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All aboard the train to Money Town -> another newbie trying to crack FB Dating (34)

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Hi, I just joined this weekend (see my introduction thread here) and figured I'd post a follow along so maybe I'll get a bit more disciplined about starting campaigns. And hopefully I can get some positive inputs from the veterans around here.

I'm a complete newbie so bear with me. So far I've done a couple of campaigns, mostly Facebook, but nothing I could really scale. Now I want to stop messing around and just jump in dating in its broadest sense.
So no more obscure niches, but just big volume and hopefully cheap clicks.

My offer right now is a dutch dating site which has a payout of €4-€7. I run direct.
Conversion rate so far is not that great though, so I think I'll just switch to Be2 and make that work. At the moment this is not my priority though, a high CTR is what I want to get, I can easily split test the offers at a later stage.

Let me first start off by saying that I haven't been able to achieve 0.2%+ CTR's. I see a lot of posts here of users achieving these results, but so far it still seems unattainable to me, at least in a way that the traffic will still convert. However I think with 0.1%+ CTR's I can already run a profitable campaign.

I use tracking202 on a shared host, I will move to Beyond hosting probably in the weekend, but so far with the small amount of clicks I'm generating I don't think it's that important.

Today I targeted men between 21-45 in the Netherlands who are single, speak dutch and are interested in women. These are the results so far. As you can see no high CTR's at all. What I want to do now is take the two top performing ads and put them in age groups of 25-32, 33-39, 40-47.

Besides that I'll just run broad again with more new images/headlines and see if I can get some less embarrassing CTR's

Day 1
Money spent: $7.14
Revenue: €8

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I'd remove any language targeting unless you're targeting a language other than the main language spoken. Most people in NL speak Dutch, so there's no point in specifying it. You're only limiting your demographic size by targeting language.

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Ok I've just uploaded a couple of ads where I removed the language targeting. It increases the demographic size by about 30%. I always thought that it would be useless targeting people who didn't have dutch as their language though, but we'll see.

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The CPC's in NL are no cheaper than in the US?

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I thought they were cheaper than in the US. Never tried advertising in the US myself though.

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Scandinavian CPCs are high in general afaik.

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Instead of targeting only men who're single, try targeting men who're single AND "not specified". This will make your CTR go up a lot because before it wasn't allowed and now it's allowed to use this targeting for dating ads.

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Did this change recently? Because last week I wasn't allowed to enter "not specified".

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Hasn't changed as far as I am aware and I would think it never will. I'm sure performance may jump but you also jump on the i-don't-like-my-account bandwagon.

If it's changed... well the performance increase you get from it will cease to exist.

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Ok a small update since yesterday:

I've uploaded 30 ads, of which 12 consisted of the winning ads from before split into different age groups. I seem to have 1 winner, that is if you can call it that. With a CTR of 0.08% it is still far from good.

I just paused the top performing ads and trying to see if the others can pick up some clicks before I make my final judgment on which ads are losers.

Spent: $7,41
Revenue: $0

I will not be doing anything for this campaign for today and will just let it run. I'm busy switching servers now for some websites I got, so no time.
Besides that I want to move my tracking to Beyond Hosting and use the excellent tutorial of Tijn about protecting your nuts. I started by registering my domain name anonymous this time .

Tomorrow I will give it another shot and start it earlier/bid higher so I got some more test results.

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It's going to be near impossible to make money with a .08% CTR. You need .1-.2 or better, but it sounds like you already know that. Maybe your images are too conservative and need to be a bit more edgy.

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(1) The Relationship Status targeting parameter must be "Single" or "Not Specified."

This is taken from one of the disaproval emails, so I guess is safe to say you are allowed to use "Not Specified"

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Straight from https://www.facebook.com/help/143949649021372/

Targeting:

The "Relationship"" targeting parameter must be set to "Single" or "Not Specified"
The "Sex" targeting parameter must be set to either "Men" or "Women" and cannot be both
The "Age" targeting parameter must be set to a minimum of 18 years
The "Interested In" targeting parameter must be set to either "Men" or "Women" and cannot be both

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Holy crap everyone dupe your campaigns and get that not specified in their. When did they change that o.O
Awesome. Unfortunately it's now only a matter of time before those not specified people get jaded to dating ads.

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i'm pretty sure the time has long past. been like that for a few months now.

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I don't know what your financial situation is like, but damn, $7.41 spend in 1 day seems really low even for a complete n00b. You won't get any real data with such a low budget. Consider raising your budget, even if it's only $20/day.

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Done that since 2012 november when I started, zeno you havnt done so yet? :O

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Nah I don't do dating, which would explain why I haven't heard of it changing - I assume the people who noticed would restrain themselves from saying so publicly, the fewer who know the better. I am surprised at the change though, wouldn't expect that from FB at all.

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Yeah I guess so, I attached some of my images below. But yeah I am aware that I definitely need more than 0.1% . Just new to this dating thing.

Sorry I have been mistaken, I do target both single or not specified, but I was confused with the interested in. I only target men interested in women and vice versa. I thought it's not allowed to target all here?

The budget I set was $25, but Facebook probably found my CTR's too low to continue .

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Set up a new campaign, new ads and a new headline. Broad demo 21-50. Higher bid as well, let's see if I can improve the CTR a bit. Also put one in with cleavage, but I doubt it's gonna be approved.

Any comments on my pictures above are appreciated btw.

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If you haven't already, you might want to try some less subtle Photoshoppery on those images - push levels, push saturation, push contrast and maybe push Sharpness a bit (or, you know, a lot). That might help them pop more.

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At your level of spend (less than 4-figs/day) you probably shouldn't go broad. Hell you can crank ROI (and much much better net) doing age groups by 10, AND targeting interests as long as you can get demos over 50k... This is a much friendlier way to get acquainted with facebook.

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My target country is quite small allready. My target now (very broad) is 400k, I thought I'd just start by trying to find some pictures that work well and then later on split it in age groups/angles.

But right now Facebook is acting up, I get 1%CTR's all over the place, so I'll have to wait till they fixed their problems and see what my ads did.

@Caurmen, I will try that, I just thought I'd go for the " amateur" pictures.

Btw what's the deal with the angle like <russian, thai, filipino, etc...> girls? I thought that was prohibited by Facebook, but I see loads of ads using that angle.

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Ok managed to get some volume last night. Not sure of the stats are right though, because in the beginning FB was having problems. Anyways here are the stats:


But I simply refuse to believe that the picture below only got 0.045%.

Spent $28.43
Revenue $22,00

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ctr too low. test more pics. you need .2+ now a days. that girl didn't do well because a) looks like a stock/pro photo. use more amateur pictures b) shes not looking at the camera/you

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Thanks for the advice, I just uploaded some amateur pictures of girls looking in the camera with big boobs. Let's see how this will go .

Still I think my pictures are not that bad, I even just straight up copied some ads from others, yet not even close to 0.2%. Then again I think 0.1% would already put me in a profitable spot.

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Seems to be the way to go. Those are the only types of images that give you a good CTR in the dating niche. Problem is, if you do start to do well and get some volume they will bump your daily spending limit and manually review your account.

Search around this forum and you will see the problems that people have w/ these reviews. My guess is it has something to do w/ the images we all use to succeed. Not trying to discourage you, it's needed, just warning you of what may lie ahead.

Have a look at this thread: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...liate-channel-!

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Yeah I was aware of that, but I figured I could just set my daily budget to $200 and spread my campaigns across several accounts?

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I usually setup a campaign with around 40 images. Pause all the ads after enough data with the lowest CTR + CR - at the end FB will only give traffic on the 2-3 ads with the highest CTR so you can pause the other ones.

If the offer is not a FB app I would also split test landers.

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@Suma, the problem is that as soon Facebook picks up a click on one or two ads, the others will basically not get any attention anymore.
Right now I just pause the winners and gather enough information to see which ads work and then later on launch a new campaign only with winners. Maybe that is what you meant, but it seemed like you pause the ads with low ctr's, which seems like a waste of uploading 40 ads.

Update, slight winner so far, downside is that the conversion rate is absolutely horrible. But that might be fixed by a lander/different offer.

Paused this one to give the other ads a chance as well.

Spent $20
Revenue €5

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Sounds like something I would be interested in, but from the sounds of it it will be a lot of work! Not that I mind the work, but apparently there must be an easier solution which other affiliates are currently using:
Do they get different servers, or just 2 different instances of 202 or do you just use the same tracking url for both accounts?

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Yesterday was ok, had about a 50% profit margin with both gaming and dating, but only a small budget.
Spent 60
Revenue 90

I also made a landing page the only problem I ran into is that my javascript timedown counter only works locally. For some reason it doesn’t work when I upload it, it is not a separate .js file, but it’s in the page itself. The geo script works no problem.

I did make a mistake in setting up my FB campaign, I currently set it up like this:
FB -> direct link to the landing page
LP has a 202script in it and all the links on the page are send through a php file to the landing page of the offer.

Now 202 does see the clicks coming in on the landing page, but has no idea where they came from/how much they cost. I also have 0 stats on the CTR from the LP or any updates on the CR. I think my mistake was that I should have made a different link to insert into the FB campaign as the offer link.

On the upside I did have my highest CTR with this campaign 0.6% over 200 clicks . Too bad my CR is horrible.

For my other campaigns I’ve doubled the budget, but so far the only thing it seems to do is increase the cpc (almost double it) and lower the CR. I did change the budget slightly before midnight, so no idea what is causing this.

My plan for tonight is to make more landing pages and target more demo’s.

If anyone has suggestions on how to make more profit I’m all ears of course!

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I figured it is time for me to do another update. I will not be making daily updates with my P/L anymore, only weekly updates or something.

Anyways FB has been a pita, I got a warning this time that my ads were not compliant. I don't know what triggered the review exactly, but my ads were as far as I can see compliant (non got disapproved either). The only thing I didn't always do was put the name of the offer in the ad. And sometimes I put in something like women looking for 50+ yo men.

What I did was I immediately removed all my campaigns and am basically starting over again. Small at first but on the safe side, so no risky pictures, offer in the ad body, no age range anywhere in the ad either.

Problem is I was finally getting some 0.5%CTR ads, and I'm pretty sure I will not be able to get a CTR that high with the ads I've just uploaded. Overall I'm facing a lot of resistance though, not only by FB, but also by the offers themselves. I mean 50% drops in both payout and CR are not unheard of. I've got offers for FB apps which are only getting me a 0.07epc, which used to be 0.20+.

I also feel that the warning might be related with me starting to use landing pages. I feel that it results in a negative experience for the user and in general it just looks shady. If FB really manually does the reviews, who says they are not clicking through then and just not being favorable towards landing pages in general? I also didn't notice an increase in epc, the opposite actually .

Anyways I feel like i've cracked the code, but I am not allowed to play anymore . My plan right now is just to advertise on FB as "clean" as I can, while only direct linking to green offers/fb apps.

At the same time I'll try my luck at other traffic sources like PoF and Adwords/Bing.

Btw profit has been hovering around the 60 mark the last 3 days.

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Really helpful "Follow Campaign". I've been through it all. Any updates recently. Would love to hear them. Regards

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