Posted on November 25th, 2008 in Facebook
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Anyone who has been using Facebook Social Ads for a while knows first hand how bad their system is, and how utterly retarded some of the decisions they have made are, especially considering they have been up and running for over a year and still haven’t corrected some of these simple inadequacies that would MAKE THEM MUCH MORE MONEY.
Billing Issues -
There are 2 major billing issues that Facebook Ads have. First, their incremental raising of daily limits. When you start an account with them, they give you something like $50 a day limit to how much you can spend per day. Supposedly this is designed to prevent fraud, after all, if they can’t spend more than $50 a day, and they’re using a fake credit card or something, they can’t get away with much money. After hitting the $50 per day limit for a few days, your account is then raised to $100, and so on, until you get to the maximum limit of $1000. This can take up to a month.
Listen guys, if you want to prevent fraud, get rid of the daily cap on spending and CHARGE THE CARD WHEN THEY REACH $50 IN SPEND, and gradually raise the billing threshhold, not the daily spending cap. This is how most everyone else does it, including your advertising partner Microsoft. Whoever came up with the current system deserves to be hit in the face with a shovel. You’re literally making it MUCH harder for legitimate customers to spend money. Heck, Nickycakes was able to drop like $10k on myspace ads in the first 24 hours of it going live. He’d be happy to spend that money on facebook if they’d let him, but…alas.
Second billing issue is the forms of payment. There is no option to pre-pay. You can only post-pay with a credit card. No wire transfers, nothing. Some companies like Amex (which facebook didn’t even accept for a long ass time) don’t like to see 20k charges showing up every day, making wire transfers ideal.
Lack of Customer Service -
As mentioned earlier, Facebook ads customer service is fcking pathetic. For most of the entire first year, you could NEVER talk to anyone on the phone EVER about your account, even if you were spending 10k a day. NEVER. Even if you were able to get someone at their company on the phone, they’d just tell you that the social ads team doesn’t accept calls for any reason. No other company including google, msn, yahoo, myspace, etc, would ever let you spend more than 1k a month without putting someone in touch with you to see if theres anything they can do to help you improve your campaigns (spend more money). Not the case with facebook…they don’t want your money. Have a question about why all your ads were arbitrarily disapproved? Send them an email, you’ll get a cookie-cutter canned response sometime next Neveruary.
Ad (Dis)Approval Team and Guidelines -
This is the biggest problem they have right now, even larger than their retarded billing and budget system. Basically, they have this ambiguous set of rules you are supposed to follow when creating ads, that could potentially be interpreted to disallow target to make an ad for target.com. When you submit ads, you wait 5-12 hours for someone to look at your ad, see if they like it, and then approve or disapprove it. If it gets disapproved, you get a message telling you that you should never submit such an ad again or risk having your account banned, and you are given 2-5 possible VERY VAGUE reasons as to why the ad was unacceptable. Here’s the kicker, though: If you keep submitting your ad over and over, say 100 times, you’re likely to have one of those submissions approved. So as it stands right now, the best way to do things is to either write a script to keep submitting ads, or just hire people to submit hundreds a day. Eventually the interns in charge end up approving one which you can then just copy ad-nauseum until it gets disabled 2 months later. There is still absolutely NO way to contact the ad approval team directly to find out what you can do to change your ads to get them approved or anything. Seriously, you guys should be making it AS EASY AS POSSIBLE for your customers to get ads approved within your guidelines, assuming you like being profitable.
Right now, Nickycakes can go to google/msn/yahoo/myspace/any number of 2nd tier sites, and advertise virtually any product he wants, and that’s exactly what he does rather than waste time submitting facebook ads all day which will be inevitably denied while others are running identical ads for identical products already on facebook with no problems. Actually, you can remove yahoo from that list…they have awful customer service, which is why they’re going under. FB, you need to not only make the rules clear, but hold everyone to the same standards. Otherwise advise everyone to hire someone to resubmit ads all day in hopes that you fuck up and accidentally approve one, since that seems to be what you want everyone to do.
Hope for the future -
Ok, please be advised that this is all UNCONFIRMED information that quite possibly be 100% fiction made up by Nickycakes. Just imagine an [allegedly] next to every sentence please.
So, there are [allegedly] some good changes in the pipeline at FB that may be happening soon:
First, they might be raising or getting rid of the daily spend limit BS, and implementing a system that the rest of the normal ad networks use for weeding out fraud. This would be nice if it happens. Also, the new sales people which are now handling the larger spending accounts may be getting their own ad approval people, or be given the ability to approve ads themselves, which would streamline the hell out of the process of getting new ads up and approved. They may also be looking into expanding to other ad formats, like banners and skyscrapers, like myspace did when they launched their product. It sure would be nice to be able to break out of the unconventional 110×80 tiny image format that everyone’s been forced into for a year.
Pretty much what it boils down to is, the Facebook Social Ads platform has some really terrible functionality and some really stupid policies which are in place apparently in the name of better user experience and fraud prevention, but in the end, they completely fail at helping either of those, while at the same time making it MUCH harder for advertisers to spend money with them.
If any FB people end up reading this, be advised that you’re literally losing 10-20k per day just from Nickycakes for no other reason than the stupid ad approval team’s inconsistency. Honestly it’s going to be so embarassing for you when your earnings and myspaces earnings are published and even though you guys are getting more traffic, they’re completely destroying you in revenue.
Published by nickycakes //
As many of you know, “fulfillment issues” have been plagueing acai berry diet offers lately which have caused massive acai berry shortages in many south american countries. This is causing thousands of south american farmers to chop down their expensive cocaine plants and plant acai berry trees to fuel the huge demand brought on by stupid, insecure americans and canadians who believe eating some kind of blueberry suppliment will help them lose weight.
As you can see in the before/after pictures below, the same people harvesting cocaine are now growing Acai.
Before:
After:
Just look how much more gangsta they are standing behind their fresh bushels of acai berry. As affiliate marketers you can all keep your heads high and rest easy knowing that you’re doing your part in the war on drugs.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
How many times have you thought to yourself, “Self, I really wish I could rickroll all those other affiliates who click my ads and spy on my landing pages.” Thats exactly what Nickycakes was thinking yesterday when he wrote Anti-Aff, the latest in affiliate vs. affiliate rickroll technology.
So how does it work? Well, first you install the software on your server, or just use nickycakes’ hosted version. Then you put the tracking pixel in your forum signature on wickedfire, digital point, your affiliate related blog, pretty much any place that you know other affiliates will be viewing. The software will then build a list of everyone who loaded said pixel for future reference.
Now…on your landing page, you put a piece of javascript that goes to the database, sees if that person has viewed your tracking pixel at some point in time, meaning they are likely an affiliate and not a dumb girl who wants to lose weight by drinking green tea, and if so, redirects them to a rickroll.
If you would like to use Nickycakes’ hosted version that already has over 1000 recorded rickroll targets, feel free to put this code on your landing page (depending on your browser you may have to fix the quotes):
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://aff.dedicakes.com/hi.php”></script>
Before you load your landing page, make sure you whitelist yourself at the following url:
http://aff.dedicakes.com/whitelist.php
Pretty simple.
If you don’t trust nickycakes’ hosted version, feel free to download the code and install it on your own server:
antiaff
Update: Tobsn was nice enough to completely re-code and optimize this thing making it even more leet. Please download it here.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on November 18th, 2008 in Funny, Retards
For those who have been following along with Nickycakes.com for the past year or so if its existence, you’re well familiar with the frequent posts about people, companies, services, etc, who are complete jokes. If you need a refresher course, feel free to read these awesome writeups on Ubercamp, Affspy, Izea Ranks, and Make Money Online Blogs.
Some argue that these kinds of posts only serve to bring more attention to the idiots out there, but Nickycakes feels like he would be doing the industry a huge disservice by not exposing complete douchebags for who they really are.
So who is Ryan Eagle? Honestly, this is one person who doesn’t really need much “exposing” for people to realize he’s a douchebag. The only problem is that he’s pretty much a complete nobody, so not many people have had the opportunity to get lots of laughs at this guy’s expense yet. Thats where the Cakes comes in. Rather than doing a long write-up about why this guy is a retard, Nickycakes is just going to give you a short story and then just present you with a bunch of self-explanitory screenshots and short narration that should paint a decent picture for you.
The story: Ryan Eagle jumped on the weight loss product bandwagon a little late and copied other peoples landing pages to make his own (pretty common these days, and not really the point) and ended up being lucky enough to have his site featured on TMZ for using kim kardashian’s image and name to promote his products. When people made fun of him on wickedfire forums, and exposed him for being a douche, rather than laugh it off like pretty much any normal person would do when made fun of by people on an internet forum, he decided to cry himself to sleep and take things to the next level. At ad:tech ny, the dude [allegedly] walked up to maks67 from wickedfire with his internet marketing gangsta’ swagger, which can also be described as swaying back and forth as much as possible to pretend like you’re swinging a giant non-existant chain around your neck which actually just makes people notice how unnaturally large your head is compared to your bird chest body. Apparently he was upset that maks had poked fun of him on the forums, and, backed up by 2 of his friends, [allegedly] proceeded to talk some sort of trash to him. Maks laughed in the dudes face and walked away, which is to be expected from any level-headed person when presented with such douchebaggery.
After hearing about this later on that evening, Cakes had no choice but to make fun of the kid on wickedfire as well. He was then contacted by Ryan Eagle himself, who asked things along the lines of “why you hatin’, yo” and, “i make a lot of money, just ask AO JON, he’s rich too” (keep in mind aojon…aka jon fisher…owner of wickedfire.. is one of nickycakes’ great personal friends and barely even has any idea who this kid is). After explaining to Mr. Eagle that his best bet was to stop taking the internet so seriously, Cakes was then contacted by one of Ryan’s e-thug friends who also had questions about why Nickycakes was “hatin’” since “you don’t even know me, yo”. They had many inquiries about how much Cakes makes per day, etc…which pretty much anyone with half a brain knows isn’t really disclosed too often, because frankly, it doesn’t matter to anyone but Cakes.
Ok, story pretty much over… now time for Nickycakes to let Ryan Eagle own himself:
This is pretty telling, here’s a pic on the front page of his “blog” where he had someone make a picture of him standing in front of a sparkling car and a giant pile of whats supposed to be money but looks more like green paperback novels, holding a stack of papers, wearing a shiny watch, a…pointer ring… and sporting bull cut more retarded looking than jim carrey in dumb and dumber…
Really,…Hopefully you didn’t pay too much for that, kid.
Here’s one from a blog post where he’s bragging about his awesome new ring and his bling bling watch. Listen…if you’re going to buy a watch with diamonds on it, save up your money and get something nice, not a $500 pile of crap from a girls watch company. Have some self respect man.
Here’s a screenshot from his myspace:
Oh…and…25543 friends? Hopefully you paid someone to add all those people…..
Here’s his pic from his hi5 profile:
And just some random other pictures that are good for a few laughs:
All sortsa stuff wrong with that suit, good lord.
Honestly, Nickycakes couldn’t even make this stuff up if he tried.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on November 18th, 2008 in General
After roughly 4 solid weeks of vacation to various spots, Nickycakes is back home and back to work. This means more posting, hopefully.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
