Ad Ops = Problem-Solving

I recently started working with a few new organizations upon coming back from my trip to Auckland for the World Cup (which was pretty cool). For one of them, I’ve been helping out with Ad Ops, which I actually really enjoy. I think a lot of people find it very frustrating, which probably happens most often because something isn’t working quite right. That happens pretty regularly when you’re trying to set pixels, get a conversion to trigger, or if a particular ad platform makes some changes to their UI and things just don’t work like they used to.

The good news is, with pixels and conversions, there are tools you can use to test whether things are firing - if you implement through Google Tag Manager, you can preview right through GTM, alternatively there are extensions in Chrome that allow you to see pixels installed and firing. You can also test things on Facebook using the Events Manager. If you go into the pixel you’re working with in Events Manager, there’s a Test Events tab and that’s where you can input the web page you want to test. You may already know this, but coming into doing work where there’s been a lot of history, it can be useful to see what is happening on a particular page. Maybe there are a ton of Custom Events that exist, but you actually need a standard event to fire and no one can get it working. Testing that url will give you a list of things that fire for that pixel and give you a good sense of what is actually going on (and what isn’t). In this case, I could see information and adjust some settings for the pixel, but it wasn’t letting me set events. Things like that can be maddening, but I think it can really help to approach things from a problem-solving angle. I went back through how pixels are created and set up - I double checked permissions in every possible place and it turns out, there was one where I had not been added. I was able to add myself and give myself that permission and it did the trick. I was suddenly able to set the standard event, and fixed that issue on my second day. (There was also a situation where the same pixel was being used for the same event on two different pages, firing on a button click, but the button text was different. I was able to just add the same standard event to each button, so it would fire on a click with TextA and TextB. We later had a third page that used TextB and the event fired without having to set that up again.)

When we re-trafficked campaigns from a traffic goal to a conversion goal, however, we ran into a bug with how ads were previewing that persisted in some of the placements that were being delivered. Using duplicate to create a new ad and change copy and image had headlines or body text that came from the ad we duplicated from, sometimes it was mixed and matched and sometimes it showed up as it was supposed to. It turns out that using Meta’s tools to adjust creative to crop graphics differently for different placements is where that bug lives. I haven’t seen this happen before where the preview was incorrect and wasn’t corrected by publishing the ad, however, I often work on political content and those placements are restricted, as are the use of the in-platform tools to optimize creative, so I’m not really sure how long this bug has been occurring. I believe Meta did recently update this tool, so it’s possible it hasn’t been happening for a terribly long time. It had happened on this account before sometime in the last few months though and they went to Support who said you just couldn’t duplicate ads… which … is not a great answer. We were able to find a fix though! You can go into the Preview on the right side for each placement and Edit, then trash primary copy and/or headlines, and save. This takes a lot of time to do each individual placement for every ad though. I also found that underneath the Ad Creative section, under Media, where each group of placements is listed, you can hover over the group of placements (example: Feeds, In-Stream ads for videos and reels) and there’s an Edit Pencil and if any customization or optimization has been applied, there will also be an Eraser icon where you can Clear Group Customizations. Clearing those removes all of the cached copy and headlines, though it also resizes your images back to the original size – this may not be the most-optimized, best-looking option, but your ads will probably still work and the text won’t be wrong. A big key is that it saves a lot of time and effort rather than re-trafficking every affected ad. I was able to find that solution and fix the whole campaign in less than 30 minutes that way.

SIDENOTE - If anyone happens to know anyone on Meta’s ad product team and wants to connect me so I can tell them that is where that bug lives, please get in touch.

I know these situations can be SUPER frustrating, especially if you don’t have a lot of time to invest in something that shouldn’t be going wrong. I enjoy trafficking and I also enjoy this bit of Ad Operations, where you often have to try different things and play around or go back and follow the steps in a process and double check things. It’s feels good to find that solution and get things fixed and running like they should be. Having been recently looking at a lot of job postings and having a lot of conversations with folks looking to hire staff, I’ll climb up on my soapbox briefly to mention I think it’s a bit silly to separate roles and leave Ad Operations and Media Buying to more junior employees. There’s a lot of value to having experience with what to do or try with Ad Ops in situations like these. Plus, knowing what you’re doing with trafficking and Ad Ops means you’re faster with set ups and it makes the strategy and planning more effective … but that’s another whole blog post, I think :)