Leaving The Day Job

Archive for December, 2007

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I’ve never been a great typist. I’m fast but inaccurate. Recently though a weird kind of disconnect between my brain and my fingers has been making my typing life a misery.

I learned to type back in the early 80s as child banging out code on a Sinclair ZX81. After 25 years of practice I ought to be getting better at it. But no. One of my former colleagues told me how much it used to drive her round the bend listening to me clattering away at the keyboard only for it to be followed by repeated pounding on the backspace key as I try to undo all the mistakes I’ve made. Another friend commented on how quickly I could type especially considering I spent half my time deleting.

In the past year or so I’ve developed an even stranger affliction. It’s not down to inaccurate typing it’s that somewhere between my brain and my fingers the words I’m typing change. In that last sentence for example I thought “somewhere” but typed “something”. This is why I think it’s like dyslexia. The words are getting themselves jumbled up. They’re not mistyped, they’re not in the wrong order, they’re just not the word they should be.

It’s really annoying because when I type the wrong word I type it correctly. Spellcheckers don’t pick up on the mistake because it’s correctly spelled. I’ve always been good at spelling and grammar but recently I’ve been misusing “there”, “their” and “they’re”. It’s not that I don’t know the difference. It’s not that I don’t know which is the correct one to use. It’s that my fingers on the keyboard have their own idea of which word I want to use.

I vaguely remember from my university Psychology course that there’s a phenomenon in learning called “chaining”. Basically, as you learn to do tasks your brain stops needing to think about the next step and just initiates a chain of steps. For example, when you start driving you need to think about stepping off the accelerator, engaging the clutch, moving the gear stick, releasing the clutch, pressing down the accelerator. As you get more experienced you don’t think about each step you just do the “change gear” chain of actions.

My theory is that I’ve learned chains of actions to type certain words semi-automatically and for some reason my brain is picking the wrong chain. Or it could be that I’m just mental. The jury’s out.

Any psychology experts or fellow finger-dyslexia sufferers out there?

Unlike many in the affiliate marketing world I’d had a bit of success with Facebook Ads but I’ve had enough of them now and I’m moving myself into the sceptics’ camp. In my previous posts I’ve written about the ups and downs and given a couple of tips I’d picked up on the way. I thought I had it figured. This week, Facebook decided to pull the rug from underneath me.

First up, they’ve taken to pulling ads without so much as a hint what the problem might be. In fact, they give you a hint as to what the problem almost certainly isn’t. I had one ad pulled because the ad wasn’t representative of the product. Except it was. It said “Get a free Nintendo Wii when you buy a qualifying mobile” and took you to the merchant’s site where the qualifying mobiles are displayed. Apparently this isn’t enough.

A second ad was pulled because “The text and/or image of this ad violates part or all of sections 4, 5, and 6 of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines.” So I emailed them to find out what was wrong. Apparently if you run an ad for a dating site you have to mention the site name in the ad. Is this in their terms and conditions? No, it isn’t.

Now I don’t mind Facebook having rules. I don’t even mind them having quirky rules for no good reason. But what I do mind is them having secret rules they don’t bother to tell anyone and which require several emails before they’ll even tell you.

The second thing relates to stats. I’ve blogged before about the bizarre stats system which shows you rolling totals for the past 24 hours. There’s no historical data other than the total number of impressions and clicks per day. You can’t see which ad has been getting the clicks. There’s no way to export data for analysis. There’s no indication of how CPC relates to the number of impressions you get. You end up spending all day checking your stats and babysitting your bids just to make sure you aren’t blowing all your budget.

Which brings me to my third point: the daily budget limit which isn’t limited. Half way through one day last week I decided my return on Facebook ads was in danger of falling too low. So I lowered my daily budget to make sure I didn’t end up spending more than I was comfortable with losing if conversions dropped off. I was somewhat surprised therefore that I ended that day exceeding my new budget. Again, I don’t mind too much if a budget can’t be changed during the day but if that’s the case then tell me about it! Don’t just leave me to figure it out after the fact.

All in all I’ve decided that Facebook ads are more trouble than they’re worth. It’s mainly poor execution and Facebook’s characteristic disregard for what anyone thinks of them. They’ve already backpedalled on Beacon, let’s hope they go and rethink the rest of their ad platform too.

Regular readers will be pleased to know this is the last posting I’m doing on Facebook for a while. I never intended to write this much about them. I hope it’s at least been some use to someone.