Once, while I was on vacation in Alaska, I had a dream that one of my accounts was overspending. I wrote to the team to check on our babies, and yes, one account had spent far over our budget in just a few days. The culprit was the in-app mobile campaign. I immediately paused everything. I contacted Criteo and once again had to prove that I had not turned on full targeting—why would I? Out of my 20+ accounts, none had that setting on, and it had been almost a full year of running ads with the same budget spent month over month. Why would I suddenly break out and decide to triple my spend on a network that I knew didn’t work? I first made that mistake a few years prior, and lessons were learned. Criteo and I went back and forth, sending analytics reports showing that the traffic didn’t match, then saying that they would investigate it. Finally, after 6 weeks, they agreed to give me partial credit, but the experience was disappointing. What a gigantic waste of time and money for everyone. Meanwhile, I switched back to AdRoll, which, don’t get me wrong, is a great service, but unlike Criteo, you can’t bid by CPC but rather set a target spend for how much you are willing to pay for a CPC or eCPM. The results? A campaign typically costs three times more with poorer results. 

All things considered, I have nothing but respect for AdRoll. It was June of 2019, and a few months before I found Criteo, I launched a fundraising campaign for my local pro-bono Boys & Girls Club of Hawaii. I logged in and almost fainted. The campaign cost was $9,000, which was $7,750 more than was approved. How could this have happened? I reviewed the account and noticed they charged us $163 per CMP, but my max range was $15 (and even that was considered aggressive). My heart was pounding when I jumped on chat. The result was 100% full credit back to my account. That’s support you can count on. That being said, flash forward to today: AdRoll will not promise or deliver credits and will only promise to stay within your daily budget, and the costs have skyrocketed with diminishing returns. 

Bottomline: media partners need to take ownership of their roles. Glitches happen, and people also make mistakes, but we’re in it together and must be able to trust each other. Moreover, I mentioned the dangers of setting up and forgetting your accounts. Optimization must be a daily practice in digital advertising. Proof that impressions ran and invalid click reports are a must as well, but it goes beyond that. If we’re so smart, then when spending trends break radically, wouldn’t it make sense to hit the pause button and make sure it was intentional? And when an error does occur, let’s not be afraid to fix it. Call it a media mulligan, and then let’s make sure that it doesn’t happen again. That’s when everyone benefits. I frequently consider how many businesses are suffering from poor account management, either internally or by media partners and agencies who rely solely on the system to make automatic bids for them. Believe me, there is nothing Smart about that! Agency best practices demand manual bidding and full control of the spend on the account.

In the beginning, it was all about showing up. It was easy for brands, public figures, and individuals to reach the masses and gain followers by simply signing up, sharing content, and creating opportunities to engage. The cost is nothing but your time and commitment. It worked like that for years. The rule of thumb was that the more you posted, the more your content would show to your “active audience,” which is defined as your friends/fans who like, comment, share, watch, or flash forward to the NOW, hovering over your content for several seconds during a scroll.

During the early adopter phase, Facebook’s mission was to grow subscribers and garner as many minutes of their daily screen time as possible. It’s no different than any media network; they needed lots of eyeballs and a commitment that they would be back, where the platform could then operate as an advertising space. They had to generate enough data to prove to the media industry that they were a valuable part of the media mix and worthy of reallocating marketing funds from other channels or spending more on this emerging media.  

To reduce the barrier to entry and speed up adoption, Facebook made users’ accounts free. Then, to create the buzz, you had to be invited to sign up for an account by a current subscriber. This wasn’t MySpace; not just anyone made the cut; it was uber cool. They had the perfect distribution network: college kids. It spread like wildfire. I got my first introduction to the platform in 2008 from my best friend, Hillary Steen, while on a summer holiday in Sweden. She was shocked that I hadn’t heard about it, “Girl, really? It’s been out for a couple of years,” she said while logging on. I hovered over her shoulder and she said, “I just need to check my profile quickly before we go out. My sister said she was going to write,” I was intrigued. Hillary invited me later that day, and within minutes, I had set up a profile and was quickly a fan. I couldn’t believe how many familiar names were already engaging in the virtual space. The friend requests piled in, and with each new connection, there was a rush. It was so easy and fun — I knew it would be big. 

When I returned to Hawaii, I pitched it to Paul Brown, and he agreed that we should start a company page. I posted content promoting the icon “Look for us on Facebook” on ads and in-store signage. Organically, we started to grow our following as the platform gained popularity. And then, for the next decade, it was pretty much the same rodeo. The changes came in sweeps or little bursts of new features and enhancements. 

The first change that really impacted the agency was when Facebook distinguished between an individual and a business account. If you had more than 5,000 friends, you were not allowed to have an individual account; you had to switch to a business account, and then those friends became fans and did not require approval to subscribe to your content. It seemed better at the time and less work for the team because we didn’t have to accept hundreds of requests manually. All that was required to engage with a brand or public figure was to follow them. No invitation request or action needed. The only problem was that they made it very hard (near impossible) to convert your account from individual to business. For years, the agency had to set up new profiles for clients, which came with heartache, especially when the profile had a healthy number of followers and a vanity url (i.e., instead of facebook.com/somelongnumberoflettersandnumbers, it was facebook.com/yourcompanyname). 

Anna’s Tip: Make sure you are creating a business profile and then set your vanity domain; you can only change it once.   

It was a constant battle for years where new clients were unable to access their accounts or migrate from individual to new business accounts. That’s why, when you search for a company’s brand name, sometimes more than one profile pops up. Sometimes it’s them, or other times it’s someone from a personal account who claims the name. 

Then the content delivery strategy changed, marking another significant change for advertisers on the platform. As Facebook subscribers grew rapidly, the platform had to figure out a way to ensure customers spent more screen time on the site. To do this, they curated content so that during each session, users would see the content they cared about and were not flooded with posts that were irrelevant, resulting in an exit. Too many bad sessions, and you’d stop coming altogether. They couldn’t risk that. 

We learned that there are several types of users: content creators, sharers, and consumers. Most users, 80% or more, are what we affectionately refer to as Stalkers, and they rarely, if ever, generate or share content. They are just there to watch (yes, it’s a little creepy). Our next group is the oversharers. They want to participate, but their lives are not that exciting, and instead of posting a picture of themselves doing laundry or eating the same lunch again, they share fun twerking videos or other clips and articles on their feed to show their network that they are exciting humans. Then we have our true content creators—individuals, brands, and public figures. In the beginning, when there wasn’t that much unique content, it was easier to reach your friends or fans because Facebook needed to fill the scroll and there were fewer overall choices. Back then, we identified that if you posted 4-6 times a day, you could reach 26% of your active audience on each post. The average Facebook user visited the platform 8 times a day (mostly from their phones), and an average session was 12–15 scrolls. 

That math was valuable to us, and thus our agency’s social strategy was to grow our following so that we could reach more people organically with our daily content, sometimes even reposting the same body copy with different images during the day to maximize reach. We then allocated media spend toward getting more fans and assumed if we posted enough content, we would reach that 26% of our audience daily. So, we targeted our ads to the existing following, their friends, or new audiences based on geo-location, demographics, and interests, with the goal of increasing our following on Facebook. I have always found that focusing on friends of friends is a good strategy and works by leveraging the power of association. “Jocelyn likes Ocean Vodka. I think she is cool, so I’m going to like them too; I don’t want to miss out.” It worked well and aligned with our mission to increase share of mind by not only inserting ourselves into our target audience’s daily customer journey within the feed, but also influencing friend-to-friend chatter and utilizing social communities. The social buzz took effect, and everyone was talking about it. Did you see that on Facebook? Are you on Twitter? It was a frenzy, and our customer journeys were forever changing. 

Then It All Changed…
Once again, it changed. Like all online media, the platform has changed significantly over the past few years, and with it, advertisers’ options to reach fans organically have declined dramatically. Most everything is a paid advertisement online. The way I like to explain it conceptually to clients is that you are only as good as your last post. Just like with a traditional blog or community message, each time you post content, it is added to the top of the page/board, and old content with less relevant messages is hidden further down. For example, if your dog was missing and you brought a sign into the coffee shop, chances are they would post that right in the middle of the board because it’s important and people love dogs. If you came in again with a sign for a lemonade stand, it might not make the board, be tacked to the bottom, or be covered up quickly. There isn’t enough space for all messages, and as we’ve learned, not everything is equal when it comes to content. And it makes sense. With so many users, social platforms want to make sure that content creators spend more time creating each post and stay relevant with their fan base. Creators that fail to do this are penalized with less visibility. Also, just because you liked Ocean Vodka last month doesn’t mean you still want to see posts from them on the regular. I might be into something else, like planning my home remodel or finding activities for my upcoming trip. The individual landscape changes for each user based on what they’re searching for. So how do social platforms know what to show you? They measure each post’s engagement statistics and then curate your content feed to ensure that you are seeing a healthy mix of friend and fan content during each active session. The result of this shift limits the number of organic, free posts to followers and directly impacts your personal account. Meaning, unless you like your friend/family’s content, you will stop seeing it. Every post your company makes sets a new baseline for your account in terms of relevance. If that post has no likes, comments, or shares, then it will not be shown. However, the catch 22 here is that unless the post is shown, no one can engage with it. So that then brings us to the topic of paid posts and strategy. 

Our goal was to maintain a large active audience so that when the client had a promotion or some important branding message to share, it would be guaranteed to reach the largest percentage of our base at a minimum spend. 

I tested my theory, starting with go! Airlines. I posted engagement content once a week and then branding or promotional content on the bookends, i.e., Monday: airline trivia/did you know, Wednesday: engagement, and Friday: promotion. For the engagement posts, I would feature irresistible Hawaii, such as a beautiful picture of a rainbow over a waterfall with a post saying, “Like if you Love Hawaii Rainbows,” “Share” if “Rainbows Make You Smile” or “Where was the most beautiful rainbow you have ever seen?” Content that invited the audience to engage without much effort, effectively keeping my growing organic audience size consistently active. 

At that time, best practice was to boost all posted content, which meant I paid to guarantee my post reached more people, both my friends and friends of their friends, with a budget of $1 per day and ran it for 10–30 days, sometimes longer. Depending on the overall results, I kept boosting and expanding the reach. The good news was that top content (posts with lots of likes, comments, and shares) was easier for Facebook to continue to promote at a lower price. It’s no different than any SEO rank; the content that people keep liking is more enjoyable and will make users want to keep scrolling, so let’s show it to more people. The results were incredible. At the time, across all my major accounts, the trend was consistent, and I didn’t have to spend more than $10–$15 per post on the “serious brand content” to reach 60% or more of my audience. I was spending half of my previous ad budget, less than $500 a month, and getting way more engagement. Clients were thrilled and that’s when we started to reallocate efforts and funds to other types of engagement strategies like Woobox contests and brand outreach, where the agency would become the brand (login to their account) and scroll down the feed liking and commenting on partners’ content, news articles, and other B2B-focused associated industries to build credibility and goodwill. Today, this is still one of the best ways to increase fans and influence share of mind, Just think about how much time you spend on one social media post for your brand. Doesn’t it feel sad when no one engages? Imagine if you saw a comment from one of your favorite partners telling you how much they loved it. Chances are you will follow their page back. Now that you’re top of mind, maybe they’ll think of you for an upcoming project or refer you. That’s the power of social networking.  

It wasn’t until March 2018, when the platform changed again, that we experienced diminishing results. I noticed that the estimated impressions and audience reach stopped showing. In the past, when you wanted to create an ad or boost a post, depending on the settings and budget, Facebook would estimate the number of people you could reach and provide a cost per thousand impressions. Not anymore. That means that you have no idea how many people your budget will reach or any solid metrics for success, whether in estimated conversions, clicks, etc. How can they not provide any guidance? How were we going to figure out a budget or compare results with other online tools offering CPC, CPM, and, you know, regular data points? Did they not know for real, or, the more likely reason, was that they didn’t want someone like me running a lot of data points and coming back requesting a credit when the estimates didn’t line up (i.e., you said I would reach 8,000–10,000 people but the report says 7,500, and I want a credit on my account). They wanted to guarantee to spend your full campaign budget, and the only way that was possible was to be vague. For example, let’s say our business wants to promote a seminar for exit planning in Chicago that is happening in 5 days. After we build our campaign on Facebook, we might learn that our potential reach is 10,000 people, and we decide to spend $100 per  day over the next 5 days. Had Facebook promised a specific reach per day but couldn’t deliver it, they would have to issue a credit. All to say, if those people in our desired target audience are not online, they can’t potentially serve them ads. They will do their best, but it depends on how many sessions that user has as well as what other advertisers are bidding on the same eyes. Overall, this can drastically swing your CPM or CPC results from campaign to campaign.

Anna’s Tip: Always create long-tail lifetime ads on Facebook that last 30 days and give the platform time to deliver the best results and make the match. The shorter the campaign length, the higher the cost to deliver impressions and generate clicks. 

Then it got really hard. Facebook announced that any post that asked the customer to like, comment, share, or watch was considered clickbait and would not be shown to the active audience. Wait WHAT?! That also included posts with links. Facebook didn’t want people to leave, hence why they didn’t want clicks posted off page, and they wanted to charge businesses to reach fans—no freebies. I believe that this was also the result of a cultural shift. People became more introverted, and as our friend list grew to include people that really weren’t our friends at all, the result was that overall engagement was down because it was diffused across a wider audience. Without the engagement content, how would we reach anyone? Duh, with ads. Which would be just fine, but if we have no control over audience reach or bidding strategies, how do we really know if the ads are even being delivered? When we did run ads, the results were declining in terms of trackable conversions and traffic on our sites. The only campaigns that proved to have any measurable ROI were for retailers, and that made sense as it was easier to identify behavioral trends and track results when a full credit card transaction occurred. However, even those results were declining. That’s when we pulled the cord and shifted the client’s media spend to other efforts. We continued to boost some post content and run some small campaigns, mostly for retailers, to make sure that the clients who cared about looking cool wouldn’t visit their own page and see zero likes. Overall, this shift resulted in the agency recommending that clients spend a couple hundred dollars a month (if any) rather than the thousands we had before.  

So what happened? The answer is alarming so prepare yourselves. It was April of 2021 when I first found a company called ClickCease, a Telavi-based company that protects ad campaigns from bot clicks. ClickCease offers protection on GoogleAds, Microsoft and Facebook. After setting up my free trial, I was impressed with how quickly I saw the problem. Assuming that the Facebook impressions were being delivered, ClickCease was reporting that, on average, 30–50% of the clicks on those campaigns had been blocked as bots. That’s right. These are not competitors; it’s the platform trying to make more money by clicking on their own ads. It all added up. If they spent all your budgeted money per campaign, no matter what, without any user control over cost-per-action, then the numbers were going to be all over the map. What advertiser in their right mind would agree to continue spending without any consistent or expected metrics? Cost per impression, cost per view, cost per click, cost per sale—these numbers needed to have a pattern but they didn’t. So Facebook used AI to make sure they did. Going back to our 5-day event example, if at the end of the campaign, Facebook charged us $500, they could just make up any number for impression share, fabricate views, and engagement results, but what advertisers really cared about was website traffic clicks and conversions. So they used bots for both. The result? Companies think that it’s them. Oh wow, we got all these clicks and cart adds; why didn’t anyone buy? It must be our pricing and our website design, right? Wrong. Once the ClickCease protection was in place, I quickly saw our Hilo Hattie and Diamond Bakery cost-per-sale numbers drop back into alignment with previous benchmarks, and we increased spend and results once again.  

My agency posts 2-3 times a week for clients on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and GoogleMyBusiness (which is the most underutilized platform out there, no cost with high SEO reward) as part of our regular MACs (Marketing Activity Calendars). The concept that matters is called social virality, which means your brand’s collective online influence across all social channels. The higher the score, the more our off-site rank will increase, which results in more organic visibility. Most importantly, it can directly influence your search impression share when engaging in search intent marketing. What business owners must consider before engaging in any social media strategy are your goals for each tool, and what you’re willing to invest in terms of man hours and paid spend to reach those goals. During my social media best practices presentation, I walk clients through each channel and discuss the opportunities and threats. Depending on our goals for brand awareness vs. sales, we might also extend our post strategy to include Nextdoor, TikTok, and Pinterest. That being said, we always remain on high alert, and when the numbers don’t add up, we play hardball and demand answers from our vendors. We act fast to protect our clients’ interests. Bottomline, what worked before will change, and it’s not you; it’s them. Trust in your gut and pause efforts when you feel something isn’t adding up; it’s better to regroup than to overspend.