Straight from the horses mouth Facebook just notified me that they don't like outside advertisers. Is it me or is this just another round of the Google slap coming around again.
Don't believe me?
Check out what they told me today.
“Hi Lawrence,
Thank you for participating in the Facebook Ads beta conversion tracking program. After reviewing extensive feedback from beta participants, we've decided to discontinue the beta program, effective next month.
What This Means for Your Business
If you use a Facebook conversion tracking tag on your own website, you'll be able to collect tracking data through the beta feature until October 20, 2010, and you'll be able to view historical conversion data through November 1, 2010.
Note: This change only affects conversion tracking pixels used outside of Facebook. We'll continue to automatically track and report on conversions for your Facebook Page or Event.
Thanks again for your participation in this beta program. We look forward to bringing you new features to support your advertising experience in the coming months!
Best Regards,
The Facebook Ads Team”
What this is essentially saying is screw all of you who want to track internally with Facebook and you gotta do it externally. This isn't impossible to do but for a program that makes Facebook millions, if not close to billions soon, it just doesn't make sense that a simple tracking option isn't available. Google, Yahoo, Bing all have tracking integration and it just makes it easy to see very quickly which campaigns are performing. Facebook already had it backwords when they didn't show it that day of but now it's even worst by not allowing tracking within Facebook PPC.
What else are you guys using to track externally for PPC these days? If you plan to use Facebook for PPC marketing you better have other systems in place to track now.
Engineering Your Success,
Lawrence Tam
PS> Graduate From My 7 Day Internet Lead Generation Bootcamp
Basically Facebook is making it difficult for you to promote web pages and wants you to focus all your ad spend on your Fan Page. Infuriating! You can spend all this time customizing your Fan Page then at any point they can change the rules of the game on your Fan Page. Like they did when the change the size restrictions about a month ago. As Facebook Advertisers we should not tolerate this!
yeah, when they say you gotta be on your toes… facebook has decided to accelerate the learning curve.
I pitty the home business owner who has NO mentor. you will be treading water then facebook goes and dumps some crabs on your head. I hope your ready for it!
Get with someone in the know and dominate. things change too quickly online to go at it alone.
I agree Lawrence,Facebook PPC has been great for a while only because of the low competition and picture capabilities that search engine PPC does not offfer. However, the fact they you will no longer be able to track conversions outside of Facebook really blows. Looks like they are headed in the same direction as Google. Soon people will be talking about how they got the “Facebook slap”! I personally use Facebook PPC but I’m also well diversified in FREE marketing solutions.
there will be a facebook slap. I hope people are using facebook ppc for things other than 100% traffic to their businesses.
thanks Lawrence.
your welcome. online tools like facebook ppc change ALL the time. keep up to date!
I don’t do much PPC yet but the tracking issue back then was definitely a mistake on their part. Sounds like they wanted to keep things in-house all along or they wouldn’t have had that board meeting about this and ultimately shut it down.
for marketers wanting to push outside of facebook this is a no-no… oh wellz