A Call With Facebook And A Few Answers To Tell You About.

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Aequitas

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Feb 19, 2007
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So as I briefly said in previous posts that I set up a call today to talk to keith from Facebook and I just got off that call and found out a couple things which I think is the reason why most affiliates may be getting a bunch of offers disapproved when they should be approved.

Also if you don't know who keith is he is on WickedFire under the username "Facebook" and he works on the Facebook Ad Team and yes he is legit.

Anyway the first thing I want to jump right into is about the way the affiliate companies do there re-directs and how it will effect your ad approval at Facebook.

This is kind of something that I was not 100% sure about but is now something I'm sure about after getting off the phone.

First you have to remember that the Facebook ad team (I'm not sure if it applies to every last person on the team) is from the United States. This is important for a couple reasons.

The first reason its important is because if your promoting an offer for U.K. traffic (Like I was) your ad will most likey get disapproved because the ad team (Being from the US) will never see the landing page which the residents from the U.K. will see.

At MaxBounty and a few others they all divide there traffic via country, so if your promoting a U.K. only offer and you get someone from the US who clicks that offer what happens? Well the guy from the US gets re-directed to a default US based offer and everyone else from the U.K. will get directed to the correct offer they clicked on.

See what is going on here, if your promoting a strict U.K. based offer the facebook ad team (being from the US) will get redirected to the default US offer and they will never see the correct U.K. offer you indented on advertising. This completely different landing page will make the facebook team disapprove your ad because your ad text, copy, image, whatever is no longer on topic.

I talked with him a little bit about how to overcome this and even though the affiliate companies we work with can't do anything about it, we might be able to.

At first it was suggested that if I had the IP of the ad team computers that I can easily redirect the ad team reviewers to the (non-affiliate link) offer, basically don't send them via the affiliate link just send them to the actual landing page so it won't matter what country there from, and after that everyone else (From the UK) will get sent via your affiliate link to the correct offer.

This presented a big problem at first, the first issue it presents is that using an IP to verify the ad team reviewer is not very stable because IP addresses can and do change from time to time, and once the change happens well were out of luck.

But there might be another way and this is something that is currently untested and I think a few of us should run a few tests on it (I'm going to), I read a post that NickeyCakes (I think it was him) made awhile back on his blog which said something about dev.facebook.com and keith said that was kind of there default backend domain.

So if the ad team reviewers are all coming from dev.facebook.com then we know not to send this person via our affiliate link but instead just put them on the right landing page (Ex: www.asite.com instead of your affiliate link), and after that everyone else (based upon country traffic) can be sent via our affiliate links so we get our full commission.

However even this method of determination has some issues with it. Also if you haven't guessed yet I've been talking about direct linking to your offers in this post.

Anyway the one thing you can do to make damn sure (without messing around) that the ad team gets to the correct landing page via your affiliate link is to promote offers which include US traffic, even if your goal is not to target US traffic and lets say you only wanted to target UK or Canada traffic because its cheaper then you can find an offer which supports traffic from the US & the UK, and/or Canada.

Now with an offer like this you can target people specifically in Canada or the UK (cheaper clicks sometimes but not always) and when the ad team comes along and looks at the landing page they actually make it to the right page and are not re-directed to some completely off-topic offer.

There are some more things I'm going to go over in this thread but I'm taking a typing break to get some dinner and I'll come back and finish this thing up with some more info so that with a little knowledge and testing we will be way more likely to get our ads approved (In turn more likely to make some cash).

Also got a ton of good ideas and suggestions coming.
 
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Ok I'm back & no one posted yet so that may be good. I want to kind of talk about a few other things now.

The next thing is something we all kind of already know but its good to touch base on it.

As you can imagine the Facebook ad team gets thousands of ads to approve or disapprove everyday and those ads have to follow the guidelines however depending on which person is looking at your ad it may be approved or disapproved.

For instance lets take dating offers into account, lets say your trying to promote a dating offer and submit the same ad with several different images of women, well one person might consider your image to be ok and not too sexual when the other person might think its slightly too sexual, this is a problem they have because it deals with personal opinion.

Its also why some ads get disapproved when they should be approved and why some get approved when they shouldn't be, some fall through the cracks and some don't.

This is why they say if you re-submit your ad every few hours you may eventually get a rep which says the image is ok and now your approved.

Also for dating offers they have a list of sites which are not allowed, for instance fling.com is not allowed because its a little more targeted to the sex side of dating as where eharmony is a little more targeted to actually putting you into a lasting relationship.

This is the perfect time to also mention that Facebook wants to keep there image clean and professional they don't want it to get out of control like MySpace has in the past or other advertising networks which allow you to advertise everything and anything.

At first (Like everyone else) I thought these rules were the stupidest thing known to man but if you take the time to sit and think about why they have them in the first place then you begin to realize that it might not be such a bad thing.

For instance we all know 90% of the ads get disapproved when submitted, a lot of it deals with things like ringtone or scam type of offers, if Facebook would allow those more scamy type of ads to run then it would reflect on them and there users would not like it.

I think Facebook has something like 110 Million members and are intending to grow towards 200 to 300 million.

Now think about this, these tight ass rules and regulations limit 90% of the ads, if Facebook were to grow to 200 or even 300 million users in the future would this be a negitive thing for us?.

You might think yes because we can't get our ads approved, well I don't think it is a negitive thing, look at it this way, if the large majority of people don't want to work to get there ads approved then that means much less competition and as Facebook continues to grow larger and larger there will not be as much saturation in the market.

This means that once you start to find some clean and valid offers which convert then you can get your ads approved much quicker then the average joe which means your getting first dibs on these markets, this can earn you a fuck load of cash.

The only issue is that its going to require some more upfront work and the ones who succeed at understanding the image Facebook is looking to protect are the ones who are going to bank big time now and in the future.

Also they don't disapprove all email and/or zip submits, there are those types of offers being run successfully on Facebook, its just very hard to get those offers approved because the large majority of them are like hey get this free gift by filling in your email then the user has to do a million other things (Like signup for products or buy things) before they get there free gift.

So to sum it up in order to get more ads approved you got to get creative and stop thinking about the upfront quick and easy dollar by promoting something which is a little scammy like ringtones.

Ringtones are considered a bit scammy because most say signup and get 15 bonus tones, then at the end of the month they get charged like $30 or $40 bucks, or offers which say hey only pay $3 for shipping to get this killer product and then the user gets hit with a $100 bill at the end of the month.

Those are the types of things which will get you disapproved. So work on offers and ideas which are cleaner then the ones we would usually run, and think about how it may help out the facebook user experince while still appealing to the users.

Figure these things out and things will start to get very lucritive and profitable for you, while everyone else is fighting to get there ads approved because they don't read or don't think about why facebook really doesn't want to have those ads on there site you can be banking and laughing at them.

Also CTR on facebook is low and probably always will be, since they don't give the best ad spots, ect... so when starting a new offer first aim to hit a .1% CTR and then aim for a .2% CTR, and so on, but even the people doing exceptionally well are not getting much more then .3% CTR.

Again to sum it up, think about how the offer your promoting will benefit the users of Facebook in a positive and non-scammy manner and begin to test and re-test those offers and let the other 90% of people get there offers disapproved because they refuse to change up there old age tactics.

I'm done for now and off to take this advice for myself and find some good offers to promote on Facebook. I'll keep you in the loop on how it goes.
 
I got great tips from someone else at Facebook- then proceeded to follow them EXACTLY and get a dick shoved in the ass on two dozen submitted ads.

I'll stick to exploiting the approval departments stupidity and cloaking the shit out of them.

Thanks for posting this information- have you had any success getting ads approved with some of the 'clarifications?'
 
Aquitas,

Awesome info, thanks for taking the time to write it. Much appreciated!

BB
 
Sonny Forelli said:
I got great tips from someone else at Facebook- then proceeded to follow them EXACTLY and get a dick shoved in the ass on two dozen submitted ads.

I'll stick to exploiting the approval departments stupidity and cloaking the shit out of them.

Thanks for posting this information- have you had any success getting ads approved with some of the 'clarifications?'
Click to expand...

It depends on what I'm promoting, I can easily get ads approved if they are exceptionally clean offers (nothing to scream even a hint of scam or hidden agenda).

narsticle said:
so facebook is TELLING you to cloak them?
Click to expand...

No,

It was a suggestion I brought up in the conversation about how I might go about getting the ad approval team to the correct landing page if they are from the US and I'm promoting a UK only offer.

If done right you can get more offers through the gates, but if abused don't be surprised if they don't like it.

Everything I'm talking about in this post deals with strict whitehat solutions, I'm not talking about any deceptive tactics here, sure cloaking may seem deceptive but it does not have to be. It all depends on how and why your doing it in the first place.
 
bb_wolfe said:
Aquitas,

Awesome info, thanks for taking the time to write it. Much appreciated!

BB
Click to expand...

Thanks,

I know a lot of it may seem basic and I'm sure lots of people already know but I wanted to try and drive home the Whitehat Facebook is wearing.

Simply put if your trying any offers with a hidden agenda, or hidden fee's or a bad user experience in any way, your probably looking at another disapproval, however when done right we should be looking at a much greater approval rate.

Nothing is going to change on there end (At least I don't think so) so you gotta adapt and find the way that does work because there is one.
 
Just to add something more to this post,

When creating an ad and trying to determine a good age range what I like to do is first know which website or offer your promoting (Hopefully its a little bit more popular) and then go to Google and try to find the demographics, for instance with Mate1.com I found this website.

mate1.com - Quantcast Audience Profile

Which basically tells me ok the majority of users are Male, aged 35-49, 76% white, 68% with no children, 51% with no college.

Now I can go to Facebook and target single males aged 35 - 49 and play with some ad text, images.

You can do this with other offers as well like free gift cards, do a bit of research to try and pin down a closer age range of the people who look for these types of things.

Also lets say your promoting a free nintendo wii or nindendo wii game, well your keywords can be things like nintendo, nintendo wii, video games ect...

It will lower the number of people you can reach but it increases the chance they will convert.

Like certain dating sites appeal more to people aged 18-23 so you don't want to target those sites to people 50+, ect...
 
I have had a similar conversation with a different rep named Jeremy. Thanks for sharing.
 
Great post Aequitas

It's cool to see Facebook holding their ground on their image and what they feel is important to what their viewers want/like and not giving in to what could probably be easy in approving anything that comes through the door.

Myspace has their crowd - Facebook has theirs. 2 different worlds.
 
Great post, +rep. Thanks for taking the time to put this. Although most of it was already assumed to be true, it's good having it confirmed.
 
Lots of words but all of it stuff we've known for about a year. If you want to get foreign offers through just redirect to the landing page until they approve it and then switch it to the affiliate link...not exactly groundbreaking.

When you say to just find legit offers to promote that nobody's thought of yet...that's what we've been doing for a year. You find something legit and run it till they decide it's not legit anymore. Again, not groundbreaking.

Sounds like you talked to one of their sales guys who, unfortunately, have no control over the approval process, and are not involved in it at all. In fact, they need to wait days just to get answers from the approval team. I wouldn't take what they say too seriously. The only opinions that matter are the approval team, and the only way to know those opinions are by submitting ads till you get shit through.
 
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