Well it’s been a while since I’ve posted on this blog, but thought I would today. I’ve been doing a lot of Facebook ads and selling physical products, (like t-shirts from teespring and other places). It works. Physical product sales work and if you don’t think so, look at amazon. That’s a lot of proof. Anyhow, recently a lot of tools and people have been abusing Facebook’s custom audiences. If you don’t know what a custom audience is, it’s a list of people who like something on Facebook or have a checked in somewhere or have gone to a certain school or earned a certain degree. Basically you can search for things like: “Nurse who love the pittsburgh steelers”. Then you can create a shirt and have “This Nurse Loves Here Steelers” on it and target users on Facebook who are nurses and love the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Sounds great doesn’t it? It was. Until people started really abusing it. See getting those user ids of Facebook users has always been completely against Facebook’s terms of service. They have NEVER allowed it. A lot of people did it because “hey if my buddy is doing it and making a lot of money, why can’t I?” That’s the mentality. We as online marketers tend to create our own reality. We think that just because someone else is doing something and getting away with it, it’s ok for us to do it too. Most of us rarely look at anything long term. Most of us only want short term gains and will stab our mothers in the throat to get it, (at least that’s what it seems like lately).

There was another way to market things as well on Facebook. We could target people by their exact name! Then we could create a shirt that said something like “It’s A Bob Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand”. Then we use Facebook’s graph search and a custom tool we bought to find all people named Bob in the world. Then we could create a Facebook Ad campaign targeting all Bobs. We could say “Is your name Bob?” “Buy this shirt Bob”. And most Bobs would indeed buy it. It was easy money. However there was one major problem with it. Some Bobs are paranoid Bobs and got spooked when they kept seeing ads asking them questions directly. All of the sudden Facebook was SPYING on them! Oh my god, Facebook served Bob and ad that had his name it. SO what did Bob do? (And several other Bobs in the world?) They reported the ad to Facebook. After enough reports, Bob won. Facebook decided that while they had been turning a blind eye to the practice, (some guys were pulling in $200,000 per month doing this), they finally had to put the hammer down and enforce their terms of service. That meant buh-bye to targeting people by names or anything else now that wasn’t a “natural” custom audience list.

What happens next is Facebook decides to disable the ability to make custom audiences the old way. There are big changes coming soon but I’m pretty sure any Facebook ad account that tried this stuff will be banned. If not banned then custom audiences disabled for sure. See originally Facebook’s intention was to allow people or companies with existing email lists to add that list to Facebook so that they could show ads ONLY TO their list. It was a great idea, (still is), but we as online marketers did what we always do, we got greedy, abused it and now it’s going to be gone for us.

So what’s next? Well there are a couple things that will always happen in life. First you will die eventually. Second you will pay taxes and third you will have to be able to adapt and adjust to continue making any money online. The cycle from “cool idea” to “wow I’m making a lot” to “oh crap the herd is now trying it” to “dammit they’re closing this loophole” will continue as it always does. It might not be on Facebook but there will always be a traffic source for online marketers to abuse and break. You either give up and go work a 9 to 5 job or keep on keeping on. The choice is yours, but crying about split milk is not going to get you anywhere!