It seems to be the question on everyone’s mind this year with Facebook.
With the recent crackdowns on Facebook UID tool owners over the past 3 months, it seems to be like Facebook is saying no to all tools that allow you to get any UID data from Facebook, even if you are using the API.
Let’s investigate the Terms of Service: (Link)
Hmm, still confused? That’s okay, its not 100% clear what Facebook wants.
However, we can learn from previous examples when it comes to advertising platforms cracking down, especially with those who are causing 90% of their issues but only account for 1% of their entire business.
That happens to usually be internet marketers. See Google Adwords.
Perhaps you remember when they were banning every single customer for LIFE for just having an affiliate link within their account. Even if they didn’t run traffic to an affiliate offer.
Google went after all affiliate marketers and mass banned them for life, even if they were spending $5k per month with them.
Why? Because Google was making 99% of the money from larger accounts spending over $10k per month and they didn’t have any issues with them sending affiliate traffic which created issues for the adwords program.
I was in fact banned for life, and I never ran an ad to an affiliate offer, but I put an affiliate link inside an ad back in 2009 and never ran it.
I contacted their support and they told me there’s nothing I can do. (Recently however, I now have a bunch of accounts. Lifetime ban was removed?)
So, repeat in history? Will Facebook do a sweeping ban all any ad accounts that may be breaking TOS? Perhaps even on many accounts that aren’t breaking TOS?
Its quite possible.
But that shouldn’t stop you from using it to the full right now. Worst case scenario is that your Facebook account is banned, but that is rare. It’s more likely that your custom audience is removed like is stated in the above video.
Until Facebook becomes more clear on what they want, we will have to continue to run our businesses and use the features they have given us.
It’s up to you personally how you decide to use or not use the features that Facebook has provided us. This includes custom audiences.
Over the last year, we’ve personally moved away from relying on custom audiences to only using them for about 10% of our ads. Why?
Because we needed to scale up. CA’s are only so big, especially if you are getting UID’s from groups in small numbers. To run a successful FB campaign, you need to utilize interest and demographic targeting as well to expand past your small custom audiences.
Here’s our brand new model for success with FB Ads in our upcoming new course, FB Ads Formula. This is the safest way to run a campaign according to the TOS of custom audiences.
Your most targeted and highest converting traffic will start from retargeting, your email list, and your Facebook fans.
Everyone should be running FB ads to those three audiences. No matter how small you are, just start doing it as it will make you MONEY.
Next is when you add in interest targeting, and then layer it with demographics. We go over this in detail in FB Ads Formula.
New Audience Tools in 2014 by Facebook
An additional strategy not shown in this graph is lookalike audiences. Click on this link to learn more about them. We are still testing and waiting for them to be more effective. As it currently stands, we don’t use them with our campaigns as the results haven’t been stellar.
We found that lookalike audiences are a good addition to Facebook, but its not clear how Facebook creates the audience from your fanpage, custom audience. We have gotten back huge lookalike audiences of 1 million plus that are just not targeted enough for our campaign.
It requires you to layer those audiences with more options like interest targeting and demographics and even then, our results weren’t as good as our other ads. Perhaps these will be refined in the future to give us more statistics about how they are created and who actually is inside of those lookalike audiences.
Our next new feature / tool within Facebook is something I’m really excited about. I used this for the first time just a week ago.
Here’s a short video on where the feature of audience targeting is with Facebook!
So, going back to our original question…
Should I Use a UID Scraper Tool with Facebook?
In short, you may, but only use it through the FB API, and don’t rely on it as your main strategy for FB Ads.
Instead focus in on creating targeted ads with interests, demographics, retargeting, your fans, and email custom audiences like in the above graph we’ve created.
If you do choose to use UID’s, we ONLY recommend choosing Social Lead Freak as they use the API and don’t scrape data from Facebook that will absolutely get you in trouble.
Social Lead Freak specifically doesn’t “scrape” data and you can control what data you pull using your own FB app. It’s just important that you don’t rely on it as your only strategy to make money with Facebook.
It’s a great tool to add to your arsenal and if you use it properly, it can add value to your next FB Ad campaign.
I speak to the owner all the time, and the last word from Facebook is that his tool complies with them. So, that has given me the green light to approve the continued use of the tool as it currently stands.
That being said, the core of your success results from long-term branding, running campaigns that follow the above graph, and building your “know, like, and trust” factor.
You want to be running your Facebook campaigns in the right way. Sending traffic to a squeeze page or content piece that is very highly sharable (perhaps like this… share, share, share this article!), and once they are learning about you and your offers, realize that your only mission is to be building trust and value to your new subscribers. You can learn more about building trust on Facebook with our newest writer Ana Gotter here.
Here’s just a simple example on how we have been using it since early in 2013 to snipe and target specific groups of buyers.
Leave a comment. Share with us your thoughts. I highly support any and all views, but we have been using FB Ads and Social Lead Freak from the beginning with our campaigns and our clients, and have a ton of data to support our current strategies highlighted in the graph above.
I’m absolutely not being partial of any product recommendation here, but I have to disclaim I do get paid as an affiliate. We have bought and researched every Facebook tool on the planet that we are aware of including a host of UID tools, and therefore take this recommendation very seriously.