Business 
Comments Off Facebook Ads Fail
I have been running Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft ads for years to advertise my websites. I recently decided to try creating some ads on Facebook. The ads were a complete failure, and it seems like Facebook has missed a lot of potential with its ad network. I basically ran into the issue that they simply wouldn’t allow me to advertise any of my products, even though it appears is if they will.
What Facebook Ad Campaigns CAN Do
When you create a campaign in Facebook ads you type in keywords that you want to purchase ads for, similar to other advertising networks. The difference here is that you are constrained to Facebooks list of keywords. These keywords come from user profiles, only, from what I can tell. This can be awesome for some types of advertising. For example, my profile says I play poker, and I often see poker ads. Perfect. But that’s only one small part of potential advertising. First of all, my profile is very bare, but there is much more information posted on my wall that could contain potential advertising keywords.
What Facebook Ad Campaigns CAN’T Do
Nobody is a fan of lost pets, heart attacks, car wrecks, or arthritis. But companies sell products for all of these issues. With Facebook ads pulling keyword information from profiles you can only buy keywords for “positive” events and items. In the Facebook ad console you type keywords into a text box and Facebook pops up potential keywords for you to choose. Unlike Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, you can only purchase keywords that are in their system. This means although I can purchase the keyword “lost dogs” for Fido Finder, because there is a band called “The Lost Dogs” (can’t purchase the keyword “lost cats” a tall), I cannot target people posting that they actually lost a dog. In general, it appears that if people aren’t proud of the keywords you need to buy, you won’t have any success advertising on Facebook. I was completely unable to advertise Fido Finder and Tabby Tracker. Then, because of ridiculous, over-aggressive, “gambling” rules that we run into on every ad network, I cannot advertise League Ace or Hold’Em Hand History even though neither of them allows any kind of gambling.
The Volume/Traction Problem
Since I do run Tagomatic, a website for music, movies, books and website “reviews”, I did decide to run some “positive” ads on Facebook for people who are into “rock, rap, country, etc.” I also ran Naming Force ads for people who are “Starting a Business”. What I saw for these two campaigns was a quick run of a few thousand impressions in the first 2 days, that resulted in 4-5 clicks, and then no more impressions for the following weeks. No notice from Facebook about any issues. No information when I sign into the console. No suggestion on how to continue my campaigns. Nothing. Both campaigns just stopped getting impressions. Now, I’m smart enough to know that increasing my keyword bid would probably result in continued impressions. But IMO the system fails yet again in not allowing me to advertise my products for $0.20 a click, even if I get a low CTR, the way other ad networks would allow me to do. I don’t think the industry really knows what kind of ads people will click on Facebook, and the Facebook system doesn’t allow this information to develop. With me only getting a few thousand impressions I don’t even have the chance to tweak my ad text or campaign settings. How is anyone supposed to get off the ground with this system?
So for all 6 websites I currently have running I was not able to create a single successful campaign on Facebook for any of them. That’s just a FAIL.