Facebook is updating its Messenger products to align with new privacy rules in Europe. This change will impact businesses globally that use Messenger ads products in the European Economic Area (EEA) and will result in some features being unavailable.
Starting November 16, 2020 and rolling out gradually through early December, several of our Messenger and Instagram products will be unavailable for advertisers in the EEA and for any campaigns globally targeting people in the EEA, including:
- Ability to optimize for Conversations in the Messages and Conversions objectives.
- Lead generation features for ads that click to Messenger.
- Sponsored messages.
- Messaging metrics for ads reporting & insight for messages.
- Engagement Custom Audiences based on people who have messaged a Page or Instagram business profile (and Lookalike Audiences based on these Engagement Custom Audiences).
Facebook encourages you to update any campaigns that uses messaging features listed above to alternative options.
- If your business objective is to generate leads, lead ads will continue to be available via the leads objective.
- If your business objective is to drive sales and they have a pixel- or CAPI-enabled website, conversion ads will continue to be available via the conversion objective.
- If your goal is to start conversations with potential customers, ads that click to Messenger and Instagram will continue to be available.
- The messages objective will continue to be available with the ability to optimize for Link Clicks, which will optimize delivery for clicks of the “Send Message” CTA.
- For Ads Manager: For those running campaigns in ads that Click to Messenger or Instagram optimized for Conversations or Leads, switching to other available optimizations may lead to a decline in performance.
- For non-EEA advertisers running multi-country campaigns that includes EEA consumers, we suggest splitting EEA consumers into a separate campaign before changes go live. For this separate campaign targeting EEA consumers, we encourage considering the alternative options that remain available (mentioned above).
Many advertisers will know they will be requied to make some changes, if they have received this message in their Facebook ad manager
"This ad set can't run because it uses an optimisation that is not currently available in Europe. You can still run ads that click to message with a different optimisation, or without European locations. Changes to your ad set may affect performance."
