Facebook ads - what the f***?
I’ve been experimenting with Facebook ads for the last week or so. I’ve had some success but I’ve also been left scratching my head and wondering if I’m an unknowing participant in a very random beta trial.
The basics: you get to create an ad with a tiny headline (25 characters), a little image and a short sentence of copy. You set the maximum CPC and you pick your demographic targeting criteria and you’re off.
The pros: Ads are up and running within minutes. You can get near realtime statistics on impressions and clicks. You can change the max CPC and see an almost instant change in the rate at which your ad is shown.
The demographics targeting is really cool. I’m promoting a gift product and I’ve been able to create separate versions for men who are married, engaged or in a relationship with copy saying respectively “Buy this for your wife” , “Buy this for your fiancee” and “Buy this for your girlfriend”. These targeted ads have had higher click through ratios than non-targeted ones I ran for comparison.
The cons: sheer randomness on the stats. For starters you can view impression and clickthroughs for the last 24 hours, last 7 days or all time. Now, I don’t like this rolling 24 hour window. I want to see stats for today - as in, since midnight. It’s impossible to tell how close I’m getting to hitting my spending limit for the day when I’ve got two days stats rolled in together.
There’s also a daily stats screen which shows total impressions, clicks and costs for each day. This appears to be connected to Facebook’s random number generator. Right now its telling me I had 70-80 clicks per day at a cost of $0 each day. This morning it told me my 74 clicks had cost 91 cents. It’s also showing me a handful of impressions for today which is a different handful to the one in the stats screen in the paragraph above.
Meanwhile, there’s an account page which tells me I’ve been billed $5. It calls itself the Daily Invoices list but there aren’t any invoices to view, download or print which will doubtless cause chaos if the Revenue and Customs stop losing CDs long enough to want to audit my accounts. As yet, there’s nothing showing on my credit card statement so I don’t know if they’ve picked another random number to bill me.
Just to top it all off Facebook have taken a leaf out of Microsoft AdCenter’s book and decided to randomly reject one of my ads. Very helpfully I’m informed that it contravenes one of their terms and conditions but they can’t tell me which. There’s a few reasons why it might have been rejected depending on how pedantic or puritan they were feeling so I sent an email for clarification. The response : “Your ad was rejected by mistake. Sorry for the inconvenience”. No offer to reinstate the ad and no way to do it myself. I have tried recreating the ad and I’ve tried creating a slightly different version of the ad. It lets me do that but the ads don’t run. Meanwhile, several of my other ads, which had been running quite happily, have now stopped. Upping the CPC as high as 50c per click still won’t get them going. This another failing of the Facebook system - there’s no way of seeing what is the minimum CPC required to get your ads running.
All this is intensely annoying as the first day I ran these ads I made 150% ROI albeit on a very small budget.
If Facebook get their act together this could be a really useful ad platform but right now it’s very frustrating. For a one man business it might be possible to muddle through but for a bigger company that needs to have audited accounts the random approach to billing is just going to be a non-starter.
UPDATE: Since I wrote this post I’ve been back and refreshed my Facebook ad stats and my click through count has actually gone down. In theory, this makes some sort of sense since you are looking at the last 24 hours ie I might have had a load of clicks 24 hours ago which are now out of that 24 hour window but it just highlights what a stupid metric it is.
Similar posts
- None Found
Leave a Reply