Affiliate Marketing

Facebook Blocks Specific Words In Ads

I opened a Facebook account for the sole purpose of advertising a few weeks ago. No, pwning them was not my intent. Ethics aside, I am such a newbie that I would screw it up anyway. I just heard rumors of $0.05 clicks and we started doing PPC recently.

I figured the scholarship offer mentioned in that pwning post was dead and buried after a month but I thought I would try running it anyway. I needed something that would appeal to college students and that offer seemed as good as anything else for a first campaign to learn their system.

Well, I did not get past the first Flyer creation page. It took a few minutes to figure this out but they do not let you put the word “scholarship” anywhere in the ad copy. Once I removed that it let me move to the second page to enter a maximum CPC and daily budget. Not surprisingly, just adding a direct affiliate link to that offer in your ad gets it disabled right away too. You also get a message saying do not ever run this ad again with links to the Terms of Service (TOS) and Advertising Guidelines. I tested this with their new advertising system, Facebook Ads, a few days ago and saw a similar thing.

The real problem did not have anything to do with the ad copy or the link or the offer though. Someone violated the TOS by opening multiple accounts to get around the maximum daily budget limit (which does not exist anymore) of $50. Maybe it is just me but I wish Facebook would find a better solution than this.

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