Facebook Ads: Dealing With Adboard Clicks

I was talking with Neil from NeilsWeb.com a couple days ago and he gave me a really cool script to deal with clicks from Facebook’s adboard. For those of you not familiar, adboard is a listing of most of the ads that are relevant to you on Facebook. There is a little link under the ads on the right side (shown below) that you can click to get there.

Problem:
Adboard is a great place to get competitive information. You can see all the ads targeting your demographic on a single page. Because of this, I assume 95% of the clicks you get from the adboard are from your competitors. This is especially true in the affiliate marketing world. So when my competitor sees my ad and then clicks it, they also can see my landing page. This is 75% of a profitable formula. So Neil gave me a great idea (and script) to prevent my competitors from seeing my landing page coming from the adboard, which is a huge help.

Solution:
The solution to this is to send all clicks coming from the adboard to a different landing page. You can send them directly to the offer, or a different page all together. I am not certain this exact practice is allowed by FB, so I have asked my account manager and am awaiting my response.

So, how do we redirect all clicks from the adboard? A simple php script below (this is a modified script from the one that Neil gave me):

$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if ($ref == ‘http://www.facebook.com/ads/adboard/’) {
header(”Location:http://www.adifferentwebsite.com”);
exit;
}
?>

That’s it. This code basically detects the referring URL and redirects the click if it comes from the adboard. A few things to remember: 1. this does not catch clicks if the user copies/pastes the URL from the adboard, without actually clicking. 2. you are still paying for the clicks that you redirect. 3. this may be against FB’s TOS, so use at your own risk.