Would love to talk Facebook and Instagram ads moderation strategy!

We respond to most ad comments as part of our Online Reputation Team. If they are off-topic, we may hide them. 

I do not feel our performance improves with response. We are hospitality and real estate. This will likely vary in the retail side. 

We do a ton of Meta ads and always respond to comments when they are real questions/comments. However, I’d say 90% of our ad comments are just complete spam or trash or trolls (we’re a nonprofit, so we can get into spirals where folks in the comments just critique the nonprofit industry or get mad about a specific nonprofit unrelated to us or ask for personal help for their GoFundMe). 

For the ones that are real, they fall under a number of specific categories so we’ve created pre-made responses in Sprout Social to use. We have noticed that for ads where comments are great and productive, they do seem to do much much better when we’re helping folks out actively. Conversely, the trash comments also tend to keep getting negative comments and bad attention even though we don’t respond at all and hide the worst. 

It probably depends on your audience though. Here’s what I’d do:

• Run two ads that are identical for a low cost (like $20 or whatever is considered low for you) that have a CTA that inspires comments
• Reply to all comments on one test and not the other
• Assess the results based on the time it takes to respond, the amount of growth it adds or doesn’t, and quality of interactions

I am responsible for responding to comments on our paid ads and my interactions there definitely drive additional engagement and sales. Our highest performing ads are the ones with lots of engagement in the comments. I work for a cookware company. I often end up posting links to educational content in the comments that support what’s being sold in the ads. Those links usually drive thousands of additional clicks. 

I respond to any questions or complaints. I only hide things if they are completely irrelevant, contain misinformation, or are inappropriate. I do not hide things just because they are negative as I feel that is a little dishonest. I find it’s better to address the issue rather than just hide it. I am usually able to flip their experience into a positive one. If somebody has a product complaint that requires extra attention I will sometimes I will move the conversation to DM’s via the Sprout Smart Inbox and leave a public comment letting them know I’ve sent a DM. It’s easier to keep track of that way.

We don’t get spam comments on our paid content often, but I have a lot of automated rules set up to automatically hide spam comments when they do happen. 

*Editing to add that I also track the sentiment of the ad comments and report feedback to other teams as needed. 

I just wanted to give a shout out to the importance of that moderation person/team in capturing insights, which can inform the optimization of the creative and targeting of the campaign itself.

We launched a new product in a category that has lower levels of awareness in the United States: paint protection film for vehicles. Our ads showed all the things that the product could help protect your car from, like rock chips, shopping cart scratches, bird droppings, tree sap, etc. In theory, that should have been really impactful. And if we just looked at the ad metrics, they looked okay. But the moderation folks who were engaging with the comments noticed something pretty critical: people didn’t always seem to understand what the actual product was. Was it someting you sprayed on the car? Was it a wax? Could you do it yourself? Worse yet, without understanding what the product was, some even commented that they thought it was a scam. Not good. That feedback led to us inserting a simple and very quick snippet of video at the start of the existing creative, showing the clear film being applied to the car to leave an invisible barrier. As soon as we made that change, the comments went from confusion to literally, “where can I find someone to do this for my car?”

It seems simple looking back, but if that moderation team had only been focused on needing a script for people claiming it was a scam, and not thinking about what we could do to prevent that thought from happening in the first place, we would have missed out on so much!

oops! double posted my reply, see below:

Thank you all for the engagement with this post! Yes, agree that there can be some valuable nuggets in between some of the noisier comments sections. In general, we can get a sense of some consumer sentiment around our product from price point to how well people understand our differentiating factors.

Our current policy is to respond to all “real” questions or pointed comments, then we try to like or thank folks who leave praise about our products, and we do end up hiding some comments that are just totally unnecessary we kind of say: this is our billboard, so we’ll keep it clean. Interesting that some of you have seen connection with ad performance and some haven’t… I’ve had a hard time truly measuring this myself. 

Specifically - what do you all think about the more recent limitations Facebook has imposed that don’t allow you to directly tag or @mention the person whose comment you’re responding to? It feels like wasted effort to respond to a genuine question and know that person will never be notified about it, though on the other hand I just hope that it may help the next person who reads it and sees our answer even if it doesn’t go to the original poster.