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A cry for help – Facebook EU Changes
Apologies for the incoming wall of text and I would like to thank you in advance for your time in going through this and supporting my business. Will try and make this as comprehensive and articulate as possible.
**Background**
Me and my partner run a business operating locally in an EU country. We sell electronic gadgets which we import from Alibaba by running messaging campaigns on Facebook which are optimised for conversations. Our cost-per-message is quite competitive at around EUR 0.50 and our lead conversion is around 50%. Effectively, our marketing cost is at EUR 1.00 per item we sell.
Some of you may have heard that, pursuant to recent changes taking place on an EU policy level concerning Data Privacy Rules, [Facebook has paused all messaging campaigns for business in Europe and targeting audiences in Europe](https://www.facebook.com/business/help/574941489951914). Essentially, facebook is **currently** no longer able to run campaigns which are optimised for ‘conversations’ along with other features like sponsored messages. I’m placing an emphasis on currently here since the help page referenced above as well as other blogs on this change mention that this is temporary and Facebook is currently working on new ways to support these features. I doubt it.
This change has completely destroyed our business. It was the last nail in the coffin after the pandemic and we were relying on increased sales in December to make up for lost revenue. It has come at the worse time possible. We are trying to support our two newborn children as well as a mortgage on a house we recently bought so solving this is critical to our survival, quite literally. It’s unbelievable how Facebook can introduce such as significant change without notifying their customers in advance or providing a solution.
**What we tried**
Since these limitations have affected us (06/12/2020), we have tried the following:
* Contacting Facebook chat support who basically copy-pasted parts of the above reference article with no help whatsoever.
* Running campaigns optimised for ‘link-clicks’ as suggested by Facebook. This was unsuccessful and we had 0 conversions after spending around EUR 10.
* Running a ‘Lead Generation’ campaign with a ‘Form’ as an ad set. Again, 0 conversions after a EUR 10 ad spend.
* Running a ‘Conversions’ campaign with three different split tests, optimised for ‘Impressions’, ‘Link Clicks’ and ‘Daily Unique Reach’ – no success
* Running a ‘Post Engagement’ campaign optimised for ‘engagements’. We had some conversions but this was at an exorbitant cost of EUR 4 per conversion.
* Running a ‘Reach’ campaign optimised for ‘reach’. We had some conversions also at a high cost of around EUR 5 per sale.Running ‘Post Engagement’ or ‘Reach’ campaigns does not provide us with a long-term solution due to these high costs and therefore we are reaching out for help. Some of you would suggest creating a landing page or messenger bot (e.g. typeform) and redirecting leads there through ‘link click’ campaigns. We have explored these options before and they didn’t work – we found that most of our client-base prefers to interact on Facebook Messenger and they will just close the URL when redirected.
Really need some guidance on this guys. Any suggestions are welcomed and much appreciated.
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8 Replies
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Where did you read you can no longer optimizer for conversions?
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I don’t understand why you are completely focussed on messaging? How do you actually sell the products, do you have an online shop?
>Running a ‘Conversions’ campaign with three different split tests, optimised for ‘Impressions’, ‘Link Clicks’ and ‘Daily Unique Reach’ – no success
None of these things will work. You need to optimize for the action you actually want people to perform or performance will be terrible.
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I believe that looking back – you will see this as the best thing that has happened to you.
Facebook doing such a small change should not cripple your business, you have to learn the rest of the platform – and other platforms as well.
Go learn, and come back stronger.
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Hello, same problem here. You can Add whatsapp as call.
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I’m sorry to hear but in all honesty this is the world of digital marketing. Biggest tip to learn from here is that to be successful you have to diversify your strategy and you have to be on top of any changes that take place. Digital marketing landscape is always changing and if you don’t keep up with it you won’t succeed.
It seems like you’re going into panic mode with your ads here. I’m going off the assumption that this hasn’t been in place for too long so correct me if i’m wrong here. Your ads need to run for longer than a week or two to really count out. Optimize for conversions is your best bet and update your website. Test new platforms and avenues of revenue such as social even, FB is not the be all and end all. Hard to say much more on this without much more info or seeing anything.
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I’m in Europe as well however my country hasn’t been affected by this change (whew). I make all my sales like you do via messenger. I suggest you optimize for engagement or reach and put a phone number in your
captions. Repeat the phone number number 2-3 times in the ad so people can easily spot it, use emojis. Add the number on your page contact, Instagram bio and on ad images as well. Make a little template on Canva that you can always use.
Make it clear that they can text via WhatsApp or Viber, this is how I would go for it. But if you can take calls then sure do that as well.
I suggest you try this out for at least a week, different creatives etc. Good luck! -
Digital marketing is gonna become a shitshow in Europe sooner or later. At some point tracking people might become impossible and so your conversion rates will go down the toilet.
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Connect to whatsapp!?
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