I enjoyed writing last week’s blog post, so I created a poll in our secret FB group asking what topics they wanted me to discuss here, and the #1 topic was “Behind the Scenes.” Now, I like the concept, but the truth is a lot of what goes on behind the scenes of running a business is not always fun, and definitely not always exciting. There’s a lot of nitty gritty bullshit. Enter: what happened to me last week.
I finally set up a FB ad or two. This was a pretty agonizing experience that went somewhat like: invest in an e-course to teach myself, get frustrated that it wasn’t working correctly, hire someone to do them for me, have that not go as planned, go back to square one and teach myself again. (See? So much fun.) The good news is that my last attempt worked and I’m now able to track my sales conversions. So… I’ve been feeling quite proud of myself.
Then one morning last week, I see I have a LOT of twitter mentions, which is abnormal because who is really active on Twitter anymore? Turns out it was one tweet that was retweeted many times:
So, immediately I’m the like WTF! Yep, that is the FB ad I created, why the fuck is it on Breitbart? Not only do I not want my advertising money going to a hateful site, but my ads were set to target the opposite of the Breitbart audience (Hello, Hillary Clinton’s face on Breitbart??? No.)! So much about this was wrong.
It turns out, unbeknown to this FB ad newbie, that FB ads are shared outside of their own site, in what they call the “Facebook Audience Network.” That network includes the Breitbart website. Now, I’m not here to call on Facebook to filter their ad audience. They are a business that can make their own decisions as they see fit. The good news is, so can you. If you want to stop your Facebook ads from showing up on Breitbart (or any site for that matter), follow the instructions here.
Big thanks to Sleeping Giants for your efforts to make bigotry and sexism less profitable by stopping their ad dollars! I would likely not even have known this was happening (can’t say I regularly browse Breitbart…) without their team notifying me.
xx JA
What other topics do you want to see here? Leave a comment below or cast your vote in our FB group!
