Facebook Ads Quirk

Just a short update about a weird issue I ran into when I was creating some Facebook ads.

Facebook allows you to advertise to a number of different sources but for whatever reason they take features away from you if you're advertising to other Facebook pages. One of those annoying features is that Facebook takes over the title of your ad if you advertise for a fan page or an event.This can be annoying as the title is the only text in your ad that's presented in a big eye-catching bold font. My revelation was that you can subvert the normal title stealing behaviour by choosing to link to an "External URL" for the event/fan page but ONLY if your URL is not HTTPS.

This is an example of what options you get when you use the "External URL" destination. Full control over the URL, title, body, image, etc. If you change your destination to that of a fan page/event/whatever it will grey out the "Title" box and you must use the title of that fan page/event (super annoying if your title happens to have more than 35 characters). It also removes your ability to select any destination outside of your fan page/event (which is fine because that's what you're trying to do anyway). In return it will give you the ability to "Like" or RSVP directly on the ad and if you have friends who have already liked or RSVP'd it will show you that they took that action.

One of the interesting things about this kind of ad is that the title and the social connections are both kind of important but in different ways and if your market is big enough (like a whole province) both methods are worth exploring. My workaround for this was to choose the URL for the event and use it with the External URL destination.

That leads me to my recent discovery. As an increasingly heavy internet user I've become more aware and consequently concerned about security on the web. Other ad channels (Google Adwords) are very much OK with letting you have control over both the title and URL at the same time but moreover have options for both HTTP and HTTPS. When I tried to set up a recent set up Facebook ads with a HTTPS url they all came back with submission errors but when I resubmitted without the https:// leading the URL they were accepted. I'd love to know what the reason for this is but I wasn't able to find any other discussions of this online so this is my solution for anyone else who has had this issue.