Facebook Advertising - FaceBook says F U to it's advertisers!

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FaceBook offers Pay Per Click advertising and has modeled it to some degree after Google's AdWords program. The problem with both programs is that you are not "buying" advertising, you are "bidding" on advertising. If you have money to spend and you want to get an ad posted tomorrow, good luck with these systems. It's like going to an auction to buy peanut butter!

Another issue with FaceBook is their faceless management. I had an ad rejected today, probably because I bid too low, and the only information they provide on why anyone's ads are rejected comes in a faceless general statement which I have quoted below:

"Please review the specific reason(s) for your ad's disapproval below. If you have further questions, we recommend reviewing our list of Common Ad Mistakes. You can also consult our Terms of Use and Advertising Guidelines for more information."

First off, if you know anything about me, I do all my due diligence (home work) before I take any action, so this is kind of an insult.

They went on to say that my offer may be fraudulent, etc. I was promoting an informational article strictly to test the response of FaceBook advertising. Here is the article (CLICK HERE if you are curious). There is no offer in this article. I was willing to spend $80 just to test FaceBook's system on an informational article - they had recommended $0.94 for a minumum bid and I bid $0.60. If they would have said this is the reason for the rejection, that would have made sense.

The fact that they don't provide me or anyone else with someone to call or even chat with. The real message I am getting here is (and let me give you my interpretation):

"Your $80 is not important enough for us to communicate directly with you or even give you a real reason about what the problem was."

It's like going to an auction to buy peanut butter, waiting a day and finding my bid rejected, with no real reason and then having absolutely no recourse or way to contact them!

I have successfully run ads on FaceBook since they first started offering advertising over a year ago, and I can tell you from experience and as is demonstrated here, FaceBook is a "Faceless" business - if you have a problem, they basically give you the finger! The advertising is also not effectective. When I do get ads submitted, I get a lot of exposures, but few clicks and traffic is very expensive. I run these tests on FaceBook about twice each year and find that just one visit to my website costs me about $1 on average - it's not even close to worth it if your goal is traffic.

FaceBook is good for large corporations that can hire someone to manage this bidding process, but I don't recommend it to anyone that has an advertising budget of less than $100k per year.

Here are some National Salary Averages* as of today.

• SEO Manager - $69K
• SEM Managers - $81K
• Interactive Acct. Manager - $67K
• Online Media Planner - $56K
• Social Media Marketing Manager - $77K
• Online Marketing Manager - $71K