Facebook tips for the week

Put ad's in their own campaigns if want any control over starting or stopping activity. If you have multiple ad's in a single campaign, there either all running or all paused.

What really sucks is once you create an ad with targeting parameters you can't go back and edit those parameters. You have to start completely over. I would really like to adjust the age range for an ad each week and compare the results.

Facebook doesn't allow you to use special characters especially in the title. But it appears you don't need to worry about it because once your ad is approved you can rename the title and use special characters like "$".

What I would like to see is support for dayparting. I tend to shut down my ads late nite after they have hit their budget and then resume their activity around 6pm. Night time is a huge wave of traffic.

Facebook ads don't add up

Facebook's ad system is a joke when compared to google and yahoo. You get what you pay for at the moment. I'm finding 20% or more FB clicks never show up in analytics. Maybe it's a problem since their system is new but it's costing me at the moment.

Advertising on Facebook is similar to Craigslist, it's like a garage sale since you still have no idea who will show up and doubtful they will buy.

How Digg fought spammers and increased page views in one fell swoop

Back on September 19, 2007 Digg launched a new profile system. The idea was to put a little more social into the Digg system. Some people liked the changes while others did not.

read more | digg story

Craigslist conversion

It's pretty easy to spam craigslist regardless of their spamming tactics. But what's the real use if conversion is terrible. After a few months I really don't contribute much to conversion over the use of CL. In fact it's disappointing but then I never thought of it as a real traffic driver but more of an experiment. People seem to have the same behavior over print classified ad's, very little response. Unless your giving something away for free. The interesting part overall like many popular sites is there are just too many messages/info to be consumed. You post a message in a popular city and in an hour it's buried by others, CL, or just on another page. I've seen a message posted in a tiny town that will come my way 3 weeks after I posted it. Things just moving too fast.

More Craigslist fun

I'm not big on Craigslist but I can't stand the fact that even though they banned a few domains from postings I could still get around the issue if I want. Not that I care anymore because I have better marketing ideas. But it did made me start thinking about the difficultly they have to deal with trying to stop spam 'like' messages from being posted. I don't see that abuse going away anytime soon and the hackers will just get smarter at automated posting. I've already seen it in action and thought it was pretty funny.

Future of the browser

Have browsers ever been 100% compatable with each other? I remember when Netscape and IE were close with HTML 1.0 but since then it has been a downhill road. So today you have 4 major browsers, Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari all which are pretty much heading down different directions. The real battle will be Firefox and IE which represents the majority of usage. I was already hard enough to code html/css across these browsers and versions and now their foundations going forward will change and the thought of be compatable isn't part of their equation for desktop dominance. So with this challenge I think it's funny people talk about standards when the very browsers we use don't really care about supporting the common W3 web standards. In fact why bother with any of those standards and just makeup your own as Microsoft does since you already have customer lock-in. Just reading about Firefox 3 and it's truely a separate path than the others.

Adventures with Craigslists, Final thoughts

I'm not really jumping up and down about Craigslist being a marketing tool but rather more of a online garage sale. I'm sure they want it this way which is fine. From my perspective you see the potential eyeballs coming to the site and hope to exploit some of that. You don't know unless your try and I walk away some valuable information concerning classified postings. It also seems to potentially coincide with paper advertising. Not extensive testing here but I did advertise an ad in a Sunday newspaper and not one result came to the website. I'm sure some other newspapers might yield some sort of results but I'm debating that effort vs radio or tv.

I'll check back in another week or so and see if my domain is still banned, not that I really care because I can create hundreds more.