Is Meta Monkeying With Your Attribution Windows?

In Today’s Issue:

😤 Meta is seemingly changing campaign attribution windows randomly

📊 Digiday examines brands' fading interest in X/Twitter

🐦 Pebble, a Twitter competitor, closes due to low usage

📸 Instagram experiments with a "Nearby" feed for stories

👩‍💻 A surge in marketing freelancers due to RTO policies

Meta Adjusting Attribution Windows Without Warning?

We start today with the continued problems with Meta’s ads platform. Many marketers over the weekend reported images being dropped from ads — an issue that, as far as I can tell, still hasn’t been addressed or acknowledged by Meta.

Today, we learned of another issue plaguing media buyers — some report their attribution settings were changed by Meta’s systems without warning or any notification.

And worse, some say they can’t change it back.

Attribution windows are timeframes that help advertisers figure out which ads led to people buying their products or taking some other action. Some people use a tight window, like within one day of someone viewing an ad; others use a longer window, like within seven days of someone clicking an ad.

This setting is critical to reporting, and many marketers try to align that window across all their marketing work. Changing it suddenly can really mess with understanding how well a campaign is performing.

We’ve reached out to Meta to see if they have any ideas of what’s going on, and we’ll update again if we hear back.

Either way, these big bugs — along with lowered performance many media buyers are reporting — spell bad news going into Black Friday and the Q4 buying season.

Brands Sour on Twitter/X: Digiday Research

More signs pointing to a slow collapse of the social platform formerly known as Twitter.

We’ve seen data showing its historically big advertisers staying away, but that’s advertising — what about just general activity like organic posts?

The marketing news site Digiday.com has tracked brand and retailer use of Twitter for the past three years; their 2023 data just came out.

I spoke with Digiday’s managing editor Julia Tabisz today:

TOD: So, how bad is it? Are brands giving up on Twitter as a marketing platform?

JULIA: It's worse than I expected. This year, only about a third of brands are posting on X. Last year, 73% said that they were posting on then Twitter, which is a huge, huge drop.

In addition to that, nearly three-quarters of brands and retailers are saying that they are not investing at all in creating original content for X. Last year, 24% weren't investing anything... That's a complete flip-flop between this year and last year, which I personally found quite surprising. That's pretty dramatic.

With all this tumultuous year that this platform has gone through, brands and retailers are feeling like it's just not brand appropriate for them anymore. 44% of brand and retailers told us this year that X isn't appropriate at all, or it's not very appropriate for their brands. Last year, only 10% said that.

TOD: Certainly the velocity of the exodus has surprised me. One of the best descriptions I’ve heard of what we have now is that Twitter is gone. It doesn’t exist any more. What we have now is a new app — a kind of burgeoning everything app — that has a small microblogging thing on the side. And so marketers have to figure out what they’re going to do on this entirely new app called X.

JULIA: And the answer is that they don't really know. In a social media landscape that is just so broad now, people don't have the time to figure it out. They are more likely to go to those social media platforms where they know that they're going to get their return on investment when it comes to marketing. And I think that for brands and retailers especially, that's true.

The First Major Twitter Competitor Shuts Down

After Elon Musk bought Twitter, many new platforms spun up: Bluesky, Post.news, Threads, Spoutible, and Pebble — which was founded by a former Twitter executive.

That one had a lot of hype behind it, not just for its solid connections to silicon valley executives, but also the speed at which it got launched.

Perhaps, though, moving fast broke too many things. Today, Pebble announced it would be shutting down, effective November 1.

Pebble was fairly full featured — it had a verification system, it had DMs — what it didn’t have was users. Only 3,000 daily active users on average. And that number dropped to 1,000 after it rebranded from its original launch name of T2.

The CEO said one factor which likely kneecapped its growth was they never launched a mobile app, losing out on discovery in the app stores.

If you had an account on Pebble, you can export your content as a ZIP file — you have until the end of the month.

Instagram Testing Local Business Discovery

Some potential good news for local businesses — Instagram appears to be testing a new geographically focused feed called Nearby.

The new feed was found in the app’s code, and shows up along the Stories shelf at the top of the app.

There’s not much known more than that, but presumably the idea is to surface Stories from brands and retailers near the user. It’s not clear if it’ll be restricted to showing businesses, or if you’ll be able to also see Stories from regular people in your block.

The Chinese version of TikTok, called “Douyin”, has a feed like this and TikTok has also been seen testing a Nearby feed.

Instagram has not commented on the apparent test.

Marketers Consider Freelancing Instead of Returning to the Office

A perfect storm of work trends, unemployment rates, and layoffs have increased how many freelancers are working in the marketing space.

That’s the main conclusion of a study of marketing executives — more than half of which now say say they have more freelancers than ever on their teams.

The study was paid for by Fiverr, which is a freelancer marketplace, so take that as you will.

They say a clash between employees wanting to work from home and employers wanting them in the office is what’s really made this spike.

And layoffs — mostly in marketing management — has helped shift more toward freelancers.

One other interesting datapoint affecting this: Sex. Well, one product of sex, anyway. The birth rate in the U.S. has been in decline for decades, meaning fewer people entering the workforce.