Facebook Ads’ Failure and Hope For the Future
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.
Nice post cakes. It really is such a bone-headed maneuver to so blatantly provide suck at the very thing that is the center of your business model.
Hopefully times are a changin.
Sick info! Thanks dude.
BTW, your catcha is bugged. It has errors the first time you try to comment.
I wasted enough time with FB. No dealings with them until they change their policies.
Epic thread A+++ Would read again
Funny post Nicky.
I agree, I never understood why companies make it hard to give them money. I too had several ads not approved for various reasons. They should be thanking people for paying for those crappy looking homemade ads.
It’s only gonna get worse I would think. They’re tryign to taylor it to get releveant, non-spammy ads, to be viewed to the right people.
This keeps their users happy because they don’t get ads that have nothing to do with them or sucker them in. And they can charge more, and have more demand, because the results will be there.
You can already see that they are getting better at it. Grassroots campaigns are showing up everywhere. The only stuff that gets through is legit or semi-legit (or cloaked.)
It’s not gonna get any easier.
good post. facebook has a lot of work to do definitely. i would say their biggest problem is the UI. its so bad. i want to be able to create 3 sets of ad copy, and target it to every age group (18-24,25-33, 34-39 etc) with just a few clicks. i should be able to create hundreds of ads in 30 minutes…like we can with adwords desktop. if they can’t figure out how to do it through their site, they need a desktop tool.
Good Stuff. Hopefully the “Cakes Effect” will get facebook off their asses and making some changes.
Agreed. Yahoo and G are much easier to get stuff in, and that traffic actually BUYS THINGS. Fb users only want FREEBIES…
Limits the offers to shit offers, which FB doesnt want in the 1st place. Imagine if the users actually spent money….like PPC users do…
Props.
I have to agree with you, especially when it comes to the approval process. I’ve created ad campaigns before, which were not spam/sex/p3n1s related and I’ve waited 24 hours to hear back from them saying that they’re not accepting the advert. It’s impossible to work like this when it takes up to 36hrs to report back to a client to explain that an advert is not approved.
I’m pretty sure the FB guys will make progress with this, looking at the system, the ad management is relatively new still.
Good post Cakes!
I was under the impression that MySpace still got more traffic then FaceBook.
When I first started with FB, I had a problem getting my bank card approved and it took over 3 weeks of going back and forth with them to get set up, with their email responses taking at least 2 or 3 days. Plus the ad approval system is horrible.
Sooner or later (maybe sooner than later) Facebook is going to have to start earning REAL money, when that happens all this will change.
Its just because its run by students..They really need to refine it though because as you said myspace ads kill them right now.
if you just reply to the disapproval ad notice but send it to support@facebook.com they will reply back within 24 hours with a little bit more information on why it was rejected. It is usually no better than the automated rejection but they do respond to support emails.
I really get pissed though when i copy an approved and running ad and then they reject it. The approval of ads is a huge pain.
I’ve spent thousands a day on fb and their inconsistency is a joke. Not too mention they seem to deny ads that snould never get denied. I personally recommend staying away from fb and social media advertising. Campaigns take much more work to manage than search/content campaigns and they don’t last near as long.
fackers need to get consistent on what they chose to approve. you can clone/copy an ad that’s already appearing and yours will get ditched.
Can’t really say it’s any surprise.
Gotta see what the corp direction is and they usually move in that way – I dunno if it’s the case but Zuckerberg & Co might be focus on “branding” and “eyeball acquisition” to the detriment of monetization and advertising.
Remember how busted YSM used to be and continues to have some flaws?
All the while, they’re launching new portals which don’t really have much chance of success?
It’s pretty much the same-old, same-old in my books.
Nick
We are working on a partnership with FaceBook for our affiliate partners. We just had our first conf call and will have more info ASAP.
Will let you know asap first on what the dealio is!
I already know the “dealio”. I have a “partnership” with their sales staff as well, who have 0 control over approving ads, which is the problem. The most you’ll get is the ability to find out why your ads were disapproved, a week later.
Hopefully after seeing all the pissed off feedback from ASW Alex will loosen up the network a bit.
Good rundown of the issues though!