It was a neat, but somewhat laborious, workaround until Facebook finally got round to awarding click to website ads decent visibility.
So I’ve been somewhat bemused since then to hear experts such as Gary Vaynerchuk continuing to endorse the merits of the dark post.
Of course they are useful for split testing ads but surely most Pages doing that level of advertising are creating ads from scratch rather than needing posts to promote and/or using one of the proprietary ad platforms that simplify testing for you?
So I have been somewhat perplexed by the continued existence of the dark post (Facebook calls them unpublished posts).
Until now.
I was working my way through Facebook’s new ad objectives for a new masterclass and stumbled upon a reason to return to dark posts.
It’s all tied up with the exciting new Reach objective.
What’s got the likes of Jon Loomer excited is the ability with the Reach objective to control the number of impressions people in your ad audience see.
We’ve all felt somewhat spammed by the same ads that appear in News Feed day after day. With the Reach objective Frequency Cap you can set the number of days before your ad is shown again to the same person.
This is great for when you want to reach as many people as possible in an audience rather than reaching a smaller number multiple times. I’m using it for retargeting website visitors – a warm and valuable audience.
It’s different to the Daily Unique Reach bidding option because whilst with Daily Unique Reach you wouldn’t reach the same person more than once per day you might still be bombarding them with content EVERY day.
But when you go to create an ad using the Reach objective you don’t get an option to create a link post – it’s just a photo post unless you have an existing post you can use to promote.
Here’s how the two post types look:
See how the photo post on the right doesn’t have the title, body copy and url link below the image. And if you click on the image you just get taken to a close-up of the image rather than the website you want to direct the user to. To get them to that website you are going to need to put a link in the text above the image.
This looks pretty unprofessional and likely frustrates a lot of users who click on the photo thinking they will go to the website.
The solution is therefore either to promote an existing organic post when you create your ad using the Reach objective (but I’m not convinced that an update written with your Page audience in mind is always going to be optimal in terms of image and copy for an ad audience) or to create a dark post and use that instead.
I go into detail about how you do that in our new Digiterati Academy masterclass.
^Marie Page