Posted on December 19th, 2008 in Facebook, Retards
If you're tired of refreshing this page every day like a d-bag, you should probably subscribe to the RSS feed.
Well, it looks as if Facebook’s anal ad policies are, indeed, biting them in their collective asses. Facebook’s value estimate has dropped almost 90% since last fall to $2 billion. Granted, the estimate last year was inflated due to microsoft’s buy-in, but still, the company is apparently not even profitable yet. The recent ad policy changes certainly aren’t helping them make more money.
Over the last several weeks, the Facebook Ads COPS team have committed to disabling pretty much every ad on the site that advertises a commercial product, especially anything to do with losing weight. They had already long ago banned things like ringtones, dating (well they haven’t banned dating but they’ve put enough draconian restrictions on it to make it not worth spending the money), scholarships, anything that collects a users information, any ads that have the color orange in them, etc… They claim that these changes create a better user experience which will keep more people on the facebook site, and that sites like myspace who have much less restrictive policies are losing users because of the ads. It’s pretty safe to say that pretty much nobody stopped using myspace because of ads.
Anyway, these new policies are losing facebook tons of money, probably millions a week. Where are those unused advertising dollars going? Their competitors.
So what happens? Their company sinks like a stone even though their membership is growing astronomically. This is what happens when you put a bunch of no-skill ivy leaguers in charge of your company. GUESS WHAT GAIZ….YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO BE PROFITABLE TRYING TO GET GARAGE BANDS TO ADVERTISE WITH PPC, SORRY!
They prolly won’t even send cakes a gift basket for the millions he generated them in revenue this year by writing about their ad system. Not that they could afford it anyway, M I RITE?
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on November 25th, 2008 in Facebook
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 //
It’s been a while since Cakes posted the super-popular gaming campaign (read: Still Can’t Make Money With Facebook Ads?) which consistantly gets hits every day despite that campaign being gone for months. So it seems like a good time to put another good one out there.
Almost every day someone PM’s Nickycakes asking if facebook ads are “dead.” Well, the answer is obviously no, since there are still plenty of people running ads. But yeah, it may be a little more difficult to turn a profit now than it was in the beginning when you could fill your $500 budget in an hour with 3 cent clicks, but certainly not impossible. Far from it.
Anyway, here’s pretty much everything you need to know to get started with this one. Enjoy, run it while it lasts:
[Alright, at the advertisers request, this post is being edited. You're on your own to find a UK mobile crush offer. Sorry guys! Looks like cakes readers ran so much traffic to the landing page and they couldn't handle it. Suggestion to them: Shell out $300 a month for decent hosting and stop complaining about people trying to throw money at you, idiots.]
Apparently, it’s working great on socialmedia as well. For socialmedia, since the ad guidelines are much more relaxed, you’ll want to make an ad that looks like one of those tried and true “You have (3) new crush messages!!” or something along those lines, which seems to work wonders for the naive teen myspace crowd.
Peeps are reporting $1k/day profits with this already, so jump on before it dies.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on July 22nd, 2008 in Facebook
Well, Nickycakes managed to get his hands on these a little early, so enjoy! Sorry for the formatting, but its copy/pasted and the Cakes is far too lazy to format it properly. This is why your ads keep getting rejected:
Summary of Policy Changes
1. Personalized ads
• You can only use profile attributes (age, gender, location) in an advertisement if it is directly relevant to the offering (e.g., a legitimate survey needing females age 25-30). Prohibited ad text includes ‘Single at 32?’, ‘Overweight at 30?’, ‘Balding at 35?’, ‘Age 25 Product Testers’, where age is completely irrelevant to the ad/offer.
2. Health ads (weight loss, hair loss, plastic surgery, etc)
• Cannot imply that the user the ad is targeted to has a health condition (e.g., cannot say “Do you need to lose weight?”, “Balding?”)
• Ads cannot depict a state of health as being the perfect or desired state of health (e.g, you cannot imply there is a perfect body weight by using an image of a person’s abs/small waist)
• Cannot depict a health condition in a negative light (e.g., cannot use an image of an overweight individual for a weight loss product or someone going bald for a hair loss prevention product)
• May not insult a user (e.g., cannot say or imply fat, bald, overweight, hair loss – all wording must be neutral to positive, e.g. ‘Propecia helps grow back hair quickly and safely.’, ‘Jenny Craig teaches safe and effective diet habits’.)
• May not encourage someone to lose an unhealthy amount of weight in a short period of time (e.g., ‘lose 11 pounds in 9 days’); should not use images to depict changes in health state that are unlikely (e.g., really obese person becoming a very slender person)
• Weight-loss ads may not be targeted to users under the age of 18
3. Money making opportunity/freebie ads
• Ads that position a money making opportunity as a job alternative are prohibited (e.g., Earn $100/hour answering surveys)
• ‘Get rich quick’ and other money making opportunities that offer compensation for little or no investment, including money making schemes positioned as alternatives to part-time or fulltime employment (get rich quick, data entry, work from home, non-legit surveys, non-legit product testing)
• If an ad includes a price, discount, or ‘free’ offer, the advertisement must clearly state what action or set of actions is required to qualify for the offer. (e.g. - sign up for 3 sponsored offers, invite 8 friends, etc – should not be vague at all)
4. Adult content
• Mandatory 18+ targeting for provocative or adult content. This includes, but is not limited to adult topics such as contraception, sex education, and health conditions.
5. ‘Anti’ ads
• Cannot advocate against any organization, person, or group of people, except for people running for public office (e.g., no anti-Israel ads)
6. Dating ads
• All dating ads must be targeted to a specific gender and sexual preference (e.g., Females ‘Looking For’ Men) and will continue to be required to target ‘single’ people, 18+.
Facebook Advertising Guidelines
Updated on July 21, 2008
Advertising Philosophy
The core of the Facebook brand is our user experience, and this experience is continually
reinforced by our product’s distinct look & feel, functionality, personality, and utility.
Because Facebook strives to make our product useful, everything that exists within the
site should conform and contribute to the overall Facebook user experience, including
advertising.
Facebook is committed to protecting our user experience by keeping the site clean,
uncluttered, and free from intrusive advertising. We believe that we can help transform
existing advertising on Facebook into tailored messages to our users, because they are
based on how their friends interact and affiliate with the brands, music artists, and
businesses they care about.
Facebook provides the following guidelines to help you communicate more effectively
with your desired audience. Please note that all advertising placed within Facebook must
adhere to these guidelines, and Facebook reserves the right to reject any advertising that
we deem contrary to our ad philosophy. These guidelines are also subject to change at
any time. Facebook may waive any of these guidelines at its discretion.
Advertising Guidelines
NOTE: In addition to the guidelines below, all advertising on Facebook must comply
with our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
1. Accounts
• Advertisers are not permitted to manage multiple online advertising accounts.
• Advertisers must not programmatically automate the creation of accounts or ads.
2. Landing pages / Destination URLs
• Ads that contain a URL or domain in the body must link to that same URL or
domain.
• All users must be sent to the same landing page when the ad is clicked.
• Landing pages that generate a pop-up (including “pop-overs” and “pop-unders”)
when a user enters or leaves the page are not allowed.
• Landing pages cannot use “fake” close behavior (ie. when a user clicks the ‘close’
icon on the page, the page should close down and no other behavior should
result).
• Landing pages cannot utilize “mouse trapping” whereby the advertiser does not
allow users to use their browser “back button” and traps them on their site and/or
presents any other unexpected behavior (for example: navigation to another ad or
page).
• No ad may require viewers clicking on the ad to submit personal information
(phone numbers, physical addresses, email addresses, etc.) on the landing page or
in the ad , except to enable an ecommerce transaction and when the ad and
landing page clearly indicate that a product is being sold.
• A secure server connection (https) must be used when collecting personal
information from users.
• Ads and landing pages cannot contain Facebook trademarks or logos, or otherwise
reference Facebook in the content of the landing page or its URL.
3. Ad copy
• Ads must directly relate to the content on the landing page.
• Ads must clearly state and represent the company, product, or brand that is being
advertised.
• Ads may not utilize a user attribute, such as age, gender, or location, unless it is
directly relevant to the offer.
• Ads may not insult a user.
4. Grammar, sentence structure, spelling, and spacing
• Ad text must be grammatically correct and contain proper sentence structure. All
ad text must be in complete sentences.
• Ads may not include excessive repetition (such as “buy, buy, buy”).
• Ads must use correct spelling.
• Ad text must contain grammatically correct spacing.
5. Capitalization
• Ads must use proper, grammatically correct capitalization.
• Ads may not include excessive capitalization (such as ‘FREE’) or incorrect
capitalization (such as capitalizing the first letter of every word in a sentence).
• The first letter of all proper nouns should be capitalized. Acronyms may be
capitalized.
• The title of the ad, as well as the first word in each sentence, must begin with a
capital letter.
6. Punctuation
• Ads must include logical, correct punctuation.
• Repeated and unnecessary punctuation (such as ‘Buy now!!!’) is not permitted.
• All complete sentences (including if the ad title is a complete sentence) must end
with a single punctuation mark. Ending a sentence with ellipses, dashes, etc is not
permitted.
• Exclamation points may not be used in the title of any ad.
7. Symbols
• The use of all symbols, numbers, or letters must adhere to the true meaning of the
symbol.
• Repeated and unnecessary symbols are not permitted.
• Symbols may not be used:
1. To substitute for letters (e.g. “$ave” instead of “save”).
2. To substitute for entire words (e.g. “&” instead of “and” or “$” instead of
“cash/dollars/money”).
3. As unnecessary abbreviations to shorten character count (e.g. “w/” instead
of “with” or “@” instead of “at”).
• Symbols may be used:
1. If the symbol is part of the product or brand name.
2. If the $ symbol is paired with a dollar amount (e.g. “Save $100 today”).
3. If the # symbol is used for comparative phrases (e.g. “Voted the #1 site by
NY Times”).
8. Language and adult content
• Provocative images will not be accepted.
• Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote adult content, including nudity, sexual
terms and/or images of people in positions or activities that are excessively
suggestive or sexual.
• Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote offensive, profane, vulgar, obscene, or
inappropriate language.
• Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote defamatory, libelous, slanderous
and/or unlawful content.
9. Prohibited Content
We do not accept advertising referencing, facilitating or promoting the following:
• Tobacco products
• Ammunition, firearms, paintball guns, bb guns, or weapons of any kind
• Gambling, including without limitation any online casino, sports books,
bingo, or poker
• Ringtones
• Software downloads, freeware, or shareware
• Scams, illegal activity and/or illegal contests, pyramid schemes, or chain
letters
• Uncertified pharmaceutical products
• Adult friend finders or dating sites with a sexual emphasis
• Adult toys, videos, or other adult products
• Web cams or surveillance equipment
• Web-based non-accredited colleges that offer degrees
• Inflammatory religious content
• Politically religious agendas and/or any known associations with hate,
criminal and/or terrorist activities
• Political content that exploits political agendas or uses “hot button” political
issues for commercial use regardless of whether the advertiser has a political
agenda
• Hate speech, whether directed at an individual or a group, and whether based
upon the race, sex, creed, national origin, religious affiliation, marital status,
sexual orientation or language of such individual or group
• Content that advocates against any organization, person, or group of people,
with the exception of candidates running for public office.
• Content that depicts a health condition in a derogatory or inflammatory way or
misrepresents a health condition in any way.
• “Get rich quick” and other money making opportunities that offer
compensation for little or no investment, including money making schemes
positioned as alternatives to part-time or full-time employment.
10. Targeting
• Ads for dating sites, services, or related content must follow these targeting
criteria: (i) the Relationship Status targeting parameter must be utilized and set to
Single, (ii) the Sex targeting parameter must be utilized and a single value of
Male or Female must be selected, (iii) the Age targeting parameter must be
utilized and the age range selected must start at least 18 years old, (iv) the
Interested In targeting parameter must be utilized and a single value of either Men
or Women must be selected.
• Ads with adult themes, including contraception, sex education, and health
conditions must be targeted to individuals at least 18 years old.
11. Facebook references
• Ads are not permitted to mention or refer to Facebook, its site or its brand in any
manner, including in the title, body, image, or destination URLs.
• Ads must not use Facebook logos, trademarks, or site terminology (including
Facebook, The Facebook, FacebookHigh, FBook, FB, Poke, The Wall, and other
company graphics, logos, designs, or icons).
• Facebook site features may not be emulated.
12. Ads for Alcoholic Beverages
• Ads must all be targeted to people 21 years old or older in the US, 19 years old or
older in Canada, 18 years old or older in the UK, and 21 years old or older
everywhere else. All Facebook Pages viewer restrictions must be set at 21+
regardless of the country they are in or targeted to. In the case where a user’s age
cannot be determined, the ad cannot be displayed to the user in question.
• It is recommended that the ad creative contain text that promotes drinking
responsibility. Acceptable examples include ‘Drink Responsibly’ and ‘Drink
Smart.’
• No ad should include content that might appeal to (or mislead) minors by
implying that the consumption of alcoholic beverages is fashionable or the
accepted course of behavior for those who are underage.
• No ad creative promoting alcoholic beverages should include any person under
the age of 21 or be suggestive of the presence of minors.
• Ads may not portray or promote intoxication. Ads should not induce people to
consume alcohol in excess, make references to the intoxicating effects of alcohol,
depict activities that encourage excessive consumption or that encourage drinking
at a rapid rate, or suggest the strength of the alcoholic beverage being advertised.
• Ads may not promote any giveaways as a reward for purchasing the alcoholic
product
13. No incentives
• No ad may offer incentives to viewers for clicking on the ad, for submitting
personal information (cell phone numbers, social security numbers, physical
addresses, email addresses, etc.), or for performing any other tasks.
14. Prices, discounts, and free offers
• No ad may be deceptive or fraudulent about any offer it makes.
• If an ad includes a price, discount, or ‘free’ offer, the destination URL for the ad
must link to a page that clearly and accurately offers the exact deal the ad has
displayed.
• If an ad includes a price, discount, or ‘free’ offer, the advertisement must clearly
state what action or set of actions is required to qualify for the offer.
15. Copyrights and trademarks
• In both ad text and image, you must not include any content that may be deemed
as infringing upon the rights of any third party, including copyright, trademark,
privacy, publicity or other personal or proprietary right, or that is deceptive or
fraudulent.
• Advertiser must have intellectual property rights to the creative and be permitted
to display such creative as advertising on the Facebook Site.
16. Spam
• No ad may contain, facilitate or promote ‘spam’ or other advertising or marketing
content that violates applicable laws, regulations or industry standards.
17. Downloads
• No ad is permitted to contain or link, whether directly or indirectly, to a site that
contains software downloads, freeware, or shareware.
• No ad is permitted to facilitate or promote (or contain a link to a site that
facilitates or promotes):
(1) Collection of demographic and usage information from a user’s
computer without the user’s express consent,
(2) Collection or request of usernames or passwords from any user,
(3) Proxying user names or passwords for the purpose of automating
logins to the Facebook site,
(4) Containing or distributing any software that (i) “sneaks” onto a user’s
system and performs activities hidden to the user, (ii) may alter, harm,
disable or replace any hardware or software installed on user’s
computer without express permission from the user, (iii) is bundled as
a hidden component of other software whether free or for fee, (iv)
automatically downloads without Facebook’s express prior approval,
(v) presents any download dialog boxes without a user’s express
action, or (vi) may violate or infringe upon the intellectual property
rights of any third party, including copyright, trademark, patent or any
other proprietary right
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on July 21st, 2008 in Facebook
Well it looks like facebook is releasing their new layout design today, which in turn means changes to facebook ads. If you’re already doing facebook ads, you probably already got this email:
Hi,
Thanks for advertising with Facebook. You may have already heard
that Facebook is about to get a new look aimed at making user
profiles simpler and more relevant. You can read more overall about
the new design here http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/press/releases.php?p=47448,
but let's also take a deeper look into what the new design means for you.
While the content on the site will remain the same, the new design
will shift the placement of ads on the site. Advertisers won't need
to make any changes to the ads they already have created in order
for them to appear on the new site design. The look of the ads will
remain the same, but they will be located in a different part of the page.
The most basic change that you'll notice is that ads will now appear
on the right side of Facebook pages instead of on the left. The new
placement integrates the ads into the new site design in a meaningful
way. As many as two ads may show at one time on any given page.
In addition to these changes, you will also see a new ad on the home
page. This new ad is located just to the right of the News Feed, and
will initially run a limited set of advertisers. As this space continues
to evolve and improve, we'll provide more details.
If you have questions about your advertising or how it might be affected
by the new design, please visit the Help Center at http://www.facebook.com/adshelp
or contact our team using the form located here: http://www.facebook.com/adscontact
As always, we welcome any feedback you might have to help us make
our advertising products as effective and useful as possible.
Enjoy the new design!
Sincerely,
The Facebook Ads Team
So what’s this mean? Well, it could mean one of two things right off the bat. Since the ads are in a different spot on the page, the CTR will likely change. If it’s a higher CTR then ads that have been running for a while will get the short end of the stick because the history of the ad has a lower CTR than the history of the newer created ads will. If the CTR is generally lower, then people who’ve been running ads for months will probably rape the competition.
Because there will be multiple ads per page, there will be more impressions to go around, but again, this might affect CTR, and probably for the worse.
Facebook is introducing a new ad spot for the homepage, which at first will be exclusive to select advertisers (probably the big cpm media buy guys), but it will be interesting to see if this spot is later made available to the self-serv ad guys as well..
Nickycakes hopes they introduce some new ad formats. The one they’ve been using since November kinda sucks and it would be fun to be able to use the entire ad space for a banner instead of some crappy text headlines. Hard to be creative with such a small graphic area to work with.
Also, just an update on the facebook ad “cannings.” People are still pissed. Almost nobody is able to get any ads approved, especially in the weight loss vertical. Apparently facebook will be releasing some new ad guidelines in the next couple days/weeks, especially as they pertain to weight loss products, so stay tuned for that obviously. The frustration is most accurately shown by an image recently left on wickedfire by cakes’ buddy i_love_c0ck:
Published by nickycakes //
