Mark Zuckerberg might be a dork, but he figured out an ingenious way to monetize social networks. Self serve advertising interfaces are the future of monetizing all types of popular websites. Zuckerberg has a way to go to perfect his ad system and needs to take some advice from an actual user of the ad platform. It just so happens to be his lucky day because I am offering my advice and criticisms for free:
Ad Approval
There are plenty of advertisers that complain about how long it takes to get Facebook ads approved. When advertisers complain you should listen. I can step back and see it from Facebook’s point of view. They want to make sure that sneaky advertisers aren’t duping their users and creating a bad experience on the facebook site. That’s understandable, but you need to figure out a way to get ads approved faster. Two options are immediately obvious:
1) Automate it.
2) Hire more interns. (I’m sure theirs tons of snot faced college kids that would love the opportunity to disapprove a few ads)
The second main problem with ad approval is that the rules are way too subjective. You can’t leave the rules up to the interns interpretation, you need a better system then that. I can submit the same ads 10 times, get them dissaproved every time and on the 11th time get them approved. That shows that the system has major flaws. You need to get to work on an objective way to review these ads.
There are certain situations where an ad should NOT undergo a manual review:
- If the ad was already approved and you duplicate it to test different demographics.
- If the ad was already approved and you duplicate it to change your tracking URL.
- If the ad was already approved and you duplicate it to correct a typo such as punctuation. (Allow a very small percentage of the ad to be changed without a manual review)
The ability to duplicate a disapproved ad, make changes and resubmit it would also be helpful.
Day Parting
Any successful marketer knows the power of day parting. With the current Facebook system, advertisers are just allowed to run ads. Once an ad is active it runs from 12am until its budget is completed. But what if an advertisers prospects are only ready to buy between the hours of 1pm and 3pm? Why should that advertiser be forced to run from 12am when they know that they won’t be able to convert anyone that clicks their ad. Furthermore certain ads may only be relevant to users at certain times during the day. You can actually increase the relevance of ads displaying to Facebook users if day parting were enacted. Take Google’s lead on this. Offer day parting!
Tracking Pixel
With the advent of fantastic affiliate tracking software such as Prosper202, affiliates don’t have to worry so much about getting their pixels placed in order to track their campaigns. However, there could be quite the payoff to both the advertiser as well as Facebook if they offered a tracking pixel that could be placed on a conversion page. What’s the payoff? Demographic data that lead to the conversion! Imagine the scenario where you can login to your Facebook advertiser account, see how much you spent for the day, see how many conversions that generated, and here’s the kicker; see a report of what demographics lead to conversions. Let’s say you are targeting Males between the ages of 18-24 but your reports show that no one over the age of 21 EVER converts on your ad. In that scenario you could readjust your demographic targeting to only target males between the ages of 18-21. It’s a win/win for both parties. The advertiser get’s more valuable traffic and a higher CTR and Facebook gets less wasted ad inventory and can make more money.
Time Zone
Advertisers should have the ability to set their time zone. This helps when trying to figure out reports of what you actually spent/made on a particular day.
Communication
Facebook seriously needs a better communication system. One glaring example is when an ad is disapproved. You get a stock response that looks something like this:
- This ad has been disabled and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. We recommend first reviewing our list of Common Ad Mistakes. If you have further questions, please consult our Terms of Use and Advertising Guidelines.
- The destination URL of this ad either violates Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines or could not be reviewed. If the landing page could not be reviewed due to visitor IP restrictions, a URL typo or other site outage, please make the necessary changes so that it can be reviewed before submitting this ad again. Sites that include content or behavior prohibited by sections 2, 16, and 17 of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines will not be accepted in any form and should not be resubmitted.
As you can tell, those disapproval messages are not very helpful. Facebook is telling you that 1 in about 25 things could be wrong with the ad. Is it the URL? Is it the Landing Page? Is It The Text Ad? Is It The English? I have no idea. The interns should write a message as to why they dissaproved the ad so that the advertiser can easily fix it.
Facebook is a pioneer in monetizing social networks. They should be applauded for that, but at the same time, they should fix what’s wrong.
