Some marketing managers and digital marketing news outlets will tell you: Generative AI is the biggest, best thing happening for our brands. They’ll talk about how great the new Facebook and Meta “improvements” are, all while collecting their checks or special discounts.
At Consultwebs, we work exclusively with attorneys and have been helping law firms grow for 27+ years. Here’s what you need to know about what Meta’s new placements test actually means for your law firm and a very specific upcoming issue that is going to pose a challenge to digital marketers.
What Are Meta Ads Placements?
These are the specific locations where your ad may appear to potential clients. 
What Changes Are Coming to Meta/Facebook Ads Placements?
- The removal of individual placements from ad sets.
- Removal of entire platforms (along with all of their placements).
- The option to limit ad delivery to mobile-only or desktop-only.
- The option to limit ad delivery to specific operating systems.
For advertising professionals, this change doesn’t come as an out-of-the-blue surprise. For years, Meta has been running many tests with the goal of automating as much of the ads process as possible. By doing this, they can entice new advertisers more easily to try ads. Meanwhile, seasoned marketers become more and more limited in their ability to manually set up campaigns. It’s also worth noting that these automations will learn and improve as the campaigns go on. This means that a portion of your budget is being used during the learning phase and potentially wasting ad spend.
What Does This Mean for My Law Firm?
Let’s strip away the technical jargon and discuss what these changes mean for your law firm. In the legal industry, we rely on high quality, refined audiences, especially for lead advertisements. We aim to reach potential clients in need of services at precisely the right time (and place.)
The Challenges
- Lead Quality – Due to placement options being removed at the ad set level, this is likely to decrease quality. Placements are where people can view your ad, like feeds, stories, search, and more. In-app games are a notoriously horrendous budget eater that rarely (if ever) produce conversions for legal marketing.
- Wasted Time – Marketers and intake that qualify these leads may have to spend more time sorting through the spam or unqualified users.
- Disruption to Mobile and Desktop – The freedom to send your ad only to users who are on mobile will be gone. This was a helpful tool for targeting potential clients in the heat of the moment, or in certain locations for geo-fencing ads during events. We also lose desktop targeting, which was useful for lead ads, and helped ensure people were in more of a position to fill out forms. (There tends to be a higher likelihood of them filling forms on desktop than mobile.)
How Your Law Firm Can Prepare Now
While these changes sound frustrating, Consultwebs is no stranger to rapid adjustments to platforms. One of the perks of being a dinosaur in the marketing world is that we know how to pivot and adapt. We suggest researching and experimenting with the following alternative solutions.
Remove Placements Account Wide
Go to your ad account settings and toggle on the option that your business can only advertise on specific placements. Unselect the ones you want to remove for your whole account. Instead of an ad set control, you can now access it at a broader account level. Be sure to make this change, or you’ll be locked into being unable to change placements within a campaign.
Value Rules
You can adjust bids for placements using value rules. They allow you to tell Meta Ads which specific audiences, ad locations, or types of sales are worth the most money to your business. Instead of running separate campaigns for different targets, you can combine them into a single campaign that automatically focuses your budget on the highest-paying opportunities. It is a newer feature that can be set up directly in Meta Ads Manager.
Alternative Ad Types
The most affected ads are lead ads. Traffic ads running to a form-fill contact page might be a good solution. If the above alternative options aren’t working for your firm, this is a viable experimentation as a backup plan worth giving a try.
Consultwebs’ Thoughts on the Matter
We’re going to continue seeing this pattern of Meta eliminating more and more manual controls. They’ve said for years that their goal is to make the entry for running advertisements easier by implementing AI workflows and systems.
Straight from the horse’s mouth in a video interview, Mark Zuckerberg said: “AI is actually probably gonna be able to find who is gonna be interested in your product better than you can.”
However, our team has worked hands-on in Ads Manager running experiments and tests with data– and they’re skeptical. The statement (and many features introduced lately) feels very out of touch.
The next feature that is likely to be hit will be the detailed targeting. It’s already been slashed and cut to bits year after year, along with the push of advantage+ audiences.
We are likely to see even more AI automations come to ad creatives as well, which have improved vastly in terms of actual ad designs. When you provide it with a fantastic base image, it does a good job of creating several similar ones that catch different audiences’ attention. And while the images may look good, the likelihood of them generating something nearly identical for other advertisers is high. Then we run the risk of becoming a small wave in the sea of the same.
At Consultwebs, we work to make our clients memorable and stand apart from their competitors, with the help of real human designers. Generative AI excels in ideation and creating workflow efficiencies, but it can never have an original human thought. Only regurgitated concepts.
Hopefully, after this article, you understand why Meta’s advertising AI dreams are a brand manager’s nightmare, and feel more prepared for the upcoming changes.
