Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

There is an age old debate of whether to use a landing page or direct link traffic to an affiliate offer.  I get asked all the time which is better.  Everyone has their opinions.  I have a simple tip that I use to increase conversion rates.

Get the customers clicking!

I find that the more a customer clicks around and is physically engaged in a page, the more likely they are to do what YOU want them to do.  You’ll notice that a lot of lead gen type offers break the fields of information that they’re collecting into many different pages.  They usually start with simple inputs like drop downs, progress into less vital information like zip codes or email addresses and then later present the user with forms to collect more personal information.  Once a user engages with the page, they feel like they’ve started something that they want to finish.  This increases conversion rates.

What if you created some type of a game that was really just a front-end for an affiliate offer?  You could get the user clicking, engage them and then present them with the offer.  You could even use the game to better qualify the traffic to almost guarantee a SUPER HIGH conversion rate.

There is my idea for today.  You can make a lot of money with it.  Who is actually going to put this tip to use?

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Grant Cardone is here to tell you that you can’t handle the truth!

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Hey all.  Some of you have noticed that i’ve been MIA for the last week.

Last week a major snowstorm came through my area and dumped over 3 feet of snow on my house.  It’s the snowstorm i’ve  been wanting for quite some time.  I was also kind of hoping for a blackout.  I don’t know why but I just find them fun.  Well we got that blackout and about a minute later I realized blackouts suck in the winter because then you have no heat.  Normally you can just jump town and get yourself a nice hotel room but over 3 feet of snow kind of traps you in the house.  Plow trucks couldn’t come through because the snow was too heavy so they needed to use backhoes and bobcats to move the snow.  Our plow guy couldnt plow the driveway either so we had to shovel a good portion of it. This kept us trapped in the house from Thursday-Saturday.  We finally skipped town on Saturday and only on Monday did we finally get our power back.  Thursday-Monday is a long ass time to have no power.

The lesson of the story is: Be careful what you wish for, you just may get it.

No power has put me way behind and i’m catching up.  I should have some killer content coming soon for you guys.  Thanks for your support of AdHustler.com throughout the past years and I hope you will spread the word so that we can make 2010 truly memorable.  Big things are coming.

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You may or may not know about Facebook’s recent email regarding calling out user attributes in ads on the Facebook Ad system.  Last week they sent out this email:

Hi,

Ad quality and user feedback are extremely important to Facebook. We’ve received significant negative feedback about ads that call out users’ personally identifiable information, especially when the information is not directly relevant to the ad’s offer. We take this feedback very seriously and are taking an active role in removing ads that are detrimental to the user experience. Some of your ads have been disabled for this reason.

Please delete any ads using this tactic that may still be running and do not submit new ads that call our user attributes unnecessarily and that are not directly relevant to the offer (including, but not limited to, age, gender, location or interest). This practice is prohibited by Facebook’s Ad Guidelines (http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php). Advertisers who continually engage in advertising practices that generate strong negative feedback will find that their ads are less likely to be shown to users and may have their ads disabled or face account penalties up to and including the permanent loss of advertising privileges.

We appreciate your understanding,

The Facebook Ads Team

I already knew the email was coming because I saw a DM Confidential writeup about the new policy.  Here are my thoughts:

Although I can’t usually side with Facebook about ANYTHING, I think the move makes sense.  Calling out user attributes to try to make an untargeted ad seem very targeted can work for a while.  The problem is that users just become blind to it anyway.  You can only click an ad so many times because you think its some super special offer before you realize its nothing more than a generic ad using your profile information to target you.

Facebook Ads are incredibly powerful.  There are probably no other ad systems available with the amount of users and demographic information that Facebook has.  For Facebook to keep trust with it’s users they can’t let the users think their information is being sold off to the highest bidder.  Relevant ads based on interest are one thing, but blatantly using the Facebook users profile information to serve irrelevant ads that seem relevant are is just going to irk the user over time.

I know a lot of people are pissed about the new rule.  I think you should turn your frown upside down.  Think of it as a good thing.  Figure out how to use the system to target more relevantly.  You’ll end up with cheaper traffic and better conversions anyway.

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A lot of businesses start Facebook Pages in order to keep Facebook Users (Fans) connected to their brand.  What they don’t realize is that fans of your page aren’t getting your updates.

What?  Who?  Why?  Huh?

That’s right.  A large percentage of your fans probably are NOT getting your updates, making Facebook as a point of contact pretty useless for businesses using Facebook Pages.

How I Discovered This

I created a Facebook Page just to play around with it’s features.  I set the page up and joined it myself on my personal account.  I updated the page and went to my news feed to see if it was showing up like you would assume it would.  It didn’t!  This lead me on a bit of a wild goose chase trying to figure out why (and yes, i wasted way too much time on this).

Troubleshooting

I asked a few friends to become a fan of the page to see if they were getting the updates.  They weren’t.  I did some research to confirm that Facebook Page Updates show up in the news feed and indeed they do.

Next I used the Facebook App on my iPhone.  I took a look at the news feed and my Page Update was there.

Next I went into settings to make sure that I wasn’t blocking page updates or some nonsense like that.  I wasn’t.

The Issue

If you scroll to the bottom of your news feed you will see a link that says “Edit Options.”  If you click it you will see the people that you’ve manually hidden from your news feed as well as some other options.  One of the options is “Maximum number of friends shown in Live Feed.”  That option is defaulted to 250.  If you change that option to a number higher then the amount of friends you have, you now magically see the Page Updates.

This Makes No Sense

The reason businesses have Fan Pages is to connect with their fans.  The reason Facebook users become a Fan of a page is to get their updates.  Both parties are in mutual agreement about the relationship yet Facebook limits that relationship by default.  If someone wants to become a Fan of something they should be shown that Pages updates UNLESS they either Hide the updates or stop being a fan.  Why would you make someone jump through hoops just to achieve the relationship they desired in the first place?  Not everyone has more than 250 friends.  Those people will see the updates without a problem.  However, many people DO have more than 250 friends and those people probably won’t even know there is a setting limiting the amount of friends they are seeing in their feed.  As Facebook continues to grow this will become more and more of a problem.

I’m sure that there is some sort of algorithm at play here that assigns more of a weight to certain pages/friends based on levels of engagement.  Knowing this it still makes no sense.  People become fans to receive updates.  End of story.

The Facebook Deception

Facebook urges businesses to use Facebook Ads to grow their fan base.  They are encouraging businesses to spend money using THEIR ads to promote a page on THEIR platform yet when people become a fan of that page, they don’t necessarily get the updates.  Businesses are paying for the ability to engage with their fans yet can’t actually engage with them if the fan has more than 250 friends.  How does this make sense?

Have you found a way around this?
Have you run into this problem?
Do you have a fan page and didnt even know that users weren’t getting your updates?

Let’s discuss in the comments!

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