I have an app that used to send more than 50 000 notifications weekly and dropped below 17% CTR. When Facebook blocked the app, we edited and limited the notifications to below 40 000 weekly which increased the CTR to about 20%. FB unblocked the app and DAU skyrocketed.
Today the charts look like FB blocked us again. While our CTR indeed dropped a wee below 17%, we do not exceed the 50 000 notification limit.
Is it possible that once you exceed 50 000 notifications for the first time, the 17% limit "sticks" and haunts you even if you drop below 50 000?
We just got an answer from a FB developer:
No, the limit does not stick once you've gone over 50k for the first time. If you go back down to 40k per week afterwards you should have no difficulties. We look at both click through rate and spam rate when it comes to apps that use notifications, and for more information, if your app is restricted I would recommend submitting an appeal at https://developers.facebook.com/appeal. If your app doesn't appear there, or if there is no notice of restriction on your app dashboard, that means it has not been restricted by us, and there may be something else affecting your notifications.
If you do submit an appeal I'll make sure our team takes a look and we can give you a better explanation. Make sure you keep an eye on the contact email address of your app for our response; you can find this in the Settings tab of your app dashboard if you need to update it.
For more information on notifications in general, I strongly recommend checking out our developer docs, particularly here - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/notifications. There's some great tips on how to optimize notifications. We allow apps to send under 50k notifications per week with no CTR requirement because we want to give developers the opportunity to test new notifications before rolling them out to wider audience. We really believe that developers can actually get much higher CTR, usually up in the mid 20's, with careful targeting and thoughtful creative work.
If you're getting that high CTR, that also means you can send notifications to a lot more people who are using your app. So not only are more people getting your notifications, but a higher percentage of people are clicking on them too.
Related
We (a local hackerspace) have a Tumblr blog and wanted to make ourselves a Facebook page. Before going live we wanted to import all our Tumblr content to Facebook so our fans on Facebook can browse it here as well. For this I have made an app that reads all the posts from our Tumblr blog and publishes them to our new Facebook page (backdating those posts as well). Here's my problem: after the app does about ~130 re-posts (~260 operations: publish + backdate) I start getting an error:
Received Facebook error response of type OAuthException: It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been blocked from using it.
Learn more about blocks in the Help Center. (code 368, subcode 1390008)
The block is gone the next day, but after a similar amount of operations it's back. After a couple of hours later, when the block is gone again, I introduced 6 second delays between operations, but that didn't help and after 19 re-posts I'm blocked again. Some facts:
I am publishing posts to a feed of (yet) unpublished page I am the (only) owner of.
The app is a standalone JAVA application and uses restfb to work with Facebook.
The line that is causing the error: facebookClient.publish("me/feed", FacebookType.class, params.toArray(new Parameter[0]));
All publish operations contain a link, mostly to respective posts on out Tumblr. Some contain message, caption or a name (depending on post type).
I need to re-post ~900 posts from Tumblr, I have done ~250 so far. When over, I will likely put in on server, scheduled, to keep syncing single new posts.
This app is not meant to be used publicly, it is rather a personal utility (but the code will be posted to GitHub, should anybody need it).
This is my first experience with Facebook API and I wasn't able to find a place where I could officially address them with this question. I could proceed by doing 100 posts/day, but I'm afraid I will eventually get banned for good, even though I don't feel like doing anything wrong.
I haven't put any more code here, as the code itself does not seem to be a problem, but rather the rate at which it is executed.
So, should I proceed with 100 posts/day and hope I won't be banned, or is there another "correct" way of dealing with this?
Thanks in advance!
I'm answering a bit late but I just had this problem too so I did some research : it seems that besides the rate limits shown in Facebook docs, there's also a much more limited and opaque rate for POST requests to limit spam.
It's not clearly set but it could depend on your relationship to the page you're writing to (admin or not), if you post to multiple pages and finally if you post too quickly.
To answer the question, it seems that it would have been okay if you had done like 1 post per minute or less.
I think you exceed the rate limiting for your user Id.
- Your app can make 200 calls per hour per user in aggregate. As an
example, if your app has 100 users, this means that your app can make
20,000 calls. One user could make 19,000 of those calls and another
could make 1,000, so this isn't a per-user limit. It's a per-app
limit
- That hour is a sliding window, updated every few minutes
- If your app is rate limited, all calls for that app will be limited, not
just for a specific user
- The number of users your app has is the
average daily active users of your app, plus today's new logins
Check this: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/advanced/rate-limiting
It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been blocked from using it.
Learn more about blocks in the Help Center.
If you think you're seeing this by mistake, please let us know.
my question is simple, we need an app to manage a large amount of Facebook ads/adsets on our own single account.
Basic operations, like for example setting a daily budget for all adsets in one shot, instead of manually doing it via facebook interface.
The issue is that we are reaching the API limits pretty fast, as we can have even 50-100 adsets in one campaign. I am hitting the API limit simply by listing them sometimes.
I saw in the Facebook App advanced settings that you can add an Facebook Ad account ID, or a Business account, would that help with the limits?
Or even better, is this even possible? Handling large amount of ads? We have a big budget and all, but it's getting tedious to micromanage large amount of ads.
The rate limit per adaccount is heavier limited if you are in development than in basics. In the basics level you can also have three instead of one system users, which would probably mean (correct me if I am wrong) that you can alternate between three tokens and thus get more api calls.
It is also worth to note that updating existing ads/adsets/campaigns is 10-100 times more expensive than creating new ones. You will also get the rate limit error if you change daily budget or similar more than four times a day, so that might be a problem during testing.
I got my application approved on app store.
But due to some change in the feed I am using my app is crashing now. What am I supposed to do now?
Giving an update will take 7 days for apple to approve and I will get bad reviews if any one downloads it in between.
What am I supposed to do now?
You could:
Fix the feed.
Remove the app from sale until you fixed the bug and the update is approved.
Remove the app from sale until you fixed the bug and the update is approved and request a speedy review.
To remove a App from sale, go to the Rights and Pricing of that app in iTunnesConnect and set the Availability Date in the future. this will remove the app from sale. Just put the date back to now to make it available again.
You can ask for an expedited review (http://developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/appreviewteam/), if you haven't abused of it yet and have real reasons (as it seems) to ask for it, they will review your App in between 1 and 3 days... :)
If you want to stop selling your App while it is happening, you can go to the Pricing menu in iTunes Connect and remove all the countries available...
You need to submit an expedited review request. From my personal experience I've generally pushed these out within 24 hours. Usually Apple does these as a one time exception, and is supposed to be used once in a great while. I've done 4 total in 2 years. Anyhow, since there is contact information on the website, if users download and contact you reply back that there are pending updates, and will be out shortly.
You could go through pausing delivery of app until ready, etc, etc. Availability can be changed and automated via dates. You can remove from countries available.
Here is link for expedited review. You'll need your App ID and Name, etc.
http://developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/appreviewteam/
Most of Zynga games use the Maximum App requests per day to show to the user how many requests he can send that day. I couldn't figure out how to get that daily number (dynamically) . Any hints on that? Since, I'm doing this in a flash app. I can't let the user send requests more than he is allowed. Ideas?
You can find out your Requests limit via the Developer Settings page:
https://developers.facebook.com/apps
Note that limits only apply to the older method of sending requests. If you use the newer Requests functionality, there is no limit to the amount of requests you can send:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/requests/
Naturally, if you're being spammy, you'll still get reported a lot and automated systems could block you, so remember to keep to a reasonable volume of requests.
I need your expert advice on this one.
I have been asked to analyse a potential Facebook application.
This application is a parental monitoring for kids accounts. Basically it will search a kid status message for specific keywords amongst others things. And this application will alert the parents when it finds something.
Of course this application will have a valid token to access the kid's data. This is not a tool to spy on the kid.
I am using the Graph API coupled with the 'since' keyword to get the last updates. It's working fine with a single user.
My question is about scalability.
How should I get updates of a huge number of kids to monitor? (between 10,000 and 100,000 accounts)
And for each kids I have to monitor status messages, videos, images, friend, friends' status messages...
Here are some numbers:
~2.1M requests each day to get hourly updates of 10,000 kids' account.
~57.8M requests each day to get hourly updates of 10,000 kids'account plus their friends', with an average of 40 friends each.
And as I read here, it would be limited.
So what do you reckon?
ps: Maybe with real-time updates I won't have this problem or would it be worse?
Yes I would subscribe to real-time updates so as an account gets updated you get a callback and then you get the latest updates. This would avoid the overhead of constantly polling accounts for updates. You will need to get an offline_access token for this to work as well.