I’ve been experimenting with the Facebook Ads platform a bit, seeing what they will approve, how much traffic costs, and how well it converts. As with most subjects, jumping in and experimenting teaches you a great deal of things, in a very rapid fashion. I highly recommend this method, as long as you have an acceptable daily budget in place.
Thinking I was a clever chap, I thought I’d try some hyper-targeted ads to dating services, with headlines like “29 and single in L.A.?” and target 29 year old people in the Los Angeles area. Facebook quickly came back with a Disapproved for the ad, and encouraged me to abide by their targeting rules for dating ads, in Section 10.
As an aside, the headline of the ad they let me create initially was “29 and Single in LA?”, which to the observant reader is not Los Angeles, but rather Louisiana, because they have a rule against not allowing two punctuation marks in a row, specifically the .? I wanted to end the ad with. Bummer.
After following all the targeting requirements, my ads were still getting disapproved. I sent an email to the Ads support address, and about a day later, they responded that the landing page was not targeted, meaning, the page was not specifically for 29 year old people in Los Angeles. Bored with all their requirements, I wandered off to find trouble in other places.
Fast forward a week, and I’m presented with this ad on Facebook:
Yes, the lovely Mullet Family, in all their glory, calling to me, a Class of 1991 high school graduate. From previous Internet experience, I guessed this to be a Classmates.com ad, but thought “Wait a minute, how can they do that, Classmates.com is not all about the Class of 1991, is Facebook giving them preferential treatment?”, until I clicked on the ad:
The landing page IS targeted to the Class of 1991, URL and all. Clever. It seems that all it takes to make Facebook happy is a few bucks for a targeted domain name, and a terrible looking, but highly targeted landing page. So what I need is 29AndSingleInLosAngeles.com, and a picture of a 29′ish looking person on my landing page. I’ll give that a try and report back on my level of success.
Update 1: FAIL, my first shot at creating an ad for the landing page was Disapproved, because Facebook Ads policy states “The ad text may not mention any user attribute such as age, gender or location unless it is directly relevant to the offer.” I’ll create a more generic ad that goes to the highly targeted landing page and see how that goes.
Update 2: A few weeks ago, I noticed Facebook ads with my age and location in both the headline and the ad text. I have also had ads approved with the user’s age in the headline, and the user’s age, location (U.S. state) and gender in the ad body. Once I get some CTR data on how this type of targeting performs, I’ll post again here.