Facebook Advertising Early Report Card: Not Bad, But Must Try Harder

Don’t get me wrong Facebook, I like you as a paid advertising medium. You’re new, you’re exciting, advertising with you is quick to set up and I can reach people with a completely different approach to the way I do currently with Google, Yahoo or Bing.

That said; don’t think that just because people like you, you don’t have to put any real effort in – the honeymoon period will quickly run out if that is the case! If you want to improve, please take on board my (and no doubt many other advertiser’s) views and feedback:

• Transparency of click data: In numerous campaigns that I’ve run now, I’ve ensured that all adverts are tagged up in such a way that we can track their exact performance in Google Analytics. The difference in click numbers that Facebook reports compared to Google Analytics can be quite startling – sometimes as much as a 50% discrepancy between the two. When Facebook tells you your campaign has generated 400 clicks on a given day, and you can only see 200 of these have actually been recorded as traffic through to your site, you can’t help but be a bit concerned about what you’re being charged for on Facebook.
• Greater communication regarding acceptable/unacceptable adverts: Now this is an area that Facebook needs to become a lot more transparent in, in terms of exactly what is allowed and what isn’t. At the very least, we advertisers would like to see some consistency! It’s all very well one day disallowing an advert on the basis of the image used infringing their advertising guidelines and quoting those to us. Fine, you think, I won’t use that image again. However, when I submitted the identical advert the day after with the only difference being that it was targeted it towards a different demographic, this was approved no problem. Time and time again this is happening. What am I supposed to do as an advertiser? You’d be forgiven for thinking that your success depends on the ‘sensitivity’ levels of the Facebook employee vetting the adverts on that given day.Increasingly, we are also seeing more and more adverts banned for this reason:
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  This is a sight I dread to see when I login to Facebook each day. Your advert could have been running successfully for weeks with a nice healthy click-through and conversion rate, but then, from nowhere… gone, just like that due to negative feedback. How much negative feedback needs to be accumulated before an advert gets pulled is unclear. Would I be surprised if only a handful of reports, despite thousands of clicks, could stop an advert? No. And what’s to stop a rival competitor deliberately reporting all of your adverts, knowing this will happen? Again, greater transparency is needed here from you Facebook.
• Improved advert testing: Now this is one of the most frustrating elements of all on Facebook. Anybody that regularly conducts PPC activities will tell you how vital advert testing is to a successful paid search campaign. On Google, for each ad group we create, we are used to creating at least two adverts. These are then used to split test traffic to effectively assess which advert is the better performer. The poorer performer is removed, and a new test advert is put in its place. Thus, the process of advert testing is established. On Facebook, the importance of advert testing is even more vital, as, other than different demographics, the adverts will have the greatest impact on how well the campaign will perform. You would therefore expect to be able to create numerous adverts, set them all live, allowing Facebook to split the impressions equally (as much as possible, depending on different demographic settings), between all adverts. Not the case unfortunately. Instead, on any given day, Facebook seems to just decide for you, which advert it would like be shown the most, and the majority of impressions register against that version. The next day, it may remain the same, or the system may suddenly decide to show an alternative advert instead. This process makes advert testing incredibly difficult. The only way around this for now, is to pause all adverts except one version, and on that day, this will force Facebook to show that one advert. The next day, pause that advert, and un-pause another. Overtime, you’ll be able to assess the results and decide on the better performing versions.
• A desktop tool a bit like Adwords Editor: Being able to create and upload bulk batches adverts from a desktop-based program instead of creating them one by one via Facebook’s website? That’s the stuff of fantasies surely? I hope not. It certainly would save me a lot of valuable time in my day-to-day job!
• Create a separate interface to login to, moving away from the existing Facebook login: After time, it does become a little tiresome having to login via the normal Facebook login screen, scroll to the bottom of the page to find the ‘Advertising’ link and then take things from there. Could a separate interface not be created just for the sole purpose of managing Facebook ads that doesn’t require them to either use their own personal Facebook account? Or the creation of a corporate Facebook login just for the sole purpose of advertising and nothing else?!
• Improving general communication: That word ‘transparency’ seems to be cropping up a lot already in this blog. But it’s so true – to improve, you need to engage with your users more effectively and take on board the feedback they’re providing you. There is a general ‘Ad Campaign Inquiry’ form on the site as a way of raising any questions you may have regarding a campaign. However, I’ve used this form a number of times to ask questions regarding billing and advert issues and so on. To date, not one reply has been received to any of my questions from the Facebook Ads Team – not good.

  

  If you’re reading this Facebook, there are companies and agencies out there like ours that are willing to spend a lot of money advertising on Facebook because despite a lot of these flaws, we have seen a lot of potential. To do so, we expect a lot more help and support from you in return. Perhaps even an assigned account manager for larger accounts wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world?

  If you really are serious about competing with the big boys in search, then you need to up your game. Do that, and the world could well be your oyster.

  Do you have additional suggestions about how Facebook ads could be improved? Please feel free to comment below.