Facebook Ads – Its a Comedy Show
Posted on January 30, 2008
Filed Under 2 Point What?
I have been playing around lately with Facebook Flyers and having been used to the traditional rules of PPC engagement, I find the Facebook rules, while very logical, a comedy show to get around.
You can tell that there is some definite philosophy behind their rules and they are trying very hard to protect the internet virginity of their users. Moreso. I think they are trying to maintain the hometown feel of facebook without letting in the internet dogs.
Here are some of the interesting rules for making Facebook Flyer Ads.
- Bad Spelling, grammar or Capitalization.
- Meaning if I misspell a word, my ad gets deactivated.
- If I Capitalize a Word the Is Not Grammatically Correct to Be Capitalized - i get disabled
- If I USE ALL CAPS - Gone
- If I use Punctuation!! - Out of there
- Incomplete Sentences or bad grammar - To the Street with You.
- If I use Slang - sup bro! - Turns it off
- You can get the point that you basically had to go to college and major in English to be able to advertise on Facebook
- Improper Targeting (actually helps CTR so cant complain)
- So if I am slanging Dating sites, I am not allowed to target them to people in a relationship. (no fun)
- If I am selling home bible study courses, I have to target them to people with the word Jesus in their profile or i am banned.
- Cosmetics have to be targeted towards women. (learned that the hard way)
- No Deception in Ad.
- Meaning I need to put the name of the company that I am promoting in the ad and exactly what they do
- Can't say something is free, when you really have to do alot of stuff to get it. ie.. in the Ad - Have to say exactly that you must complete 6 offers, send them a copy of your birth certificate and stand on your head to get that free iPod.
- My picture (yes they let you display a photo) has to be targeted to the ad. Meaning I can't put a sexy girl photo up for an auto parts ad
- Bad Bad Things - Beside the normal bad list, of Alcohol, guns, gambling, viag@ra, porn and warez - Facebook specifically doesn't like these things.
- Ringtones? come on guys - just because one guy made a bunch of money off you and bragged about it doesn't mean you have to ruin it for the rest of us. Ringtones never hurt anybody
- College crap from non-ivy league schools. Zuck wont let you advertise for any college or scholarship program that ain't ivy league.
- Web Cams - Web Cams are VERY VERY Bad According to Facebook. Guess Zuck had some embarrassing moments and wants to ruin it for the rest of us
All in all their methods are somewhat reasonable, they are trying VERY hard to keep the advertising integrated with the user experience, and they obviously have a team of interns who spend all day policing peoples ads as well. TO credit them, when I had specific questions as to why they were turning off my ads, I actually got a live response who helped me rewrite.
But get over it Zuck, why Webcams? 
edit. I just logged onto my facebook profile and found that in addition to the highly moderated rotation of flyers, that I was getting served with big 160x600 ads for Estee Lauder Lip Stick and i am Male. come on Facebook, if you pay so much attention to the flyers, figure out your corporate advertising feeds. I also noticed that the crap home-degrees ads were being run through these channels as well, but not allowed on the flyers. somebody wake Zuck up.
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4 Responses to “Facebook Ads – Its a Comedy Show”
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[...] A few days ago we discussed some of the terms and polices of Facebook Flyer ads. [...]
Some of these rules are truly strange but none-the-less funny in a peculiar type of way.
I kinda think the ringtones and the webcam are related in some strange way and thats why the usage of them could get you in a little trouble with your campaign.
And it all happened on some college campus.
I get some hits from facebook, not sure how useful it is for conversions. Too many rules though.
Facebook ads are interesting, they are aggressively promoting the sale of their ads. I haven’t heard a lot of good things about their ads.