- Nov 23, 2011
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The Facebook Mind Games | Lunatic Edition
A few things about me first, used to be very active with Facebook ads from cloaking to using Chinese agencies for accounts.
As Facebook involved so did we and almost even a little bit faster.
From promoting adult dating offers, weight loss, lead-gen, and doing millions with casino offers.
Maybe some of you have seen some of the angles and stories we have written that pulled people in like magic. Before Facebook REALLY came out with the pixel it was all about getting a high CTR, the algorithm had a simple focus.
This many people clicking? They must like it and Ads that bring in a lot of money without bothering the user experience are #goals for any online business that relies on income from advertisements.
But then what?
Facebook would soon find out that ads with such high engagement might be content that is not following the rules. It’s basic knowledge that humankind clicks on things that provoke reactions and emotions such as a nice-looking girl in tight yoga pants or something that’s far too good to be true.
I would have mentioned Fake news here as well but in this era that wasn’t really a thing yet, it came a bit later when people started using it for political gains, and all kinds of other shit.
Facebook levels up, and puts a trigger on advertisements with a certain level of engagement, CTRs, and that kind of stuff.
This trigger is what we call a manual review…
Some accounts would start spending again and some would be banned, and this became or kinda from the start part of the game.
One account is just not going to make it and even now you should never RELY on just one Facebook account even if you are running absolute morally correct campaigns, thing is every company and especially a tech company is always looking to automate things where possible and reaching FB and their support just takes up to much time.
Also, let’s not fool ourselves, Facebook became well aware that cloaking was happening probably even before they created it lol.
Kinda like a cat-and-mouse game.
So now you are thinking, shit if I'm going to get those high CTRs again things will trigger that fucking manual review again.
What can we do about it?
We don’t want to stack our odds versus a manual review and cloaking was and still is basically just a huge list of IPs to put it in a simple way that is known and collected from the times when your ads were still under review and within the timeline of when your ads where not sending traffic.
When your ads are not running but you are getting clicks, these would 9/10 be from something or someone within Facebook.
All this data is what we would collect over time, and it just kept adding up. Luckily back then working from home wasn’t really a thing but even now people that work with Facebook will need to connect with their protected network and not their own IP address.
This is almost often required with big and small tech companies, or even hospitals for that matter. All actions have to be logged so still to this day you got the advantage with that.
But cloaking is still one of the last things you want to test against Facebook, sure you can increase your leverage but it’s never completely bulletproof.
But what you need to understand, the more manual reviews being triggered also required Facebook to hire more and more people and at what point would this be too much?
Now obviously the goal was to come up with better tech to get this done with less and less need for human resources but again this is where Facebook hit a spot where people had to be trained, and more money had to be spent to battle our amazing campaigns
It’s almost always the case that when things get annoying for us as advertisers it will also reflect on the tech giant itself. This counts for Google, Native ads, and Snapchat and the list is just endless.
The best solution here is certainly not spending a huge amount of budget and hiring people from “most often” low-tier countries (no offense meant here, it’s just a term) but it was the fastest solution at that time.
Side quest.
Timing and patience.
The reason I am bringing all this up is that you always need to have patience and find the right timing.
So in this stage, Facebook has its hands full on new hires, training that your odds of success are increasing.
Your odds are now increasing against a manual review as it’s most likely that the person reviewing your ads is new and like any company would do which is saving costs is that more than likely the person reviewing your ads isn’t exactly fluent in English.
To get into this a bit more, this would be called perfect timing your odds are increased and this is where you go on full-scale mode because we all know black-hat tactics come and go, and you will want to be prepared for that which leads me to the topic of.
Multiple accounts and budget is a must.
If you go into Facebook ads or any other giant traffic source you better come prepared and need to truly understand that all the real money is made through the right timing.
I’m sure most big Facebook advertisers agree that being able to show very very consistent statistics, I mean it is possible but it’s rare.
Let’s dive a bit further.
Facebook has shareholders, the shareholders have to be pleased like kings. Picture Mark kneeing down and begging to give him another chance to set bigger numbers In Q4 than he did in Q3.
(Just trying to make it a bit more fun, love you mark if you ever read this)
The effect that will happen here is that the stress from Mark goes all the way down the ladder and the Facebook team starts to allow things they usually won’t. The one and ONLY reason for this is to have reports that show an increase.
In a way, you could say they are playing pretty much the same game as us. Our money is wanted when they are in need. (Suckers)
At this stage obviously, their goal isn’t reached within their growth, saving costs is always a must so a new algorithm will follow.
THE Domains.
Again this is pure logic and counts for Google as well, picture the FB vampires writing down what is most likely going to be spam, and one of those things and later on a lot more things.
But let's talk about domains first.
New domains coming to Facebook and spending huge amounts on traffic before this was no problem at all but this again became another trigger to flag your account.
You imminently went from a good score to the score of a spammer.
All these things are pure logic and I am trying to write this for all of you to see the bigger picture, a new domain would flag your account because there are in general just very slim chances that a new company or a new advertiser come on the market with such big budgets to spend without having any history at all.
So to avoid this flag it is time to involve again, we started picking up expired domains with good age and that lasted for a good while but after a while that wasn’t enough anymore either. The logical next step had that domain or brand been promoted on Facebook before so just having a domain with age did not cut it anymore.
Besides that… Fast forward
Running just white hat campaigns wasn’t going to do much, well in the beginning but as you can tell by still reading up until this point the algorithm becomes tighter and tighter. These days we are hearing so much about the “rumors” of social credit scores in China but this has been happening for years and years.
The same goes for Facebook, so let me explain what people did wrong in the warming-up process.
“They didn’t care, warming up was warming up it just had to be clean stuff right”
The white hat campaign you would launch would actually mean a lot as your page has a “social credit score” based on liked and engagements, complaints and so forth.
So what we did was always make sure when launching a warmup complaint to look for something that people just can’t hate on.
(Seems impossible nowadays)
But we came up with things like Cats, cute animals in general, and giving people a positive feeling about our advertisement, the likes and shares would help a lot down the line as you were building up the reputation of your account, and at this point even more importantly the Page you are going to use to run the actual good stuff on.
This is still very much the case now so keep that in mind.
Remember that I mentioned Chinese agency accounts in the beginning?
This part is going to be interesting and it was where most of our money was made, again we are going to think about the stockholders, what can Facebook possibly do to increase its value?
Little Side Quest,
The value of Facebook is all in the data but the face value to the public is the charts and increases, the shit they are ok with showing you.
Facebook wanted a piece of the market share in China. You can read more about that here:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-backing-away-china-mark-zuckerberg-privacy
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/24/...owed-china-censorship-ban-hangzhou-zuckerberg
Google for more.
Now there are much more sources I can list here but the real ones know that everything I am talking about is straight-up real.
Let’s keep going I’m getting tired of typing.
Facebook decided to just hand over a couple of Chinese companies the KEYS to the empire,
Much like the subsidiary it was given its own control to deal with approvals and things like that and Chinese agencies started popping up everywhere.
To keep a long story short, We took a bunch of Chinese agency owners out and around town in Bangkok and managed to get some of the strongest accounts in Facebook history, instant approval on just about anything, and no limit on spending at all.
This wasn’t going to last and we had a great budget for sure but we are talking about unlimited spending and instant approval so what we did here is went into rev-share with hand-selected affiliates that knew how to run profitable campaigns.
We made so much during this time that the work ethic just burned out (looking back, could have absolutely made it at a very young age but things go as they go and all is well today)
Again this is a reflection on timing.
I want you to zoom out and get into a sick mindset where you think about these things, a market share in China? How are we going to use that to our advantage?
Well after China failed and Facebook stopped giving access to agencies in China it all became a bit slow for a while but we knew this was something to focus on and I'm going to ask you a question right now!
Have you seen the huge boost of Vietnam providers pushing FB accounts, Agency accounts, and so forth? Well, I have and it was almost as good as China for a while but again the abuse here got too much and it died out.
Enough for now, if you find this interesting leave a like or comment… Not around much but felt like sharing a bit of the random shit that goes on in my mind.
Some form of meditation.
Keep in mind that “black hat” is not always about doing something illegal, you need to bend the rules a bit to survive in this world.
I understand that I have not shown screenshots or gone into tech details.
This is solely for the mind lol.
