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The Incentive To Be On A Platform

Platforms of all sorts incentivize businesses to depend on them. Most of my internet businesses were/are heavily dependent on Facebook, Instagram, Digg, Google etc. You got to drive traffic from somewhere, right?

The influencers making hundreds of thousands claiming to be indie artists are dependent on platforms like Instagram, Facebook & Youtube. It would take one bad email to snatch away their dreams, career, livelihood and fame. Platforms are risky, and the bigger your business is, the less dependent you need to be on a platform.

The list of causalities is too long for me to name. The list of my own business casualties isn’t short either.

It’s okay to be on a platform. We all need them. They are the power houses of the internet and fuel growth for all of our businesses. But it’s one thing to drive business from the platform and it’s another thing to build business on a platform. In an ideal scenario, we shouldn’t be building businesses on platforms. In some situations though the reward is so high that we and others embrace the risk that comes with the platforms.

When I started this blog, my father asked me that why am I self-hosting it. By self-hosting, I need to take care of some small bills, and also need to maintain it myself. In comparison, I could have started writing on Medium instead, which is what my father expected me to do. It can be easier to subscribe, higher email delivery and open rates, free recommendations and surfacing of my content on the platform to other medium users, no cost of hosting content, safe, higher up time, better SEO etc. There could be many benefits.

But when I see content-locker on Medium that tells me that I like to read a lot and hence have reached my reading limit, it’s a sweet reminder of why I chose not to use a platform like Medium.

I’ve finally decided to share my life stories. It took a long while for me to agree to write and share and I can not leave my breadcrumbs on the mercy of Medium or others. I use platforms because there’s financial incentive. As there is no financial incentive with this blog, I decided to self host it even if it means lesser readership, lower email open rates and everything else that I’ll be missing out. In the long run, I think, I will miss out more on a platform.

My Ad Account Got Disabled, But I Live On Optimism

Today, an ad-account for one of our e-commerce stores got disabled. There was no violation. It was the same ads that we had been running for 4 weeks. Usually when the ad account gets deactivated, there’s an appeal link. The account is usually sorted in couple of hours. But today, there was no notification or appeal link.

I’ve still appealed through a different support channel, but its not going to resolve in couple of hours but would take longer than that.

Meanwhile, I’ve exported all campaigns to a different ad account. Theres a way to export CSV of campaigns and import to a different ad account. Here’s a walk-through video of how to do it. The process can still be very messy because of custom audiences, and lookalikes. When Facebook deactivates one ad account, it locks everything inside that ad account including all custom audiences and lookalikes. So its not possible to move those if they are owned by a disabled ad account.

I had a shitty day trying to do these manual, hateful tasks. I really had two options. Option # 1 was to basically feel angry at Facebook and stop advertising. Option # 2 was to start-over.

The option # 2 can be interesting because I may be able to make the 2nd ad account deliver profitable campaigns too. In the best case scenario, I may get the first ad account back as well. And in the super optimist world, I’ll have two ad-accounts burning twice the fuel, delivering twice the sales, making twice the profit. I want to think that this will happen. Because without this kind of optimism, it’s hard to want to run a business.

Why I Like Facebook’s CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization)

Facebook launched campaign level budgets in the mid of 2019. Initially, I was skeptical but I’ve started to like CBOs a lot. By using campaign level budget, I can now test 5-10 adsets in the same budget that I needed before to test 1 adset.

Facebook simply spends higher budget on the adsets within a CBO that are more worthy of my budget and spends lesser budget on adsets that are more likely to burn cash.

There is always a risk of missing out on a potentially winning adset but the reward overshadows the risk. In addition, you could still define minimum spend per adset within a CBO to ensure that each adset gets a bare minimum spotlight. Although, I generally advise against that.

My only problem with CBOs thus far is the organizational structure. Prior to CBOs, I only had to create 1 campaign per product. My campaign could then have hundreds of adsets.

Now I’ve to create multiple campaigns per product with each campaign grouping similar adsets together. Because of this, I’ve to create 10s of campaigns per product. The downside is I can’t group together data for 1 product without using filters which is just an added inconvenience

If Facebook introduces something which is above the campaigns level only for sake the of categorization, I’d really like that.

The Right Way to Talk to AI Support to Lift Limitations

A few days ago, I spoke about the visa restrictions on the internet. I also wrote a bit about how you can circumvent those. Today, I’m going to write about a certain kind of visa restriction that I often face.

Large platforms treat users from different countries differently. They do that to apparently keep their platform “safe”. To keep the platform safe, they look at the data they have on each country, the amount of spam/scam etc happening from each country or region and then develop rules to treat each user accordingly. In theory, this means it’s harder to use these platforms from Pakistan than it is from US even if all you’re trying to do is use the platform the right way.

One such restriction that I’ve always seen happen is completely losing access to account. For example in the past, I’ve lost access to my Facebook personal account and Facebook ad accounts. Google Adsense is also more likely to get disabled in Pakistan than in US. There’s always the option to appeal for both these platforms but appeal often results in nothing.

A friend of mine devised a strategy to deal with these appeals. His theory is that all account closures happen with no human intervention. The decisions are completely taken by the machines. He also believes, and I agree, that in most cases the appeal process also happens without any human intervention. So how can you convince a machine into accepting your appeal?

My friend uses emotional signals to deal with this. If you’re apologetic or regretful in your tone of appeal, your appeal is never going to get accepted. You’re guilty and you’re showing it in your tone. Instead, my friend is angry, distressed and disappointed when he’s appealing; and I’ve seen it first hand that the appeal is much more likely to work.

Visa Restrictions On The Internet

While I acknowledge that internet is the biggest game changer of the human history, it is still not what it was supposed to be or what it can be.

In the offline world, all humans aren’t born equal. They are born in certain conditions where their lives are driven by their socioeconomic circumstances. Their lives are dictated by their place of birth and half of what they can and can’t do is written in the stone. Sure they can break the chains and the barriers to come out stronger but that happens very seldom.

On the internet, everyone has the same opportunities. In theory, though. You could get on YouTube and make a living regardless of where you live. Hundred of millions of people have benefited from such global opportunities that didn’t exist 30 years ago. But these global opportunities are still not provided equally to everyone, although they are marketed as such always.

For example, YouTube first launched their monetization partner program in 2006 for select countries but it wasn’t until 2016 that this program was launched in Pakistan.

Facebook restricts fresh Pakistani ad accounts at Rs 1000/day spend ($6.46 on today’s exchange rate) while a fresh US account is restricted at $50/day spend. Restrictions are lifted more quickly for the developed world, and less quickly for the emerging world. The scrutiny of AI is much harsher for us than it is for the developed world.

In summary, AI is no different than the visa issuing officers that judge us more than our counterparts elsewhere in the world.

On the bright side, in the offline world, if you try hard enough, you can sometimes circumvent these restrictions. You can sometimes emigrate or obtain a better travel document by meeting certain criteria or just by wanting to have it bad enough.

Since internet is almost always better than the offline world in every regard, you can also circumvent a lot of these restrictions if you try hard enough. In fact, on the internet, like everything else, this circumvention is often not as hard as in the offline world.

Perhaps, we’ll talk more of this circumvention in another blog.

Facebook’s Super Lookalike Audiences Using Top Percentile

Super lookalikes isn’t officially a type of audience by Facebook. It’s just a term used by performance marketers to describe lookalikes made using top percentiles of the audience.

This kind of custom and lookalike audience is generally not publicly made available by Facebook but it’s kind of a hidden gem. If you don’t know about lookalike audiences, please check this out. And if you do, read ahead.

This is where you generally create or find your custom and lookalike audiences

But super lookalike audiences are created here.

Using the percentile option under activity in analytics section

You can create a filter to reflect the top percentile of your readers or buyers and save as custom audience

You can then use this custom audience to create lookalikes using the standard way. I call these super lookalikes.

Because results for super lookalikes speak for themselves.

Growth Risks With Facebook’s Machine Learning

Facebook has very advanced machine learning capabilities. More often than not, you’re better off reaching your customers for a cheaper cost by reaching a broader audience instead of a narrow targeted audience. But how is that possible? In theory, targeted audience should work better? But with strong ML, the broader audience delivers better and cheaper results provided that the initial customer dataset was correct.

But what happens if you get the initial data wrong? It puts their ML chase your customers in the wrong direction. Let me explain.

When building a Facebook page, growth is going to depend a lot on you first 100s or 1000s likes. Hence getting your first subscribers or customers wrong, can put you altogether in the wrong direction. I can think of 2 reasons why that could happen. Firstly, your upcoming page subscribers are likely to come from the network of your existing subscribers due to sharing and other engagement. And secondly, the engagement behavior of the first data set of subscribers with your content will define how engaging your page is and eventually define the placement of your page in the newsfeed and other Facebook algorithms.

So getting the initial dataset of subscribers/customers is extremely important. It is why I’m generally way more careful in the start when building a Facebook page or an e-commerce store through Facebook ads but later on take the liberty to test all kinds of traffic. It keeps my seed-data clean. The data that is going to be used to build the entire user-base later on.

If you have a question, please feel free to ask in comments.

Facebook LookAlike Marketing Hack That Will Save You Tons of Money

I have yet to meet a performance marketer who has not fallen in love with Facebook’s LookAlike audience feature. If you provide minimum data (100 users) to Facebook about your leads or customers, it can find more potential customers for you that lookalike your seed data.

It doesn’t just sound sexy. It works. It works wonders. It’s the most amazing feature I’ve seen on any ad platform thus far. But you can make it even more amazing by following a simple trick.

If you have worked for even a few weeks in the internet marketing industry, you’d be aware that the advertising marketplaces work on bidding and competition. Since more and more people are trying to reach customers in US, UK, Canada, Australia & Europe, advertising is generally more expensive in these geos compared to Pakistan, India, Philippines, Mexico, Brazil etc.

And to take advantage of this location arbitrage, all you have to do is begin your ad campaign by targeting customers or audience in a cheap geo-location like Pakistan or India. Once you have 100+ leads or customers from one country, you can use that data to create LookAlike audience for any country including the US. This saves you serious costs in data acquisition which is often done by losing money. And you end up with a valuable data for very little ad spend that allows you to scale your campaigns in any country.

To build LookAlike audience, you’ll need a customer file, engagement on your Facebook page including video views, or website data using pixel. To learn about pixels, watch this. To learn how to build custom audience, watch this. And to learn how to create LookAlike audience from your custom audience, watch this.

Internet Is Centralized & Contaminated

I love internet. I have always loved it and I’ve always thought of it as a friend of a common man. It is an equalizer for sure. It makes the boundaries thinner, reduces some of those “visa restrictions” we have to participate in a global world. But internet is still far from perfect. And that’s okay. But I feel it’s also not moving in the right direction. And that isn’t okay.

Internet was meant to be decentralized. It put the power in everyone’s hands. Until we started to see a few corporations taking more and more control making it centralized again.

As a marketer, I was always told by other better marketers that email lock-in with your customer is everything. I was told that Facebook will lure you into buying likes and then change algorithms. Twitter will do the same and Google will mess with your SERPs too. But email is forever. You reach out to your users on 1-1 basis with nothing between you and your users.

Unfortunately, with Gmail powering roughly 50% of all email addresses in the world, that is changing too. Emails are now controlled the same way Facebook controls your pages, and Google controls your SERPs.

Gmail categorizing emails as Primary, Social, Promotions & Updates reducing distribution, readership and snoozing notifications.

Think of it like this; email address is no different than your physical address. Imagine if the post office decided for you which mail should reach you, and which should they keep. It’s messed up, isn’t it? I think it is. And I’m against centralized control like that, especially on lower level protocols.

Other email providers are also categorizing emails, snoozing notifications and reducing readership in the similar manner as Google.

From the user’s point of view, may be it helps reduce the noise. But as a business owner, the inability to communicate 1-1 with the customers, who opt in for this communication, is not just unfortunate, its unethical on Google’s part.