What Do You Miss About Old School Facebook Advertising?

It’s a question I’m asking myself because it’s obvious that we’re in a completely different stage of the product now.

What’s different about now compared to a decade ago is that back then it was all about keeping up with what was new. It was all kind of primitive and confusing and exciting at the same time.

Now, it’s a combination of what’s new and what changed or is no more. Now you have to keep up with what no longer works like it once did in addition to the latest shiny optimization.

What I Miss

I do miss the days of Power Editor.

It was clunky and buggy, but you knew that you were part of a small number of people who were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it. We felt like we were in on a secret that no one else knew about.

Because there were far fewer advertisers then, it was CHEAP. It was so cheap that I’m not even sure how good our strategies actually were, but they worked. We could get leads for under a dollar and achieve comical return on ad spends.

It always felt like something big and new was coming out. Interests and behaviors and partner categories were a huge deal. I remember when custom audiences came out and we could target our email list.

Then lookalike audiences.

But maybe nothing was bigger than FBX and then website custom audiences.

Every test and experiment I ran back then took advantage of the ability to target website visitors in unique ways. And do you remember there were two different pixels, one for audiences and one for conversions?

It was amazing for those of us who tested and tinkered and created all of these super complex campaigns. Yeah, I miss it sometimes.

Do you?