How many times recently have you seen an ad like this showing up in your Facebook profile?
Unfortunately for marketers, the fun is over. Facebook sent out the following email today:
Ad quality and user feedback are extremely important to Facebook. We’ve received significant negative feedback about ads that call out users’ personally identifiable information, especially when the information is not directly relevant to the ad’s offer. We take this feedback very seriously and are taking an active role in removing ads that are detrimental to the user experience. Some of your ads have been disabled for this reason.
Please delete any ads using this tactic that may still be running and do not submit new ads that call our user attributes unnecessarily and that are not directly relevant to the offer (including, but not limited to, age, gender, location or interest). This practice is prohibited by Facebook’s Ad Guidelines (http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php). Advertisers who continually engage in advertising practices that generate strong negative feedback will find that their ads are less likely to be shown to users and may have their ads disabled or face account penalties up to and including the permanent loss of advertising privileges.
Looks like people aren’t appreciating the laser-targeted ad text… Oh well. Back to the drawing board….
A couple of days later, I logged into my Facebook account and saw something very similar to the image on the right. Not only were all 3 ads on the page for a Government Grant offer, but the images and ad copy were almost identical. I figured this must be a fluke and refreshed the page. To my surprise, another 3 Government Grant ads appeared, including 2 of the exact same ad, image and all. This is the kind of thing that is giving affiliate marketing a bad name. You can’t even login to MySpace or view a story on MSNBC without being assaulted with the infamous “1 Simple Rule” ads for the fake Acai blogs (or flogs, as they have been recently named).
My point is this: if you are starting in affiliate marketing, you definitely should be looking around to see what is out there and see what is working, but don’t just copy and paste it into your campaigns. Stealing landing pages is definitely frowned upon, but it’s becoming even more common to copy a landing page, changing just a couple of words in the ad text here and there to make it your own. How did these flogs come along in the first place? It was by people being creative. There was nothing like it when the first Acai flog hit the market, and it absolutely crushed it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were made for a simple idea that someone had, and they actually followed through and tried it.