Facebook Newbie Challenge - From Zero to $100 a day. (39)
Hi and thanks for stopping by my challenge! I've been in this forum for 20 days and am learning a lot, but now it's time to put eveything into practice, take action, focus and stick to it.
Of course I'm gonna stick for 30 days to this challenge, but I use that time frame more like a check point to evaluate my progress than a deadline. I'm gonna make this work no matter if it's in 20 days or 90 (or more, but hopefully less) because I hate being an employee, want freedom to do so many things. In fact I took my current job because I was too tight on money after trying to make it online for more than a year with very little income created.
I tried different stuff including phone apps, writing an ebook, several sites including a few adult blogs (but only two of them get around 1000 visits a day)... I spread myself too thin because some of this stuff could actually return decent income with more focus and determination.
My short term goal right now is to consistently make $100 profit a day... I know it's pretty low and I then have a greater goal, but I start from zero and after taxes and stuff $100 would be just a little more than what I make at my day job (yeah, Spain salaries rule!!!).
I'll be creating campaigns on Facebook every day and updating my progress here to keep myself accountable, learn from your feedback and log everything I do.
Also if anyone's interested in mastermind group I'm more than open to it, my skype is *EDITED: PM me*.
And finally, thanks to Laverdure, the IM beast who told me about this forum and also to wramirez who has given me a ton of advice. Let's go!
Allright so for day one I've created my very first campaign. It has been running for 3 days now... I messed around to see how facebook ads worked and obviously the result was aslo a mess in terms of organization and tracking.
Campaign: Cupid (Spain). Direct (no LP).
Payout: $3.36 (2.52 €)
Targeting: Men in Spain who like women and are between 23 and 34 yo.
Suggested bid: 0.16 € - 0.48 € most of the time (keep reading).
My bid: 0.18 € (also messed around with 0.16 € and 0.20 €... mess...).
Reach: I screwed this up because I tried different interest-targetings within the same campaign. As I said it was a mess. I had most of the ads reaching around 23,420 people and then a few ones reaching 320,140.
I thought targeting guys who liked "romantic" stuff (movies, singers) was something good but in this case it narrowed too much the reach and NO targeting by interest was actually an improvement in terms of CTR. This is the difference between the ad that got the most clicks (below) and the same one without targeting by interests (above):
I was adding one creative at a time (same text). I've been told that this is good at the beggining to avoid being banned.
What I've confirmed is that creatives are decisive, you have to try A LOT because one that I thought wasn't gonna get many clicks was actually the one that got the most. The last day of this mess of a campaign with the broader targeting I got 3 clicks (so 7,5 €) but the money spent was totally untracked as it should so on Day 2 I'll give CTR, EPC, ROI and stuff.
Things I was most unsure about:
- If Dating requires targeting by interest. In this first campaign NO targeting by interest was better.
- If Relationship status matter for dating... I suppose that depends on if the dating site encourages cheating but overall I don't know if unchecking married guys improves the numbers or not.
- If Education matters. Same as above.
- If the targeting by interests is good but I have to include a huge list of interests in order to rise the reach.
- Optimize for clicks or impressions? I did Optimize bid for clicks manually and set the maximum CPC at 0.20 € when it was suggested between 0.14 and 0.38.
Cheers!
Besides the basic rations (CPC, EPC...) I don't now if there's some important information that I missed out in this post. Don't hesitate to tell me if that's the case and I'll include it!
Thanks for posting, i will be following along. Congrats on taking your first steps, stay focused you will reach your goals!
Okay so on day 2 I took the highest converting creative for the Cupid campaign and created a separate campaign. These are the results (in dollars below).
Now (after reading mehdi's FB post) I realize those number were shit in order to use them as "high-CTR" image... I learned the lesson. Besides what you can see, the numbers are:
Spent= $23.7 (18.24 €)
Conversions= 5.
Revenue= $16.4
Profit= $-7.3
ROI= -30.7%
I actually earned a little more because I had some tests running at the same time and they got clicks... but as far as this campaign you can see what I did.
It's taking longer than I'd want to. I have a bunch of creatives waiting but I'm holding back on the ad/campaign creation because I've been told it's best to upload the first 60 ads/creatives one by one to avoid multiple rejections that could end up in a ban. Usually it takes a few minutes but at times they take a few hours to approve an ad. To this point I've only gotten one ad rejected, which actually was very mellow (judge by yourselves) and the funny thing is I got the same creative approved for a different targeting!!
The only thing I conclude from that is their approval criteria can be pretty arbitrary. Anyways, right now I'm focusing more on being 'liked' by FB (if there's such a thing) than on pushing the boundaries to find high converting creatives.
Another thing I learned:
In order to get data fast, it's best to create ads in separate campagins. That is, one ad per campaign. However I don't see the point of the extra work if I'm not going to use most of them, so what I'm going to do is (please correct me if wrong):
1. Create a test campaign with reasonable copy and put 20+ creatives on it (or as many as needed to I find a few of them with CTR > 0.1%)
2. Create separate campaings for the winning ads.
For day 3 I'm running this campaign and a new one in the health niche but it's taking forever to get the ads approved. My goals for tomorrow are:
- Keep uploading creatives for the health campaign.
- Find a few creatives with high CTR for the dating campaign and launch a profitable campaign with those.
Good luck manu, just some tips:
- Bid higher
- put less ads in 1 campaign or pause them once you got a good sample size. The way it looks now is that a lot of your ads are not getting the impressions they deserve.
Originally Posted by kabouter
Quick update, I couldn't do shit yesterday because I only got one ad approved. I don't know why but the first days first I got them within a few minutes. My approval ratio was very high, like 40:1 so I don't know why...
What I've learned.
They approve by user or something like that... so you can get the ads approved in batches... so it's best to create an ad and after getting the approval, submit around 5 creatives more so they'll approve them all at once. I did this and got them running within a few minutes.
For the dating ads, I tried NOT to check "Interested in women" in order to broaden the reach but got 4 ads disapproved... don't know how mehdi got along with it because I re-read the guidelines and FB says it's not allowed. Changed it and submitted a few more.
Regarding what kabouter recommended to me, I bid higher on the existing campaigns but didn't see results yet. Have to try with more ads.
Okay day 4. I was getting a bit lost with all the info I'm reading, the little time I have and the campaigns and data starting to grow, so I just opened the guide again and followed the checklist.
- Update your Challenge Forum post with Yesterdays results & actions for today.
I'm not going to do this.
- Create 1 or 2 new campaigns for offers you have not promoted before.
I didn't do this, will do it for day 5.
- Create 1 campaign with a new angle for an offer you have promoted before.
I took the healthcare offer and completely changed the targeting, because it wasn't converting at all (negative 100% ROI).
- Add 1 or 2 creatives or landing pages to an existing campaign to improve CTR or CR.
Added a bunch of creatives for the dating offer. All of them got approved. Added two creatives to the healthcare offer with the new targeting but I'm still waiting after 12+ hours.
- Optimize your campaigns by removing targets, creatives and offers that are not profitable.
Deleted a most of the ads/campaigns that were losing money and had really low ratios (on both offers), paused a few of them. I found a creative with 0.1+ CTR so I think it'd be a good idea to focus on that and try similar images.
- Scale your profitable campaign.
Don't really have one so couldn't do this last step... The dating campaigns I have get some conversions here and there but negative ROI overall.
BTW, if you could stop by this thread I just opened and answer those two basic questions about FB ad tracking and mywot, I will teach you how to pick up girls in Spanish. 
Today was another shitty day in terms of progress... I learned a lot though, stuff that I think it's best to know right from the start.
I didn't even know what mywot.com was... I just installed it and realized the main dating offer I was promoting (Cupid) is a big fat red... so even though it's up and running and returning me some money... I deleted the campaigns and I'm gonna change those offers for more FB friendly (if it can be called that way).
Also gonna set up a tracker. Don't know exactly how is it gonna help me but I've been told it's very useful to change offers after getting the review of the ad. Can anyone cast some light on this please? I don't really know how that works (besides for measures, obviously).
Good luck hitting your goals. If you change your ads post review it can cause damage to your campaign as a whole.
Originally Posted by guardianads
So that's done changing the redirect in the tracker right?
Originally Posted by keepitsimple
Crappy weekend... I stayed in the city I have my regular job instead of going to *my* city so I could work full on on the FB stuff... however after a day and a half I didn't get any response for the campaigns pending approval...
Crap... but what am I gonna do.
I read forum threads, installed prosper on my server, bought a Nexus 4 to be able to keep track of this stuff while at work (don't tell the boss...), applied for a few more dating offers in my network and prepared more creatives to test. Also updated based on what I'm learning here, and set up split test for a landing page on one of my adult sites, but that's irrelevant.
Looking forward next week.
I don't know if I'm screwing up or what... but I'm having a lot of trouble getting my campaigns approved... I literally cannot stick to the creation of at least 1-2 campaigns a day because sometimes it actually takes 1 or 2 days to get one freakin campaign up and running...
I'm not having many ad rejections but I don't know... maybe I need to get my advertising account to age or something... nevertheless I keep pushing new ads as much as I can and reading a lot on here...
So whenever I reach a speed that is worth telling I'll get back to regular updates on this thread.
Help and advice is of course very much appreciated.
Switch away from FB.
They only want Corporate money.
Originally Posted by sandyone
Pro-tip: Don't out your images for your ads on this forum. If one of them starts winning, you will want to keep that all to yourself.
You are headed in the right direction dude. Just beware of the fb ban hammer - it is probably the bitchiest traffic source to work with these days as an affiliate. Honestly it isn't hard to get profitable on fb... It's harder to keep accounts up. I pray you are able to squeeze as much ROI as possible out of fb and that your account forever lives.
Also stay away from acct bumps. They are going ban crazy on affs and all bumps trigger a manual review. DO NOT hit your daily spend limit a single time.
Cheers dude, all the best.
ALSO, pm me if you are interested in selling any of those adult sites you mentioned that are getting a little traffic.
Originally Posted by zealous
Get your account phone verified for a 250 bump. And yeah basically get more accounts
Originally Posted by kabouter
During this time I kept submitting ads and it seems like they're giving me quicker approvals, so I'm gonna try to update this thread daily again. Hopefully I'll get back to the spirit of this challenge and create new campaigns with different offers, optimize, etc.
Yesterday I found a creative and angle with around .2 CTR so I've created a few variations (photoshopping bigger boobs lol, borders, sharpness, levels, saturation, color balance...) to test what works best and today I'm gonna see how it converts.
Takeaway
Angle. I still don't know how exactly and when I'm gonna make this work, but so far changing the copy to convey a specific angle has almost doubled the CTR of the same ad. The reach is much lower but logic tells me 100k is still big enough to make some money.
Especially for beginners I think it's best to focus on niches/angles rather than going broad. That'll come when I get more experience and money. It's like a principle in marketing but when I get into something *new* (for me) like CPA I tend to forget the basics and maybe focus too much on the tools and techniques.
Originally Posted by manu
Originally Posted by kabouter
Fuck, now that I'm getting a little more traction I had my accound blocked and all my ads stopped for unusual payment activity on my account.
Filled out a bunch of questions and sent my ID... let's see.
I got the 'This decision is final' message from Bob ONE FUCKING HOUR after I submitted the required info in their freaking form, answering EVERY SINGLE QUESTION. I don't know what do they want... oh yes wait, it should be this...
Originally Posted by sandyone
dating affiliate are dead on FB!
Contacted them again through this link http://www.facebook.com/help/issues/ads to contact them, that PaqMan posted. I repeat it cause it can be helpful for others. Still didn't heard from them, but I'll wait a few days before moving on... in the meantime I'm evaluating other alternatives.
I want to stick to ONE freakin thing until I reach my goal and I probably can get profitable on FB by redirecting to Fan Pages, or creating alternate accounts, etc. etc. or who knows... But they pretty much printed out the ID I sent over and wiped their butts with it and that's a huge repellent for me, cause I chose FB as traffic source almost arbitrarily.
Originally Posted by darkforces
Originally Posted by grindhard
Any update on your account??
Allright so back to Facebook baby!
Regardless of this post where the big guys are telling to avoid FB... I'm gonna give it one more try at least for now. A business partner friend and I are gonna use his FB account and are going to try Gaming since it's safer than Dating. We don't know if we're even gonna make it a profit out of it, but even if it's like 20-30% ROI, we'll consider ourselves successful.
By the way, do any of you know if it's necessary to put your VAT number in EU/Spain? FB says leave it blank if you don't have it... but I'm thinking that may be the cause of my ban before, and we don't want to repeat the same mistake. Spain is shit for entrepreneurial ventures... we're thinking of creating a company outside.
I started looking into Adult Traffic and sooner or later I'm gonna dive into it cause I like it plus it's big-guy recommended for beginners. I just wanted to give FB one more chance to make it *work* even though it's too bitchy for affiliates, you know... since it's consistency that makes progress and gets you to know the traffic source, even if it's to know it sucks... we'll see and then move on to greener playgrounds, regardless of its outcome.
So right now we started with 2 gaming offers. Sent 20 creatives for each to test although my partner's account is very new so I don't know how easily those will get approved. Same shit again, awesome Eager to see the results and share them with you guys. I don't know why but I feel happy about it today, maybe it's the nap I took that made me get late to work lol.
Cheers!
Manu, Congratulations, I love your thread and hope to continue your own way 
Spanish'm like you, if you want to talk give me your skype by PM (I can not that I have less than 10 posts yet)
Thanks for this thread....for someone who just about to start with FB, I'm learning a lot!
Especially zeno explanation of testing creatives!
Keep us updated bro!
Inspiring thread.
Any updates?
Hey! Yes there are news. Last month my partner and I already did more money than with our day jobs. Not a lot more, because especially in the beginning we lost money and I'm talking net profit.
But we already hit 300 euro ($400) days and all was going great. Motivation was super high and clearly saw the potential in this. However, this profits were mainly coming from just 2 offers and we had to stop both of them for different reasons. It all happened almost simultaneously so almost all campaigns were cut suddenly. This was mid July. Since then for several reasons we haven't been able get back to where we were. Not because "this doesn't work" but because of work/organization problems.
We're starting to get things running again, but honestly I have doubts. On one hand I work great with my partner and I'm 100% sure I wouldn't have gone so fast if I hadn't worked with him. But on the other hand, I can see now that our medium/long term goals aren't the same... so work ethic and other things driven by that aren't the same either... I want to kill it and do it fast. For him 'killing it' is 10k and beyond that he's not as motivated to work harder as I am. I'm giving it a bit more time for several reasons (not excuses), but soon well see.
Also, I don't like many things about facebook... I see the whole "create 100x accounts" a waste of focus and resources (probably a lot will disagree with me I know). I just don't like the bitching. Here I really don't know what to do. Because I begin to understand how FB works and doesn't feel great to jump to another traffic source. Experienced people gave me this advice too... I just want to "settle" in a better traffic source, you know... I liked and like Adult. I just don't know if I have the capital to start off testing with all the competition. How much money could it be to get off the ground? Any help and feedback is appreciated.
Hey Manu, appreciate your realistic and accurate account of your progression. Irrespective of your decision, I encourage you to persevere. I know you've given me the motivation to get started. thank you!
Originally Posted by caurmen
Hey Manu. Thanks for this follow-along. I'm just getting started in Facebook PPC, so this is exactly what I needed to read.
I've got a question about your ads. You said you were advertising a game in Germany? Was your ad copy in English or German? And if it was in German, do you speak German? Or did you have it translated somehow?
@ avidnetizen
If you want to run an ad in Germany, I advise you to let someone write a copy for your in German because then you will reach a lot more people than when you write an ad in English (because not every German speaks and reads English). To do this, everyone and I recommend OneHourTranslation.com!
Yeah. I always write the copy in the language of the country I'm targeting. I don't speak German nor many other languages. I usually follow this process:
A. Write the copy in Spanish or English.
B. Translate it with Google Translator.
C. Check it myself with three awesome tools:
- Searching the words I don't know with a dictionary.
- Searching sentences within quotes I think can be wrong (eg "Jetzt Kostenlos Spielen") in Google. If there are no results, probably that's wrong (but not always).
- Logic.
D. After getting a draft this way, pass it to some friend or someone who knows the language in order to check it.
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