Mark Zuckerberg, Here’s the Problem with Facebook

Facebook Marketing Managers

If we could chat with Mark Zuckerberg about how he could improve profits for Facebook, We would want to chat about Facebook pay per click advertising.

As professional Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising account managers, who manage over $3.5 million in ad spend for clients, we think we know what we are talking about.

•  It is excruciatingly difficult to connect client advertising accounts to a manager profile. Time typically to connect, if you even can, is over 3 hours. Clients can simply not figure out how to approve our access. It is not a simple process.

•  If you can connect the ad building application does not allow you to easily set up conversion tracking.

•  Once you have a manager account, to add additional employees to help with management is nearly impossible. You have to tunnel through many levels of access. And then once connected, you cannot understand why suddenly they cannot login and review accounts. Impossible!

•  With a manager account, you are barraged by hackers. I will routinely have numerous bogus login attempts to my manager account. I have had to confirm my profile, validate several times with Facebook and then turn on draconian security in addition to 2-step verification. I continue to get hackers trying to access my account. A manager account is rife with attempts to gain control of the account and associated advertisers for nefarious purposes.

•  Clients want to spend on Facebook. We alone have over 6 clients who if we gave the go ahead would start advertising on Facebook, but the problems are so severe that we will not take on new clients.

•  Facebook is not honoring the daily budget/30-day budget. When you set a daily ad spend for $50 and the account is routinely spending over $120 a day without a look to adhere to a 30-day ad spend, it puts our reputation on the line. We stopped taking new clients when this happened to one key account.

•  Clean up the system and improve ad quality. We had one client with a low ad spend generate $14K in revenue monthly on Facebook for his industrial supply store. But, suddenly out of the blue he has no revenue and is spending more on clicks than he is generating. Why? What happened. Facebook has no answers and there is no one really to call to ask a question why. The drop was sudden and mysterious. When Google has conversion tracking issues – we account managers know and understand that the data will catch up. For Facebook, we simply cut the budget to a very small daily number hoping to get answers sometime in the future. What a bad way to manage business Facebook!

Mark Zuckerberg, if you don’t know how Google Ads works for account managers, you need to find out. Make Facebook advertising easy to use and allow managers easy set up and management and your pay per click business can grow and generate real profits for Facebook.

We would definitely move clients into Facebook, it is not a hard sell, but with problems like this, you can count on your profits continuing to decrease.

For information about McCord Web Services and our Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising account management services, visit our website www.McCordWeb.com.

IcelandDriver.com and Hávar Sigurjónsson

Iceland glacial lake

Although this is off my usual topic, I want to recommend a tour service and individual to you today. Hávar Sigurjónsson owner of IcelandDriver.com was my tour guide recently on a 17 day trip to Iceland.

Iceland is a wonderful place to visit and full of interesting sites, waterfalls, history, and glaciers. Our tour guide Hávar Sigurjónsson provided and in-depth tour with engaging conversation and a deep understanding of the history, culture, and folklore of Iceland.

Have a trip your way. Our small group tour of Iceland consisted of travelers age 25 up to 70. Hávar had activities for everyone. For the younger sporter set, he took tourists on additional tours by bike or hiking after we arrived at the hotel. For others, like myself, we relaxed at the first class hotels after a full day and then met the full group at dinner. There were activities for all ages and interests.

My husband and I highly recommend Hávar Sigurjónsson owner of IcelandDriver.com to you for consideration when you decide to book your own tour of Iceland. Our trip was a comprehensive tour and a once in a lifetime experience.

Privacy Changes Drive Google to Sunset Universal Analytics in Favor of G4

July 1, 2023 is the sunset date for UA or Universal Analytics.

Google has announced that it will sunset the popular web traffic analytics tool called Universal Analytics in favor of G4 Analytics on July 1, 2023.

Why is Google making this change?

With the changing needs for privacy, Google has decided that it is time for everyone to get onboard and embrace G4 Analytics. Read about the differences between the two.

G4 has been out for two years, but many, myself included, consider the dashboard difficult to set up and use. This has slowed webmasters and marketing managers from embracing the new cookieless technology of G4.

Additionally, Google announced that the data from Universal Analytics (UA) will not flow into G4. So, webmasters should plan on adding code now for G4 to start gathering data before the UA sunset date. Some webmasters and site owners may want to do a download of UA data before the sunset of the application.

It’s all about the third party cookies

All of these changes are about the use of third party cookies for tracking. Google Ads uses audiences and cookies from UA when merged with Google Ads to create tracking for advanced audiences. Specifically the explanation below puts this issue in easy to understand terms.

“…the change reflects an evolution on how analytics is associated with websites and the changing role analytics plays in privacy. Universal Analytics represented the pinnacles of page-loaded measurement, introducing cross platform tracking and more flexible code options for producing custom dimensions and metrics. However, it still relied on cookies, the text files in browsers, to transmit data behind the dimensions and metrics. ” Read more.

By moving beyond cookies with G4, Google is building for the future, but may also be self-serving to benefit remarketing and conversion technology alternatives to protect Google Ads. The loss of third party cookies is a huge issue for Google Ads conversion tracking and for the serving of remarketing ads for advertisers.

For now, Google and McCord Web Services is recommending running UA Analytics and G4 on the same website. Allowing the two to run will build a number of months worth of data before UA Analytics is sunset.

The problem with G4 is it is more than an update it is a new protocol

If you have logged into a G4 account you most likely are stunned at the lack of any data. G4 runs on custom events, there are really very few built out features at this time which makes it hard for webmasters to embrace G4 as a functional alternative to UA Analytics.

Although the ability to customize events may be a boon for some, for most G4 cannot be considered a plug and play application. We are hopeful that as the sunset date gets closer Google will listen to the feedback about needing to make G4 more user friendly and offer more information on how to set up events that make sense to replace the information lost when compared to UA.

Our recommendation is to start now with G4 code implementation so data can start accruing for at least one year. And to start learning now to create events for the important statistics you like in Universal Analytics in G4.

We encourage you to subscribe to our blog posts to stay informed on what’s coming up for G4 and Google Ads.  Just visit our blog home page and look on the right side bar for subscribe by email to get a copy of our blog posts when they are published.