Outrage as Meta ad glitch burns through budgets: 'ROI's gone to hell in a handbasket'

In the hours before Meta fixed the issue, some ad buyers saw CPMs rise as much as 500% compared to the prior 24 hours.

One marketer claimed that his cost per mille (CPMs) rose by 200%-500%, meaning significantly less reach for the spend.

Executive vice president of paid social at Jellyfish, Shamsul Chowdhury, told The Drum that “ROI has gone to hell in a handbasket."

"We were spending money way faster than normally. When we see ROI take a dip like a nosedive, that’s a red flag," he said.

After being contacted by a Meta rep on Sunday to make him aware of the glitch, the agency is still waiting to be told what the ‘fix’ from the tech giant entails. Chowdhury said he will expect a refund for the misspent budgets.

“This is not a small thing. It's a big thing. And advertisers are upset, Meta has to do something to get them a comfortable on advertising on your platform because they’re not the only game in town anymore. You’ve got to step up your game.”

A Meta representative told The Drum it was “a technical issue that has now been resolved" which "caused ad delivery issues for some advertisers.”

It said reporting was not affected and confirmed that it will issue some refunds for those impacted. Those will not be immediate, instead it will “requires analysis after the issue has been resolved to determine what ad placements and advertisers were affected”.

The glitch occurred just days after Meta announced plans to cut 10,000 staff.

Media consultant Eric Seufert branded “Meta's communications about this situation with advertisers was woefully inadequate. This is unacceptable and insulting.” Meanwhile, former GroupM leader Rob Norman responded: “‘Inadequate and insulting’ is a default state.”

In the aftermath of the issue, marketers debated whether pausing campaigns on the platform was the correct approach, hinting that trust in the world's biggest social media ad platform could be damaged.

As per Ad Exchanger, advertisers have been “straining to find ways to address account issues” throughout 2022 after a year of glitches and miscues.

However, an engineer at a top network agency told The Drum that amid all this, the bigger concern was "what's happening at Twitter" referring to the pilloried Twitter Blue rollout and new rules on who can advertise on the platform. Just this morning a fake Disney Junior account, which reportedly had a history of posting racial slurs, had been verified.

Additional reporting from Chris Sutcliffe.

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