Meta Generously Offers To Build Your Landing Page For You Starting Wednesday, Regardless

MENLO PARK, Calif.—In what the company called a gesture of goodwill toward overworked marketers, Meta announced it would begin automatically building in-app product pages for eligible Facebook and Instagram ads on October 28, saving brands the trouble of deciding whether they wanted that.

“For years, brands have spent enormous sums designing beautiful landing pages, with their fonts, their promotions, their carefully tested hero images,” said Gavin Thorpe, a performance-marketing consultant who manages ads for 40 direct-to-consumer brands and one very persistent mattress. “Meta looked at all that and said, ‘What if none of it?’”

Under the change, a shopper who taps an ad may be shown a product page inside the app rather than the brand’s own site, a shift Meta says improved conversions in testing and marketers say they will learn about from a dashboard that has also been redesigned.

“You can opt out. There’s a toggle. It’s in the settings, under the other settings, behind a settings.”

Several brands said they were ‘cautiously optimistic,’ a phrase that in advertising means ‘we have no choice and are being filmed.’

At press time, Meta had offered to also write the brands’ quarterly reports, noting that it already had most of the numbers.