Inconsistent Enforcement, Inability To Avoid News Feed Plague Facebook’s 20 Percent Text Rule

Facebook marketing expert Jon Loomer is 100 percent annoyed with Facebook’s 20 percent rule, as in, from Section III.D of the social network’s advertising guidelines: “Ads and sponsored stories for news feed that originate from pages may not include images with more than 20 percent text.”

Loomer wrote that his issues are more with the enforcement of the rule than the spirit of the rule, pointing out that there is no official guide or tool to help page administrators determine if their ads comply with the guidelines, and that page admins are not given the option of excluding their ads from the news feed.

Facebook page builder ShortStack created a visual guide to the 20 percent rule, but Loomer was correct in pointing out that there is no official version of this type of tool.

Loomer wrote about specific examples:

Some ads get through that shouldn’t get through. Some ads get rejected that shouldn’t be rejected. And there is no consistency to the process.

An example is a promoted post that I ran for a client. That post was a link share that drove users to a Facebook tab. The link preview had more than 20 percent text in it.

After getting rejected, I decided to run it as a page post ad that would run only in the sidebar (we’ll get to this problem later). Rejected again.

A freaking link share. So you’re telling me that advertisers have to control how much text is in the thumbnail image? That’s absolutely ludicrous since it won’t always be controlled — and the image is rarely created with Facebook in mind.

And that’s only part of why this rejection was ridiculous. This particular page post ad was targeted at a custom audience of people who aren’t already connected to the page. I created this ad with the full intention of it never appearing in news feeds. But because — I assume — it could appear in news feeds as a suggested post due to a minuscule number of friends of fans, the link share thumbnail image gets the ad rejected.

I promoted a similar post that this time included a shared image. That image was a screen grab of a book gallery that was featured within a Facebook tab. Once again, that image did indeed have more than 20 percent text.

But that promoted post made it through. It was insanely effective. It was so effective that I extended the daily budget and expiration date to go through the end of February.

Of course, I got greedy and decided to create a page post ad out of that same post that would — hopefully — go into the sidebar. Facebook rejected that one, and seemed to pick up on the other ad that had been going on for three weeks. It then killed that one, too.

Some of the most effective ads are page post ads and sponsored stories that promote the engagement of page content. Sometimes, those posts include images that have more than 20 percent text in them.

Sure, I get it. I can’t promote that post in the news feed. So I guess I’ll just promote it in the sidebar.

But here’s the deal: You can’t.

Even when you use power editor, you can’t create a page post ad or sponsored story that only shows up in the sidebar. This wasn’t clear to me until Facebook recently added some copy explaining the various placements in power editor.

Do you see the problem here, folks? Previously, the second option was only “desktop.” My assumption was that this was simply all sidebar ads on desktop placements, since the final option was “news feed only.”

But “desktop” includes the sidebar and news feed. In other words, if you want to target fans or friends of fans with a page post ad or sponsored story, it’s impossible to hit them only on the sidebar.

Since you can’t avoid the news feed, you can’t create ads that contain more than 20 percent text in them — even if your intention is to reach only the sidebar.

The result: I’m getting rejected over and over and over again. Link shares and ads that I never wanted to show up in the news feed to begin with.

Readers: Have any of you encountered similar difficulties in trying to place ads on Facebook?

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Facebook’s View Tags Show That Views Can Be More Valuable Than Clicks

As Facebook advertisers try to find ways to get users to click on ads, new statistics show that the impression is probably more valuable than the click. TechCrunch learned more about Facebook’s view tag feature, which allows advertisers to track users who view ads, but who do not click on them. The site reports that, in one example, 87 percent of conversions came from impressions, rather than clicks.

The view tag program was first rolled out privately, but over time, Facebook allowed more advertisers to make use of it.

TechCrunch illustrated how view tags work in a very simple flowchart:

Facebook has been trying to crack this nut for a while. Earlier this year, the social network partnered with DataLogix to find out how often someone buys a product after seeing an ad for it on the site.

Through view tags, advertisers can see what ad led to a purchase, even if the user didn’t click on it.

So far, view tags appear to be working. TechCrunch heard from SocialCode, which ran a campaign for a company looking to get people to redeem an offer through Facebook. Of the 5,924 people who redeemed, 5,127 had seen the ad (but not clicked), and 797 people clicked through the offer straight from the ad.

Kenshoo also used view tags. The company told TechCrunch that view tags showed that 34.6 percent of conversions came from impressions where users did not click on the ad. These kinds of conversions generated more than $31,000 — 29 percent of the campaign’s total revenue.

Readers: Have you utilized Facebook’s view tags?

Report: Judge Closer To Approving Facebook’s Revised Settlement In Sponsored Stories Suit

Did a $10 bill change the mind of U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg? Quite possibly, but not in an illegal way: At a hearing in San Francisco Thursday, Seeborg looked more favorably upon Facebook’s revised settlement proposal in a class-action lawsuit over the use of users’ images in sponsored stories, and the judge said he would rule “very shortly.”

In August, Seeborg took issue with the settlement proposal Facebook announced in June, and a major sticking point was the fact that Facebook users received no money, with all of the funds going toward organizations that promote online privacy.

But Reuters reported that Facebook’s revised proposal provides for payments of $10 to each user out of its total settlement fund of $20 million, with the remainder of the money going to charity.

Facebook also said in its revised settlement that it would create a new tool that would allow users to view any of their content that may have been used as part of sponsored stories and opt out of the process.

According to Reuters, if Seeborg does grant his preliminary approval, outside groups will have the opportunity to file further objections before a final hearing is held.

Reuters also reported on an interesting exchange between the judge and Facebook attorney Michael Rhodes, in which Rhodes claimed that the social network’s revised settlement provided meaningful protections, and that the court’s job was to ensure a fair settlement, and not to create national privacy policy, prompting Seeborg to reply:

Trust me, I’m not proposing to set grand policy with privacy issues writ large.

Readers: Do you think this version of Facebook’s settlement will pass muster?

Portuguese Is Facebook’s Fastest-Growing Language

English is still the most widely spoken language on Facebook, but a new challenger is rising. According to statistics from Socialbakers, a growing number of new users speak Portuguese, the third-most-popular language on the social network.

Socialbakers tracked the growth of users’ primary languaged from May 2010 through November 2012 to find that an overwhelming amount of new users speak Portuguese. In terms of overall numbers, English is still king among new users, but Portuguese has seen a great increase in terms of percentage.

Arabic placed second, and German a distant third.

Sadly, English (Pirate) has not taken off like we hoped.

Readers: How do you tailor your Facebook marketing efforts to those who speak languages other than English?