The Top Facebook News Updates for March 2019

Facebook apocalypse :- 

On March the 13th 2019, millions of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users were either unable to open their apps, or experienced a range of problems in loading pages, publishing new posts and/or interacting with others.

Many took to Twitter to figure out what was happening - since even Facebook’s own bug report platform, in which it discloses what services are down, had gone offline.

According to Facebook’s official statement, the shutdown was caused by server configuration changes.

“Yesterday, we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues, and as a result, many people had difficulty accessing our apps and services. We have resolved the issues, and our systems have been recovering over the last few hours. We are very sorry for the inconvenience and we appreciate everyone’s patience.”

Some conspiracy theorists speculated that it may have been caused by Facebook’s push to integrate all of its messaging platforms, or that it may even have been an attempt to cover up some malevolent activities, since prior to the shutdown there was a lot of focus on the current investigation into Facebook’s data deals.

There's little evidence to support these theories, but still, as with most things Facebook, there may have been an alternate explanation.

Facebook plans to replace Ad Relevance Score with new metrics

Facebook also announced that it'll be saying goodbye to its Ad Relevance Score process on the 30th of April. Facebook’s relevance score offered advertisers a level of insight into how well their ad may perform and was used as one part of the process to define ad reach. 

Ad Relevance Score will be replaced by several metrics that, according to Facebook, will be “more actionable”.

The new metrics coming into effect are:

• Quality ranking - Measures an ad’s perceived quality compared to ads competing for the same target audience
• Engagement rate - Shows an ad’s expected engagement rate compared to ads competing for the same audience
• Conversion rate ranking - Shows an ad’s expected conversion rates when compared to ads with the same optimization goals and audience.

In addition, Facebook's also changing up a bunch of other metrics related to ad performance, with the following categories to be updated:

• The Offers saved and Costs Per Offers Saved metrics will be united under the Post Saves metric. The new Post Saves metric will measure the number of times your ad was saved, including all Offer Ad saves, and will count the post saves that occurred on or after February 4, 2019.
• Messaging replies and Cost Per Messaging replies are being replaced by 'New Messaging Connections' and 'Messaging Conversations Started'. This will put the focus on new connections that can be interpreted as leads by your marketing team.
• Mobile app purchase ROAS and web purchase ROAS will now be combined into a general 'Purchase ROAS' metric.