Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

I haven’t posted much recently because I have been trying to keep my nose to grind.  Not to mention, there is so much acai drama going on, it could keep anyone busy.

Last week, out of the blue, I was assigned a Facebook account rep (what up dude, if you’re reading, sorry about the cloaking post - swear I don’t do it).  At first I was really skeptical of what he could offer me, aside from being able to call him when I need big limit increases, which he did.  After talking with him on the phone today I learned SO MUCH about Facebook and he was an awesome guy.  It was actually pretty amazing everything he told me.  I am not going to share it all, I got to keep some to myself but here are some of the big highlights I learned from him:

• Contrary to popular belief, Facebook does not use interns to approve ads.  They have full time employees (yes I am sure it must suck) who approve ads and also double as customer service.
• When you see intern.facebook.com show up in logs during reviews, it stands for internal not as in an intern
• Facebook does pace your campaigns during the day and it paces on campaign limit.  So he suggested that I raise my campaign limits real high to like 20k/day so that it would show more ad impressions, instead of pacing it to a lower limit.
• If you want a big boy daily spend limit, they like for you to have a debit card associated to the account.  I was informed there are quite often large charges that get bounced, so if you attach a debit card as a back up, it can help to get large limit bumps.  I added one and they were quick to bump me pretty high.
• Using keywords can really help, even for broad demo’s.  He really stressed that I should try using keywords more than I do, said a lot of people don’t use them and they can make a big difference.
• Another suggestion was to really break out ads by city/state and call out that city/state in ads.  I’m probably not going to do it because I am lazy, but he said a lot of people see CTR boosts when doing this.

If anyone needs/wants a rep and spends decent coin on facebook, he said I could pass his info to a few people.  Just leave a comment here with your real email and I will get in touch with you.

As per my previous post, I said I would post the Facebook cloaking script I use to send the editors(interns) to a different page than I send users. You don’t just use this for risque dating offers, it also works really well for Zip/Email submits. Facebook doesn’t allow you to advertise for those offers, as it requires users to input personal information, so you have to cloak to run them. Same goes for dieting offers, as Facebook has really cracked down on those as well.

I originally got this script from Nickycakes, then I modified it to include the second referral source once editors started to come from intern.facebook.com. This script won’t work every time, as often times editors will input the URL directly to test it, they have caught onto our cloaking, but try submitting it a few times and it will go through. Also, be choosy about what you cloak to, they know you aren’t really advertising for cnn.com or google.com.

<?php
$cloaked_url = "http://www.entercloakedurlhere.com"; // devs go here
$normal_url = "http://www.enteruserurlhere.com"; // everyone else goes here

if(strpos($tracking_ref,”intern.facebook”) || strpos($tracking_ref,”dev.facebook”)){
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: ” . $cloaked_url );
} else {
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: ” . $normal_url );
}
?>

Like I said, this script works for me, I might have to change it some as they become more savvy, but it is good for now (and simple).