Here’s a comment you won’t often see in a blog addressing internet marketing: I’m glad I didn’t put my book out when I initially planned to.
Yes, the Secret Project I was working on was a study of Facebook Ads. Back when I started this, they were the new “guru’s secret” du jure. There were enthusiastic descriptions of them as “like the early days of Adwords, but better” and the like. I decided to take a systematic approach to the field.
I got the idea from a free webinar which gave a brief overview of the process (then tried to sell us a more detailed – and expensive – course on the process). Instead of buying their books/videos/etc, I took a more hands on approach.
The first thing I did was go to Facebook and read the TOS for the ads. Not the usual skim, but actually read them. That turned out to be a good thing. Aside from the usual prohibitions on porn, fraud, and the like, there were limitations on what the pages can do and on what the ads can say. And a lot of those prohibitions covered standard marketing practices.
For instance: if your ad says “free” book, report, etc., you are prohibited from directing readers to a page that requires an email address before they get that freebie. In other words, they outlawed one of the most time-honored practices in IM.
Another example: they prohibit pop ups and closing hijacks. When you go to a sales page and then try to leave again, chances are good that a screen will pop up saying something like “Wait! Look at this Special Offer before you leave!” If your FB ad points to a page that does that, you are in double violation and will probably fail to get your ad approved. In fact, if the page your ad points to doesn’t do it but has a link to a page that does it, you are in violation and won’t get the ad approved.
That brings up another point: your ads do not go up automatically. They have to be approved by a member of the Facebook advertising staff before they will appear (just as comments on this blog have to be approved by me before they appear here). And they can be disapproved again at any time (as certain “black hat” types found out when they tried modifying their landing pages after the ads were approved).
Once you get past the prohibited practices, you have to deal with the prohibited subjects. Not just the usual “no fraud or adult subjects” boilerplate. Oh no. Virtually all ads related to Internet Marketing (or even the older Direct Response Marketing) are prohibited.
Is it any wonder that there are so many reports and products about how to circumvent the rules on the market now?
For my purposes, I decided to play it straight. After some research (and trial and error), I settled on products in 3 markets: Gardening, Hypnosis, and Woodworking.
One of my first problems was that most of the relevant sales pages did the prohibited things with pop ups and the like. After several rounds of correspondence with the site owners, I got access to versions without the popups and hijacks.
There followed a number of tests establishing the optimum bids for the ads to get the best return. That part of the process was not significantly different than it is for Google ads and the like.
For a while, things worked out well enough. The first sign of real trouble came when I tried scaling up the campaigns. I doubled the daily limit on each, then gave it some time. I got more views, and more clicks. What I didn’t get was significantly more conversions. Campaigns that were mildly profitable at $5.00 per day were losing money at $10.00 per day.
I dropped the limit again, and watched. The conversions didn’t drop. Yet. I dropped it more, and they fell. Returning it to the $5.00 level returned the conversion level.
The first campaign to get in trouble was the Gardening product. It turned out to be very seasonal, and very regional. After the first flush of response, it quickly became unprofitable. I cut it off, but kept my notes. We are now entering the season of better response, so I may restore it.
In the meantime, the rest of the world was having a predictable (but unfortunate) effect. With all the gurus telling everyone about the cheap ad prices (and other advantages) on Facebook, costs started climbing. Ads that had a suggested bid of $0.35 – to $0.62 started seeing the lower end climb to the 60s, 70s, 80s, and then even higher.
I was getting a solid response from the Hypnosis campaign, but it turned unprofitable when the ad prices went up. Instead of an average profit of about $10.00 per week, it started losing a few dollars per week. In the end, I pulled the plug before the last of the previous profits bled away. After 9 months of work, I had a net profit of $78.00.
The woodworking campaign remained profitable for a longer time. But the suggested bids grew from $0.35 up to $3.50 up. And it is continuing to grow. Over the last two months, the impressions per day went from around 31,000 per day to less than 100 per day. And it is still dropping. For all intents and purposes, the campaign is dead.
My book was scheduled to come out about the time the gardening campaign started to falter. I wanted to include the downside for accuracy’s sake, so I held off. Then the other events started cascading. If I had released the book on schedule, it would have been seriously misleading – something I find morally unacceptable. At a time when I would have been encouraging people to enter the field and copy what I had done, what I had done wasn’t really working anymore.
That’s just wrong.
Altogether too many gurus have done exactly that. They have taken advantage of a temporary market phenomenon, then (when returns dropped off) sold reports/courses about how they did it. Most of us would prefer a report about how we can do something like that, and how to recognize when it will work. And especially, how to recognize when it won’t.
With all the questionable ethics floating around the IM field, the only way I see to operate appropriately here is from a position of uncompromising integrety. Anything less will chew you up and spit you out.
Thus endeth the sermon.