news feed... I think it's the algorithm doing something weird or suddenly splurging on a subset of the audience that has a very low likelihood of converting, i.e. is a low quality audience based on historical data.

06-25-2014 07:51 PM #12 gamble (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by zeno View Post
Ouch.

Have a look at the reports for that time window and see if there is anything out of the ordinary - particularly frequency and average news feed position, and CPM paid.

I have talked to a PMD rep about this and he was also baffled - intuitively, there is little reason why CVR should go down along with CTR if ads move further down in the news feed... I think it's the algorithm doing something weird or suddenly splurging on a subset of the audience that has a very low likelihood of converting, i.e. is a low quality audience based on historical data.
I analyzed the reports, and no major stat discrepancies, other than CTR. Frequency at 1-1.03, paid cpm was a little higher than usual, but ctr was 1/5 what it normally is for those camps. It makes sense that cvr/ctr shouldn't drop so much if the ad is shown to a ton of people in the target audience all at once, but the ctr shows that there's no method to the madness in this case. I keep thinking FB trolled me and showed my ads to a bunch of teenage dudes, while my camps are targeting middle aged women, so I got a lot of "WTF is this" clicks.

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