Facebook - Anti Social Ads

There's been a lot of talk about Facebook's new ad platform for "Social Ads". Well they've gone live and killed my ad campaign which was working fine! The Flyers Pro which were the previous PPC adverts on Facebook have been tarred for low CTR, well I had managed to create a set of adverts which were getting 4-8 times the CTR of usual adverts. This was great and allowed me to drop the CPC down to 8p or so. Bargain. And because they had such a good CTR, they got preference over other things and appeared to run almost immediately.

Well, the new system looks like it will be better, but the change in system means my CTR history is, well, history. And the format is slightly different, so I can't replicate what I did before. And there is less text allowable. And, and, and.

So they killed (my) ad campaigns :-( The new system seems to just not get any click through at all (or minimal) and I have no idea where they are being displayed. Net result = my leads go down and Facebook ad revenue goes down. I assume other advertisers are going to see the same.

Now. Just need to figure out how to get the new platform working in my favour!

Ad money increasing, ad payouts decreasing

A very interesting story on Michael Gilmour's Whizzbang Blog : Where's all the revenue going?

This brings up the differences between the increasing ad money coming into the PPC market, yet a general decline in payouts. So where's the extra money going? Initially it looks like it's staying with either G or Y, but people are still digging.

Of course, if payouts continue to decline, in the face of increasing advertising money then a small upstart is likely to have the nerve to take the two big PPC engines head on and target the domain parking business. Other research has shown that parked generic domain names can deliver over twice the conversions of ads placed on active, content led sites with less-good domain names. If an new PPC ad company can get in there and share more of the incoming ad money, they will have people biting their hands off.

I concede that writing a whole PPC system isn't easy, but it's not impossible. And the money at stake means that this could soon be a viable option for the big domain holders.

Keeping tabs on clicks and visits

When you are running a PPC campaign, it can be annoying waiting for the online stats to update. One thing I have used in the past is to simply get my website to email me for every visit, with details on the IP Address, referrer and full path requested. The same technique is useful for newly registered domain names that you can self park.

My automatic emails provide a number of useful things:

• I know about site visits almost immediately, rather than when the online PPC stats update. (Useful for high bid terms!)
• I can see when I start getting referrals from somewhere new, like a forum, and jump in to comment.
• I can see what search terms my site is getting clicks from
• I can block the IP address of bad spiders that start to overwhelm the server
• For previously registered domains, I can see what pages are still getting referrals, and from where. Potentially useful for matching future content, rather than returning 404 errors.
• With a custom 404 handler, you can trap missing pages, and be alerted to them immediately.

Of course, you wouldn't want to do this on any big traffic sites for any length of time, as you would drown in email! But for new sites, high PPC terms, or specific test conditions, it is very useful - and far easier than downloading log files or waiting for stat reports to update.