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The FB Pixel now available for FB groups!
Before we go into the bad news, let’s look at the little good news there is.
Facebook now allows admins to add the Pixel to FB groups.
Facebook says: “It’s important to note that attributed results (or actions taken as a result of your Group posts) will only show in Group Insights and not in Events Manager or Ads Manager. It’s important to note that these results are not related to the paid advertising results that appear in Ads Manager”.
If you have a group, check if you don’t have this enabled already. It’s rolling out already.
5,000 targeting terms removed
Now we switch to bad news, and there’s quite a lot of it, unfortunately.
Big-blue has decided to remove targeting terms/interests that could be used for discriminatory ad targeting.
While FB doesn’t categorize people by race or ethnicity, but advertisers could target or exclude people interested in things like Evangelicalism, Native American culture, Islamic culture and similar.
So it was quite possible to target or exclude a big portion of people based on their ethnicity or religion.
Why is this actually bad news? Because most advertisers did not use these terms maliciously, and it will put a big dent into their targeting capabilities, at least until Facebook comes up with something better.
Doesn’t sound so bad? Wait, we’re getting there…
Facebookeddon…
“He sees you when you’re sleepin’
He knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for your ad accounts sake
Oh! You better watch out, you better not cry
Better not pout, I’m telling you why
Zuckerberg is comin’ with bans”
It started with this post by Kosti To in the Purple Knowledge Lab group, about his $2,200,000 Business Manager getting banned.
We touched in it on our email from August 21st.
Then other people started reporting way, way more bans than average, especially on Business Managers, not just on ad accounts.
We know it’s way more than average because we browse all these groups every day to bring you the most important content.
People almost never complain about account bans to this extent, just the odd beginner that either didn’t pay attention to policies or got caught in a false positive and doesn’t know what to do.
Just in the last 24 hours, we found 4 more reports of Business Manager bans, ad accounts banned or an unusual amount of ads disapproved.
These came from Matthew Novik, Kathryn Louie Thomas, Jake Vale, and Saif Najm.
And that was just people who reported it in groups. In private talks, more advertisers have said that it’s tough these days, whatever you are running.
It seems e-commerce is the “targeted” one, specifically low-quality e-commerce. It seems to be facing similar challenges to outright BH practices.
The only upside is that even if you are caught in this net of bans, if you really didn’t do something shady, you have an above average chance of getting up and running. Sure, above average doesn’t mean much but yeah…
Facebook, thy name is hypocrisy
Facebook banned myPersonality, an app that was active mostly before 2012, that had similar practices to Cambridge Analytica.
Nothing that major here, right?
Way smaller than CA anyway, old, less impact… but FB wants to improve its reputation and released this statement.
Well, on the same day, the Facebook-owned app Onavo got banned by Applefrom the AppStore for… Any guesses?
Feeding data to its parent company against Apple’s terms of service.
The Crew’s take on Facebookeddon
We exaggerated the title for the clickbait effect and because we really wanted to make that image above with Mark Zuck instead of Bruce Willis.
On a more serious note though, it’s not looking too bright for Facebook advertisers, even though we were rather optimistic for them. Facebook still has a lot of work to do to clean up its reputation and this means many advertisers will suffer.
We’ve brought up this warning before so over the next couple of weeks we’ll also try to bring some suggestions on how to cope with these tough times – from alternative traffic sources and advice for them to just adding a regular dose of comic relief so you don’t feel so bad about the red rectangle of doom.
If you want to help out everyone in the community with advice, hit us up by replying to this email or at [email protected]. We’re far from experts on alternatives, so we’d really appreciate advice from your hands-on expertise!
PS: We still think FB is very likely to figure all this out, it’s just going to mean tough days for businesses that depend on FB Ads until they do.
GENERAL
The world’s first documented customer complaint?
Med Riadh Haouas came across a hilarious exhibit at a museum and he shared it in the Momentum Marketing Tribe group.
The title of it is “Complaint about the delivery of the wrong grade of copper” and it dates from 1750 BC.
This just might be the world’s first documented customer complaint.
The text is also hilarious. Med shared the translation, so if you want a good chuckle, check it out!
Who’s gonna hang out with us in Bangkok?
With all this bad news in the past couple of days, it’s only fitting that we try to bring some bright side to things.
OK, you got us! We would have done this either way… there’s no hiding it!
Sooo, we’re 4 months old… And in these 4 months, you, our readers, have given us a lot of support and it makes us extremely happy that you enjoy our work.
It also makes us very motivated to improve our content, to find better ways to connect with you, and to reach more people.
So that’s what we’re doing now with this giveaway: The Ultimate Marketer Bundle – Bangkok 2018 Edition.
What is it?
Well, the prize has something for everyone in the industry, regardless of experience level.
- A WHAT THE AFF free dinner with 5 best-in-the-biz guests at a high-end restaurant in Bangkok.
- An affiliate pass to Affiliate World Asia 2018 from Affiliate World Conferences.
- 3 months of AdPlexity product of your choice, for free.
- 3 months of ThriveTracker, 66% off up to Enterprise plan.
- Two invitations to Affiliate Business Club’s event in Bangkok.
Why Bangkok? Because we’re going to be there, and most of the industry will be there too. Plus, it’s a great city!
By now, we hope you’re wondering how do you enter. It’s pretty easy – go to this link, where you will see the giveaway page.
Add your email there, and done – you are part of the giveaway.
That’s not all though – we’ve put together a few ways to increase your chances of winning. You’ll see once you submit your email.
The most important one right now is a bonus available for 8 hours from the time this email went out at 11 AM GMT, for those of you who are loyal readers and open this email every day.
We’ll randomly add this again over the next weeks and let you know in the newsletter to visit the page to claim your entries.
We’d also really appreciate it if you shared the giveaway. There are bonus entries for those that do, right there on the giveaway page!
This giveaway is ONLY for affiliates, media buyers, e-commerce store owners, and the likes. Affiliate networks, traffic sources and other vendors are welcome to share with their customers but employees and owners from vendors cannot win.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
IBM’s mind control system
While you’re fighting to get campaigns profitable, one corporation has set their gaze upon the yet-unexplored land of mind-reading technology.
When we first read about IBM dabbling in mind-control devices, the image in our minds was related to all-powerful humans controlling others, resembling zombie-like slaves.
In reality, however, instead of a grim dystopia, the project is about giving disabled people means for accessibility. Probably for the better, we think!
Someone with locked-in syndrome or paralysis would greatly benefit from a system that allowed them to control prosthetics with their brains, and that is exactly what IBM is going for.
The general idea is that it works like this: An EEG monitor is attached, and a specially developed AI interprets those signals as commands for a robotic arm.
Of course IBM isn’t the first or only ones looking into this kind of technology, however, it seems like they are the most interested in creating a reasonably priced system using readily available components, allowing it to be used by the public, as IBM research scientist Stefan Harrer says:
“Our primary design goals were (i) low-cost and (ii) suitable for use in an unrestricted real-life environment. (i) allows the system to transition from an expensive research grade exploratory setup (the status-quo of BMIs) to a setup that is affordable for the broad public (the first of our main objectives) – (ii) allows the system to be taken out of highly specialized research lab environments and moved into everyday environments for use by the broad public (the second of our main objectives).”
Albeit there are no plans for human trials yet, eventually this work should make the daily life of a great many people much easier.
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