How Digital Marketers are Winning with Facebook Ads in 2022

Why your Facebook Ads testing strategy matters

Without testing, you’re often left to your own gut-feelings on what is and isn’t working within your paid campaigns. And while gut-feelings and intuitions aren’t always wrong, they don’t provide you and your shareholders the confidence that data-backed decisions do. Facebook Ads testing allows you to have a greater understanding of your target audience: what appeals to them, what drives them to engage with the brand, what types of ads are compelling, and what doesn’t hit the mark. In order to successfully test your creatives, you need to be strategic about what you test, when you test, and how to test. Below, we’ll show you exactly how to approach Facebook Ads testing.

How to properly test your Facebook Ads creative

Step #1 – Start with copy

Unlike most tasks associated with setting up advertising campaigns, testing your Facebook Ads should start with the foundation: copy and images. Let’s focus on copy first. If your copy isn’t catching the attention of your target audience, then you can almost always guarantee a lack of performance, even when everything else is spot on. The copy communicates the value of your brand or product, so testing this early on gives you an idea of how that value or call-to-action resonates with your audience.

If your copy isn’t hitting home, do your value propositions make sense? Does your service or product solve actual problems? Or are your values aligned with your audience, but your call-to-action isn’t strong enough to make a difference?

Step #2 – Test your images

Once you have your copy solidified, it’s time to understand what types of images or image formats work best with your target audience. Do they gravitate towards bright or dark colors, product images, or text-heavy images? When you’re testing the images against the copy, it’s crucial to test each image with the same copy set so that you aren’t introducing new variables to the experiment, which would throw off your results. The same is true for testing copy: don’t change the images (or other elements) while conducting that test. This includes your adsets and objectives. The best way to ensure your adsets remain constant across your ads while testing is to duplicate the desired adset in Ads Manager and creative a new creative from there.

Step #3 – Test your Placement

Once you’ve tested your images and copy you can move onto testing two important adset factors: placement and audience. Testing placement can help you understand where your audience is most likely to engage with their ads at various stages of the marketing funnel. Placements to test include those that fall within the Feed, video versus static compatible placements, Reels and messenger, and the Facebook audience network. Most commonly, marketers will choose to allow Facebook to serve their ads in placements that make the most sense to their algorithm with the Automatic Placements options. However, you have the ability to manually choose which placements your adsets and ads will serve on.

Step #4 – Test your Audiences

Testing audiences offers more potential than placements for a clear reason: there are so many options and variations available. When building out your various audiences to test, you should be careful not to have too many interests, behaviors, and demographics overlapping.

For example, if you’re looking to test audience behaviors and interests keep demographics, placements, objectives, and creatives all the same. Remember that sometimes your brand or product serves a wide variety of audiences—testing which copy, images, and placements resonate best with each demographic may be a tedious task, but it is essential to understanding your audience and where to invest your budget.

To keep your audience tests (and all tests for that matter) organized, we recommend developing a process to keep track of all of your tests along with their objectives and results.

How to test your campaign objectives and optimization strategies

The final test-worthy elements sit at the campaign level of your Facebook Ads campaign: objectives and optimizations. Campaign objectives are determined by what action you want your target audience to take when they are served your ad. Are you serving ads to drive awareness, are you looking to increase engagement, or are you looking for your audiences to perform an action or complete a conversion after they’ve seen and interacted with your ad? Objective testing may require fewer variations than previously mentioned factors; but, if there is any uncertainty, marketers should consider exploring these options and putting some to the test.

Beyond campaign objectives, there are several ways to optimize your objectives at the campaign level. From link clicks to leads, there are a number of options you can set for Facebook to optimize your campaign against based on your unique marketing objectives and goals. These optimization options can be set up prior to campaign launch or adjusted once the campaign has begun running. If you do decide to test different optimization strategies once your campaign has begun, be sure to document your performance prior to the optimization change, when you made the change, and any significant changes to performance after the change has been made. Again, testing one element at a time is vital to drawing a clear conclusion of what is and isn’t working.

How to report on your Facebook Ads test results

Reporting on your test results will most likely look different than reporting on metrics for campaign performance. While you are looking to understand the audience and effectiveness of your campaign elements in relation to campaign performance, you aren’t reporting directly on how these different tests drove results to your campaign objectives and marketing goals. These tests should help to determine what strategy will work best to help you drive results and hit your marketing goals.

Once you’ve set up your tests you should allow enough time to collect meaningful data to determine what is most successful. Once a test is launched, allow at least 72-hours for your ads to move from the learning phase and begin collecting enough data for you to feel confident in one element’s results over another. If you manipulate your tests too soon, you miss out on uninterrupted results that typically yield stronger outcomes.

Additionally, you should be reporting on metrics such as ad impressions, cpm, ad engagement, and cpc versus site impressions or site conversions. Remember, you’re testing ad success, not site performance.

As you begin your Facebook Ads testing journey, be sure to remember the following takeaways in order to crush your next test and walk away with valuable insights on how to improve your campaign success.

• Test one element at a time – like any experiment, if you begin changing additional variables, there is no way to know what actually made a difference.
• Test elements from the bottom up – starting with your creative before moving on the Adsets and Campaign elements.
• Don’t move too quickly through the testing phase – your tests should be given ample time to run their course; once you’ve set a test live, let it run for at least 72-hours before you start making any conclusions or additional changes.

Always keep your goals in mind – your ads should always work towards accomplishing your goals while also testing for optimizations for subsequent campaigns.

Best Practices for Facebook Ads Reporting in 2022

Understand campaign performance with Facebook Ads reporting

Reporting is a sure-fire way to help your team understand what is and isn’t working within your Facebook Ads campaigns. It helps you understand your target audience behavior, compare relevancy and effectiveness of creative, determine cross-platform performance, and so much more. The bottom line is this: reporting can tell you if your campaign is busy making an impact or busy wasting budget and time … and hopefully not the latter.

For you to make informed business decisions, you need good data. And in a world where data piles up everywhere and is in a constant state of flow, being able to access this data in a timely and organized manner is crucial. To set yourself up for success, you need a process around preparing campaign reports properly, a way to identify which key metrics to focus on, and an understanding of reporting automation.

How to set up Facebook Ads Manager for better reporting

You’re probably familiar with the Facebook Ads Manager platform offered by Facebook/Meta (sometimes we feel like it’s the only thing we know/see all day). Whether you’re using it to run Facebook, Instagram, or Audience Network ads—the reporting remains the same, making it relatively simple to get started on reporting in the platform.

With your ads launched, Facebook provides an initial set of data that you can report on, however, we recommend creating custom report presets based on your campaign and reporting needs so that data retrieval is simple, to the point, and exactly what you’re looking for. Facebook outlines, in a few simple steps, how to set up these custom reports.

After reports have been customized based on your campaign and reporting needs, you can export these reports on an as-needed basis, or simply schedule the reports to be emailed to key stakeholders. By scheduling out Facebook Ads reports, you can remain hands off, while providing updated data with ease and efficiency. Similar to setting up a custom report, Facebook has a great article demonstrating how to share and schedule reports.

Selecting reporting metrics based on a campaign’s objective

Reporting is an essential part of any Facebook Ads campaign. Whether your ad is focused on awareness, consideration, or conversion—ad data metrics should answer questions based on how the campaign is tracking towards a specific goal, how the audience engages with the ads, and how the delivery is affecting investment.

As you report on Facebook Ads data, consider these metrics when looking at each stage of the marketing funnel. If you’re interested in diving deeper into the best ad metrics to leverage in 2022, we have you covered.

• Performance:

• • • Results
    • Frequency
    • Impressions
    • CPM (Cost per 1000 Impressions)

• Engagement:

• • • Post Engagement
    • Clicks
    • Click-through rate
    • CPC (Cost per click)
    • Conversions

• Delivery:

• • ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
  • CPA (Cost per Acquisition)

How to automate Facebook Ads reporting

Our personal motto (especially when dealing with reporting on anything) is: work smarter, not harder. And the number one way to smarter reporting is automation.

The old way of automating Facebook Ads reporting: There are a few ways you can automate Facebook Ads reporting. The first (and a bit outdated if you ask us) is to set up report presets directly in Facebook Ads Manager and then schedule automated emails or those reports to yourself, your shareholders, or your clients.

The new way to automate Facebook Ads reporting and save time: We recommend introducing a data unification and automation system to your tech stack. Without having to create your own presets and reports within Facebook Ads Manager, platforms like Joinr allow you to connect your data directly to a secure data warehouse that then unifies and organizes your data for quick and easy data visualization in Google Data Studio, or for rapid cross-platform comparison between Facebook Ads data and Google Ads campaigns.

With Joinr, automating ad data reports is easy and painless. Connecting your Facebook Ads account lets the tool fetch data directly from the Facebook platform and store it in a secure, centralized location.

No more spreadsheets, no more waiting for reports to generate and load, no more data clean up. After the ad data is connected and synced, Joinr transforms the raw data by trimming the excess metrics and aligning the mismatched labels. Using an ad data unification tool like Joinr, there is no longer a need for data clean up, spreadsheet manipulation or complex coding.

Finally, you’re left with freshly unified data that flows directly into Google Data Studio (consistently updating so that your team has the most up-to-date data) where it can be turned into a visual, data storytelling masterpiece.

Creating Killer Facebook Ad Copy and Creative

George Herbet once said, “good words are worth much, and cost little.” And while we appreciate the sentiment, anyone who says words don’t cost much was clearly never a digital advertiser. The importance of the copy you use in conjunction with your Facebook Ads can not be overstated—every word (and image too … we’ll get there a little later) you choose can have a huge impact on how your ads perform on Facebook, and thus, how you meet your growth goals.

Aligning Facebook Ads copy to your target audience

To best position a brand’s Facebook Ads copy, you should first need to understand your intended audience(s) via research, customer feedback, and past paid ad experiences. Once established, you’ll then need to tailor your Facebook Ad copy to your audience’s needs and wants. Copy like this, created with both relevance and value, are more likely to make an impact and yield a higher return on investment. Don’t forget to consider the variations in target audiences that your brand could attract.

For example, if your brand offers earbuds, your target audience is pretty wide. The entire audience spectrum may agree that quality is the key factor, but the tone of voice and verbiage you use may vary depending on demographic. You might consider using a lighter tone for a teen audience, and a more grounded tone for an adult audience.

Stay consistent with language structure and brand tone

Following a simple language structure can help streamline the copywriting process for your team:

Identify offers: To begin this process, start by answering the question, “What is it that our brand offers?” This could be a product or service.

Identify benefits or values: The next step is to brainstorm how your brand offering benefits the target audiences. If there are multiple benefits and target audiences, start by highlighting the most prominent benefit of the brand and measuring if it can apply to all groups. If not, determine which benefit fits each target audience best. The key is to understand what value will ultimately hook the target audience and drive them to take action.

Establish next steps: The final stage of this process is to develop your brand’s ideal next steps for the target audience based on the goal of the particular paid ad campaign. Brands should be assigning a task to their target audiences, whether it’s to learn more about their brand or to take a specific action once the consumer engages with the paid ad.

Developing copy that is concise and leads with value is infallible. Facebook Ads limits the number of characters available for paid ads—which means our copy needs to (as they say) get to the point quickly. With the average Facebook user seeing 36 ads per day, being concise with value statements is crucial. It’s also important to have a clear and singular call-to-action (CTA). If an ad provides more than CTA you run the risk of competing user-actions that may dilute your KPIs, confusing an audience of what the next step should be.

Even with these best practices in place, you should continually audit your ad copy to ensure that it is written in a tone consistent with the brand. When a consistent tone is used across all marketing channels (from paid ads and organic social to community engagement, website, and email marketing), users within a target audience gain a sense of familiarity and comfort, which often results in higher engagement and overall trust.

Designing imagery that speaks to your audience’s needs

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in the marketing industry, it can also be worth a new view, a share, like, or conversion. According to Facebook, visual content is far more favorable in the algorithm than is written content. Of course, written content does have a significant impact on the relevancy score and effectiveness of an ad; but, when the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, it’s important for an ad image to make a lasting impression. On Facebook (and Instagram), visual content is more likely to be the reason someone shares, remembers, or engages with a piece of content and is key to creating imagery that will compel your audience to react or act.

“But I have a lot of important information that is relevant to my audience, what if an image doesn’t do it justice?”

We hear you. Words and context matter. To help combat this, and now that Facebook has removed the 20% text overlay rule, you could add text to your image. But remember, the more text on an image, the less effective it becomes. The information you think the audience needs to convert doesn’t have to be the first thing they see on an ad. Save that information for the long-form written content on your site, your blogs, or your newsletters.

Formats and audiences

Two additional considerations for designing your ad creative are your formats and your audiences. Choosing or designing brand-centric graphics that cater to a target audience’s needs help foster a strong bi-directional connection between your offering and the audience. When people feel connected to and understood by a brand, they are more likely to take action.

And finally, the importance of formatting your content. Certain ad formats and ad placements are stronger choices than others depending on both what a brand offers and what the campaign objective is. For example, 50.59% of web traffic in 2022 is generated from mobile devices so considering mobile placements when designing ads is important if you want to reach over half of all digital audiences.

Testing and reporting on Facebook Ads results

Testing and reporting are inevitable components of running a Facebook ad campaign. Without testing, marketers are left to rely on gut feelings or someone else’s experience that may not always work for them. As a result, marketers could end up washing most of their ad budget down the drain. Luckily, Facebook Ads testing and campaign reporting isn’t as tedious as one may think. By challenging variations in your Facebook ad performance, you can better understand both your target audience (their likes, their drives, what compels them, etc.) and if your design and copywriting efforts are translating to goals being met.

Beyond doing your own testing, Facebook has a feature that allows you to run ad relevance diagnostics. Ad relevance is a factor that Facebook utilizes to help show people the ads that are the most pertinent to them, which then leads to a better experience for people and better results for your brand. As listed out by Facebook, the three diagnostic categories they look at include:

• Quality Ranking: How your ads perceived qualities compares to the competition.
• Engagement Rate Ranking: The expected engagement compared to the competition.
• Conversion Rate Ranking: The expected conversion rate compared to the competition.

These diagnostic categories allow you to identify why ads aren’t meeting campaign objectives and can be used to determine what adjustments to creatives, landing page experience, or target audience need to be made. Here’s an article where you can learn more about ad relevance.

How to Navigate Facebook Ads in the New iOS 14.5 Reality

What does the iOS 14.5 update mean for digital marketing

“On April 20, 2021, Apple confirmed that the release of general availability of iOS 14.5 will begin next week and it will start requiring apps in the App Store to obtain permission to “track” users across apps and websites owned by third parties for advertising and measurement purposes through its AppTrackingTransparency framework.”

What do you call the opposite of a fan favorite? Whatever it is, Apple’s latest operating systems update iOS 14.5 is the response to hoards of people’s concerns and complaints around data privacy is drawing “boos” from marketers everywhere.

Apple’s reasoning behind this data privacy update was to protect their users—giving them more control over the data they choose to opt-in to share, and allowing Apple a way to provide transparency into how its users data is used. This latest update impacts how Facebook can collect and process conversion events, while also undermining the tools that help optimize target audiences and report on conversions. Additional effects of the privacy update include a reduced ability to personalize ads and report on performance through app and web-based conversion events.

With the limitation in how user information is exchanged between user devices and Facebook, we as marketers are now faced with prohibitive rules around specific data collection and sharing. Target audiences are now smaller and less effective than before, and campaign optimization potential is limited since web conversions are harder to track.

This all seems bleak, doesn’t it? The good news: marketers are tough. We find ways around obstacles, we are creatively strategic, and can adapt to changes on the fly. Luckily, Facebook and marketers alike have proactively started learning and applying workarounds to the Apple privacy updates.

Facebook’s workaround suggestions to the iOS 14.5 update

It may seem obvious, but Facebook is no more a fan of the Apple update than marketers are. Just like your brand, they’re affected by the limitations this update provides. Thankfully, Facebook has invested in privacy-enhancing technologies to help explore advertising solutions that process aggregated data for performance reporting and measurement. According to Facebook’s resource documents on the issue, they’ve listed out several recommendations for marketers in response to this privacy act update:

For app advertising:

• Set up the conversion schema in Events Manager.
• Plan to create iOS 14 app install campaigns specifically for advertisers running ads on apps.
  • Note that these campaigns are no longer available for Reach & Frequency Buying.
• Mobile app custom audiences for inclusion are no longer available.
• The ability to send people to a custom view after an app install is no longer supported.

For web advertising:

• Verify your domains in Facebook Business Manager.
• Set up & prioritize up to 8 web events per domain in Events Manager.
• Take care to note the reduction in attribution window timeframes – Facebook is no longer supporting long attribution windows (i.e. 28-day lookback is no longer supported).
  • 28-day attribution and 7-day view-through attribution are no longer supported.
  • 7-day click-through attribution will remain supported.
• Be aware that the ability to measure the impact of Facebook and another publishers advertising through the Cross-publisher conversion lift tool is no longer supported. Finding a tool that allows for cross-platform analysis is something that any marketer should strongly consider moving forward.

“We believe industry collaboration is critical to arriving at solutions that work for all stakeholders — not just a single company. We continue to work with our customers, privacy advocates and industry groups such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM) and World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) to develop and implement new standards that further protect people’s privacy, while keeping content free for people and enabling businesses to grow.”

Problem-solving in Facebook to make up for iOS 14.5

As mentioned above, marketers are a “pivoty” breed. Because of that, we’ve come up with ways to work with the iOS 14.5 update rather than against it. Below, we’re outlining four ways you can problem-solve with Facebook Ads campaigns to compensate for tracking restrictions.

Utilize UTM parameters and Google Analytics to track goals

With the addition of three new UTM parameters, Google has made it easier to enable detailed online traffic tracking through the use of UTM parameters (read more about how to best use UTM parameters here). Google Analytics isn’t restricted to only Google-based platform ad data, marketers can utilize Google Analytics to set up Goals and track user interactions from their Facebook paid ads efforts. Learn how to set up goals here.

Explore alternative audiences (re-engagement users and first-party data)

Re-engagement audiences are great for targeting users who have interacted with your brand on Facebook in the past. This could be users who have viewed your business page, watched a video on your page, or engaged in some way with your past ads or content. These audiences can be useful, particularly in consideration and conversion campaigns, due to the fact that they are targeting users who are already familiar with your brand or business.

Audiences based on first-party data are also great for targeting previously engaged users. This data typically comes from user data collected via subscriptions or sign-ups. These are users who have agreed to receive information from your brand, it’s important to think about how you personalize your ad and targeting experience for each of these audiences so that you reduce the chance of users opting out and reducing your audience size.

To help build up these first-party audiences, consider what your inbound strategy looks like—do you have a value proposition that helps encourage newsletter sign ups or subscriptions? The better your value proposition is, the better chance you have of building up a strong first-party audience.

Personalize the ad experience using owned data

While contextualized and behavioral audiences segments will hold less weight with the iOS 14.5 update, there are workarounds. Using what you do know about your audience is key. Pulling from first-party data, customer feedback, email response rates and Organic social, marketers can take the data provided on these outlets and use it to develop a more personalized ad experience for their target audience.

With millions of ads in the marketplace, it’s important for brands to get as personal as possible with their ad creation to ensure their target audience’s eyes and interest are captured before their competitor.

Strategically target specific devices

To most iPhone users, it may shock you that Android users make up 85% of the market share among mobile devices. With this being said, breaking out the impression share so that more of your campaign efforts are targeting Android users is a way to work around the iOS 14.5 updates. Pivoting from mobile iOS user devices to desktop and Android mobile device users is a way marketers can get around the Apple privacy restrictions.

Set up the Conversion API in place of cookie tracking

In response to the iOS 14.5 update, Facebook launched the Conversions API tool in order to allow advertisers an alternative way to track advertising data. The Conversion API tool allows advertisers to collect data using server-side tracking versus browser-side tracking. How this works in compliance with the Apple privacy update is that the conversion API allows for a direct connection between your website and your ads. When a user clicks on the ad, a unique ID is generated, allowing you to collect data about your Facebook ads and user behavior while still protecting your customers identity and privacy through the unique ID.

Unified data can help navigate the tracking restrictions

Limited ability to track what your customers are doing online mean you have to use the data you have to its fullest potential. Ad data comes in all shapes, sizes, and even data languages, making it difficult to compare and analyze cross-platform performance. In a world that is restricting marketers from better understanding their customer, clean and easily comparable data should be free-flowing. Unified data allows you to clearly manage and analyze your data from multiple platform data-sources, eliminating any further mystery or confusion around how paid ads are performing or how their target audiences are responding and how to draw clear insights.

Joinr is a free tool that allows marketers to easily connect their Facebook and Google Ad data so that data sets from the different platforms can be unified and transformed into workable data that can be visualized in Google Data Studio.

Innovations to Incorporate into Your Facebook Ads Strategy

Best practices for setting up Facebook Ads Manager

Although under fire for concern over their privacy and transparency framework, there are 1.82 billion active users on Facebook daily. Yep, you read that right, 1.82 billion active users daily. Despite user concerns, there hasn’t been a significant decrease in the number of users signing up and using the app.

With 1.82 billion active users, Facebook reaches 2.14 billion users through their expansive Audience Network—an off-Facebook, in-app, advertising network for mobile apps allowing ads to reach customers using mobile apps and sites other than their own. With this many reachable users, brands need a stellar Facebook Ads strategy to effectively serve relevant ads to their target audiences.

But never fear, Facebook Ads Manager is here! During the ad set up stage in Facebook Ads Manager, there are now several optimization tools and features that can benefit both brands and users alike.

The optimize-text-per-person feature

According to Facebook, their algorithm automatically reviews an ads primary text, headline, and description when determining where and when to serve your ad to drive the highest yield. With the optimize-text-per-person feature, the Facebook algorithm automatically switches around primary, headline, and description text as necessary.

When you activate this feature, you’re allowing Facebook to optimize your creatives without moving a finger—basically letting you perform automated ad copy testing which in turn, helps you understand your customer base better. Using this feature also allows you to spend less time setting up campaign ad copy and more time strategizing and analyzing campaign performance and results.

The multi-text option feature

The multi-text option feature allows marketers to provide Facebook with a variety of text options to use on their ads. With the variety of text options, the Facebook algorithm then pre-determines which combination of texts will help a campaign hit its objectives more efficiently.

The elimination of the 20% text overlay rule

And there was great rejoicing throughout the land. Gone are the days of having to regulate the amount of text within an ads image. Facebook eliminated the 20% text overlay rule, allowing marketers to include (or continue to exclude) as much text as they wish on their Facebook ads.

However, be careful what you wish for. While this restriction has been eliminated, we recommend still incorporating this best practice into paid ad creation. Keeping text to a minimum will help you focus on what encourages users to engage with your brand versus what is being said. Users see anywhere from 1,000-4,000 digital ads a day, meaning they probably don’t take the time to read in detail what is being said. Therefore, grabbing the attention of your audience through impactful visual graphics is an effective way to drive users to your brand or site, where lengthy copy can then be leveraged to keep a user hooked and invested in learning more about your brand.

Optimize your Facebook Ads campaigns set-up

First we had Automated App Ads. Now, we have Advantage+ App Ads. When Facebook rebranded into Meta, they made a number of changes including consolidating five of their Advantage features into one Meta Advantage Suite. Within the Meta Advantage Suite, marketers have access to Advantage Lookalike, Advantage Detailed Targeting, Advantage+ App Campaigns, Advantage+ Placements, and Advantage+ Creatives.

Whew. Say all of that five times fast.

The good news is that marketing budgets increased 6.4% from 2021. The bad news is that with this budget increase there comes an increase in the amount of work marketers have on their plates. For this reason, any platform, tool, system, or process that automates operations using machine learning, has our vote. With Facebook’s Advantage+ App tools, marketers can rely heavily on Facebook to deliver high performing creative to highly relevant audiences on the most effective placements using machine learning. The newly rebranded tools require fewer touchpoints from marketers during campaign set up, thus simplifying audience configuration and streamlining the creative management process. These tools also allow marketers more ways to optimize their campaigns, automatically test ads, reach more users in more places, and in turn run more efficient campaigns.

Stay up-to-date with Facebook brand safety & privacy

It’s safe to say that every marketer, globally, has spent the last year dreading the day that the iOS 14.5 updates by Apple were pushed live. In response to the operating system updates, Facebook and marketers alike have worked together to develop workarounds and alternative tools that help better understand their consumers and drive ROI despite the ever-increasing roadblocks. For marketers to succeed with their Facebook Ads strategy in 2022, they must adapt to these restrictions and learn how to navigate this new iOS 14.5 reality.

Back in March of 2022, Facebook (er Meta…that still feels weird to say) published updates to their brand suitability framework in regards to third-party verification and content-based controls for feed. Since 2019, brands have had the ability to easily create block lists, set account-level inventory filters, apply brand safety controls via DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, or OpenSlate, and apply content-level whitelisting across specific placements. Today, Facebook has expanded their efforts towards transparent and accurate measurement of brand safety and suitability. These efforts help you better understand the type of content your ads will appear next to, allowing you to use content-based controls to make informed decisions that protect your brand while helping to reach your marketing goals.