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My first follow along - Duplicating revenue every month and my first dip at dating! (36)

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Hi guys,

I'm new around here (here's my introduction post) and I'm very excited about this.

I'm really looking forward to getting your input and learning as much as I can from you fine people.

I could say that I've been actively involved in AM since January and I think I'm doing good. Is not big numbers, but they are on an upward tendency.

I have one offer that I'm promoting via PPC that is currently doing OK. These are my numbers (rounded and normalized in $$ because a lot of $ to Euros conversion):

January:

• Ad Spend: $70
• Revenue: $306
• ROI: 437%

February:

• Ad Spend: $230
• Renevue: $912
• ROI: 396%

March:

• Ad Spend: $270
• Revenue: $933
• ROI: 345%

April:

• Ad Spend: $800
• Revenue: $1844
• ROI: 230%

May:

• Ad Spend: $650
• Revenue: $2200
• ROI: 338%

As you can see, this campaign is pretty consistent. I tweaked my keywords (basically delete all my keywords but one and left it "broad" with the +) using the + modifier in AdWords in may. This is why you see less ad spend but more revenue.

In june, I'm going to try to scale this campaign by adding additional countries were I think the product could work. I'm going for a 2K Ad Spend.

Now, I'm starting to enter the Dating + Facebook game. This is completely new for me and right now I'm about -40% ROI and could use some guidance here (actually A LOT!)

I picked a dating offer from Neverblue and this is my current setup:

• I'm working two angles
• With specific landers for each angle (no direct linking)
• Four ads for each angle (two females and two males)
• My demo is of about 200K (more or less...ads targeting females have around 50K which I'm suspecting is way to low)

I started with a bid of about $.40 and that did not do anything so I upped the bid to $0.90. Some traffic started coming in. These are the stats:



Now, being a newbie in Facebook I have no clue if this is good or bad. What I do know is that volumen wise is not good. I need bigger numbers (but have no clue as to how)

So far, out of those numbers I've managed 4 conversions.

Facebook Summary
May:

• Ad Spend: $55
• Conversions: 4
• Revenue: $28.40
• ROI: -49%

Next Steps:
Up until today I was trying one angle. The second angle was just added today and was approved about two minutes ago.

I'm unsure about what comes next in the sense that I'm sure I can start tweaking images, headlines, copy, etc, but I'm worried the demo is to small. Any thoughts?

Either way, I'll keep posting here and holding my self accountable.

Looking forward to learning like mad and joining the ranks of the successful affs!

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You can definitely work with small demo's like that provided your angle works. Looking at those stats above, your ads are ineffective. 0.04 CTR is horrible, they will get you nowhere. Your frequency is also very high which could be because of poor ad CTR + high bid/budget or it could be due to the small demo. Either way, you will need to test other images in your ads to try and find higher CTRs.

Nice to have backend conversions though, what landing page CTR are you looking at? Obviously you will want to split test landers but that can be tricky when you don't yet have FB ads that are giving you a bit more bang for your buck on clicks.

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Hi Zeno, thanks!

Glad to hear some input on this. Now that I know my CTR is horrible, I can work on improving it. Like you said, I'll be adding different images today to see if I can improve the CTR. I'll keep you posted.

About the CTR on the lander: is at 33% right now. I have no clue if this is good or bad for this type of traffic/campaign. Thoughts? Also, I would like to A/B test several landers, but I don't have sufficient traffic to get to any results with statistical confidence.

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33% is decent CTR for a dating lander on FB, obviously you want to push it as high as possible (>50% ftw!) but I wouldn't consider that a catastrophic failure of any kind. Ideally you would have a lander that you have tested elsewhere and know converts well. You're right about A/B testing, on FB you really need to optimise the images/ads first so that you aren't paying ridiculous amounts for the clicks you need to make the testing worthwhile.

What backend EPC are you getting? When multiplied by lander CTR what CPC do you need on FB to break even? If this isn't ridiculously low then you can aim for ad performance -> lower CPCs while not running too much in the red and then optimise the lander to bring things into the green.

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Ok so I went to CPVLab and the data is a bit wacked (still figuring out how to upload reports and such). So I downloaded the Facebook report in order to get the EPC. As of right now I'm at $0.31 EPC.

If I understood you correctly, I need a CPC of $0.10 (33*0.31/100) to break even if everything stays the same. I'm guessing $0.10 is in the ridiculously low category?

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Yesterday I tried adding a new angle and things did not work at all, in fact my CTR went down so I stopped to rethink my strategy. In the meantime I came across Zeno's http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...729#post108729 and I'm about to do just that.

Also in a complete newbie fashion, I found out that adding interests to the audience actually (sometimes) increases your demo. I was under the impression that this was not the case, so I added additional segments so my demos are now in the 300K+

I'm waiting for my campaign to be approved, once I have some data, I'll update.

Thanks.

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Were you using interests in the first place? Imagine interests like a Venn diagram where an interest = a circle with a certain number of unique people in it. Each interest adds more circles, but they might be overlapping to some extent. Sometimes adding an interest doesn't change audience size because everyone is already inside the circles provided by your previous interests. #Broad interests encompass many other interests so they will give you the biggest circles.

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Hi Zeno, thanks for all your help. Yes, I was using interests but only a couple of them (the first that came to mind), but my reasoning was tied on how Facebook words the audience, but now thanks to your explanation I can see why sometimes it broadens your audience.

Another question and this is regarding the ads: will ads get approved if the headline is written in the first person: "Let's play sports together" for example.

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Ok, so today I redid my ads, added a few more, changed the images, added more interests to the audience and launch the campaign.

I was hoping of course for at least and increase in CTR...yeah right, haha. Things got a whole lot worse... my numbers suck, BIG TIME.

Now, I just realized that the images I was using did not show the angle I was working. Kind of did this on automatic: just show babes and hot dudes, and that's it. I'm suspecting this is a deterrent to the angle.

Also, I was way to vanilla with the images. I'm now trying to push for edgier images...let's see if I can get some of them approved.

So, I have now added images that support the angle, so everything is in "harmony". Just submitted the ads. Will post once I have some data.

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Interesting follow-along so far!

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Thanks! I'm waiting on my campaign to get approved

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Ok, so today I had a chat with @wramirez617 and being awesome like everyone here, he gave me a few pointers that helped me made a few choices.

I ditched the region of the camp I was trying to promote (Australia) and switched to a LATAM camp. There are a few reasons for this:

• Less competition
• I'm fluent in Spanish and I'm from down there so I believe it gives me a competitive edge (and have dated a few girls from where the campaign is )

About the camp:
Latinos are very specific to the expressions we use depending on the country, so in order to get an edge I did some research and found out all the specific words that my audience uses. There are A LOT, so I choose those close to what I was looking for (ways to say beautiful girl, relationships, etc). Based on these specific words, I wrote 9 ads, each with a different angle.

From the 9 Ads, I created 9 campaigns in Facebook in order to test 5 images per ad. (One campaign has 5 ads with the same copy with 5 different images)

Each campaign has two landers that complement and reinforce the angle of the ads (same two versions of lander for everyone, different copy)

Images:
I downloaded two mega files from STM yesterday and went trough ALL the images. Somethings CAN'T be unseen...

Most of the people in these images, from my POV (and this is the type of things I think gives me that minimal edge) look WAY to North America / Canada. I don't think much of those images would fly with a latino audience, so I went to Google, my Facebook, etc. and found some decent samples.

Objectives:

• Get a decent CTR (get to the 0.XX range as this would be a major accomplishment based on previous numbers). This would validate my research and image selection process.
• Out of the 9 camps, have 2 angles show promise.

Possible roadblocks:
My VPS is hosted in the US and my landers are giving me 3.5S loading time (I downloaded the landers from the Landers thread. The ones that I choose are loaded with JS and those mofos are HEAVY).

Next Steps:

• I'm waiting approval on the camp from the advertiser and once I have that I can finish things up, submit and see what happens (have no idea if what I'm doing will fly with FB. Is not edgy, but who knows...certainly not me )
• Keep fetching for LATAM dating offers in case the advertisers does not approve me. Either way, my camp would fit another advertiser as well.

Dying to get some data on this!

BTW: thought you guys might find this interesting: http://loads.in/

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Hey mate, LATAM is a nut waiting to be cracked, its where I and many other marketers have had our first big campaigns. Good luck and im curious to see how this turns out for you

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Definitely a really good tip. Earlier this year one very slang-savvy translator came up with a single phrase for a LatAm campaign that transformed one of my campaigns - from loss to a 80-ish% ROI.

South America doesn't seem to be too load time sensitive from my experience - I suspect because they're used to the lag from US-hosted sites - but if you want the best speeds, look for a host with a datacenter in Florida, as that's where the cables to South America come in.

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I load one creative per camp

For many reasons but mostly because your cpc will a be affected by the adgroups ctr and you don´t want that.


This is a good site to check load time too, https://www.pingdom.com/

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@spamalot thanks! I can't wait to pump some traffic into this to see how it goes.

@caurmen I agree. Language is key here. I'm from Vzla and have many friends from Peru, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, etc. I remembered gathering with friends and we all speaked spanish yet no one understood a damn thing based on slang and local expressions.

@wramirez617 thanks for the tip man! Does it make sense to upload everything, see what gets approved and pause all but one per group, let it run, decide if it's a go and if not, un-pause a new one?

Thanks guys!

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Nice job man with Adwords, i'm sure you'll crack Facebook as well.

I'll follow you

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Thanks crysper! These follow along campaigns and making yourself accountable are a great way to get going!

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Quick update:

Things are not going well.

I got rejected by the advertiser to push the offer in LATAM. That set me back a bit. There seems to be a shortage of LATAM offers, but I'm waiting approval from networks that claim they got good offers.

Another thing is that ads are taking forever to get approved, if they do. Since my last update I haven't had one of my dating ads approved or denied. They are just standing by...

I have a couple of other campaigns about some FB pages that I have, so I reactivate those (in order to help all this approval ratio thing, but my guess I need to submit more. This ones did get approved, like in 30 seconds)

I applied to some public campaigns (don't require approval) and they have a LATAM offer but pixls fires when the user buys a membership... not so sure about this but either way I want to get some traffic in order to learn...I can't learn much with no traffic.

To not waste time, I've been building a set of landing pages templates of my own (I know there are like a hundred out there) but I like to do my own shitz

Hope I can get some ads approved and come back and report with some traffic numbers.

Out.

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Hey man- best of luck with Latam.

I've tried it in the past but gave up too soon.. for the same issues you spoke of. Lack of offers in general and the payouts were pretty weak. Hoping your knowledge of the culture and slang can bring you some success!

I went through the same thing with facebook approvals.. even waiting up to 5-7 days at one point. Makes it tough to have an engaging follow-along haha.

I'll be following this one!

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@badger your words give me hope my friend! let's see if I can get some data to at least learn something! haha. Once I have any, I'll update asap.

Thanks!

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DATA DATA DATA!

Finally some data I can post. FB is taking for ever to approve my camps, but at least they are not denying them. I´m getting most (a couple got denied) of my ads approved.

At first, I was pushing a Be2 offer for Australia. My firsts attempts were not good, so I decided to take the same approach I did with my LATAM campaign and redid the ads. Since the ads were waiting for approval when I decided to switch to LATAM, I just left them there and waited to see if they got approved. They did.

Here are the numbers:




Look at that sexy CTR...hummmm /sarcasm. OK, my AU camp tanked. I need to rethink the whole thing.

Now, let´s move to greener pastures....

LATAM.

My hipotesis was that I would have a competitive advantage here. Languague, slang, etc. Did it work? I like to think so (data is the last 24 hours):



CTR´s are way better and I´m near those valued 1 cents clicks. But, since the campaign has been running I´ve had...0 conversions.

I did expect that.

This is a CPS dating offer. Latinos don´t like to take their CC out. I knew this well before I submitted the camp. But, I did it anyway because I wanted to reach my objectives and prove my point.

Here are my %CTR in my landers:


Don´t mind the costs (I haven´t update my reports). For my firsts landers, I think I´m doing all right, but they need tweaking:

So far, I´m -100% ROI on everything. Is ok.

I now know that I can approach LATAM and with enough tweaking, get there.

My main issue now is finding good SOI or DOI offers for LATAM. Be2 Chile did not approve me in Neverblue and Adsimilis denied my application (they didnt even call me ). So I´m out of good offers... with good traffic on my hands.

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If you’re looking for South American offers i recommend CPATREND they have a few from what i know. When you apply just let them know you’re from stackthatmoney and quote your username and they will expedite your application i got mine approved same day I applied.

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Awesome, thanks!

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Awesome thread.

I haven't launched my first campaign yet but will definitely try the Latin American market approach as my parents are from there and I speak the language well.

I hope you succeed dude!

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Interesting - those are some very solid CTRs for a first round of ads.

A suggestion: when you're applying to networks, you may want to mention that you're intending to concentrate on LatAm and that you have a significant competitive advantage there. It may also be worth saying that you already have promising campaigns that you're just looking to match to offers.

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Thanks caurmen! I posted a thread here, and I´ve already signed up with a few networks that do carry LATAM offers. The power of the STM forum baby!

About the ads:
I went with broad targeting. Today, I´ll narrow it down, way down. Let´s see if I can really pump up those CTR´s.



I´m planning on segmenting by city, and including the city in the AD copy. I expect an increase in CTR knowing that volume might be a problem.

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Ok, so 14 days have passed since my last update. These couple of weeks, have been, well, interesting.

In my last post I mentioned that I was going to segment by city. It turns out that the demo's were incredibly small, so I ditched that idea and before segmenting anything, based on the recommendations I got during the week, I focused on two things:

• Increasing my approval ratio
• Increasing my CTR's

I accomplished both: I'm on automatic approval now (not that I'm running anything to risky, but it sure changes the dynamic of the camps) and I also managed to increase my CTR's.

How I handle the CTR increase

I went to my camp and took the best performing ad (0.13% CTR) and created 15 camps with one ad each camp.

It was the same ad, just with a different image. I knew the copy was solid, I just wanted to push it with the pic.

I submitted my 15 camps, of which 5 got rejected and 10 went trough. Out of those 10, there was a clear winner with a 0.30% CTR. Bingo!

Now, I'm rolling baby. I have an ad at 0.30%CTR, 2 cents clicks...I'm ready to bank mofo! ... yeah right.

Up to this point and with my old ad, my lander was doing about 40% CTR. So obviously I'm happy that with my new cheap clicks, at 40% CTR lander will help me for sure. I let the ad run for 24 hours...

Lander CTR with the traffic from the new ad:

2% - Let me repeat that: 2% CTR!

Motherfucker just took a nose dive. And this is where hell begins...

I check everything and it all looks good:

• Landers are not ripped so no funky codes
• The ad is exactly the same (I copy pasted that bitch)
• CPVLab is running OK

I'm clueless.

I let it run for a couple of more days to see if maybe FB is being funny with my traffic. No luck, 2% it is. No soup for you!

Fuck. Well, I keep going:

I work out a new lander (my reasoning is maybe FB is showing the ads to the same people and they are getting a bit saturated) this time I try a long copy LP...

3% CTR. Still the same.

I let that run for 24 hours and is the same stuff. At this point I stop everything to regroup.

After snooping around, I notice two things:

• The audience of my new ad is a bit broader: old ad: 30 to 40 years old - New Ad: 30 - 50.
• The URL in my old ad points to: http://www.mytracker.com/........ and the new ad points to http://mytracker.com/.....

My take is that the URL does not matter and I focus on the audience. I change the audience to match exactly the old ad 30-40.

I submit the ad and it get's approved, but before resuming it I un-pause the old ad...

BOOM! 55% CTR on the new Lander. WTF???

Ok, so this MUST mean that the inclusion of the 40 to 50 audience is wrecking everything. I pause the old ad and turn on the ad with the correct audience...

3% AGAIN!

DUDE! - Same ad, same audience, same landers. WTF?

I'm now running an experiment today to see if I manage to find out what's going on:

I'm running my old ad and the winning new ad plus the second best ad of the new group. Hopefully by the end of the day I'll have some data to see what's going on.

If not, I think is time for me to ditch this camp and start a new one. I'm $300 dollars in and have made around $50 in conversions (I'll update the numbers once I run this last experiment)

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Well, that's just plain wierd!

Try split-testing 30-40 and 40-50? You might find there's HUGE volume in the 40-50 age group and they just don't convert.

Were you using "require exact age match" on the camps?

Altogether, very odd! Not surprised you're WTFing on this one.

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Thanks for the tips caurmen! Yeah this is just plain weird.

What I'm doing right now is:

I have 3 ads:

• The old one
• The new one with the same audience as the old one (removed the 40-50 crowd)
• And another good ad from the new ones

I'll let it run tonight and see what numbers I have tomorrow.

Now for a quick update on my numbers. This are my overall numbers:

My first camp was for Australia...Haha. I had ZERO clue were I was getting into, but my CTR's quickly reminded me that this was no place for noobs

Australia Camp:
From May 17th to June 8th.

• Spend: $154 | Income $28.40
• Impressions: 707.134
• Clicks: 217
• AVG. CTR: 0.031%
• AVG CPC: $0.29
• EPC: $0.13
• ROI: -81.55%

After this I moved to the LATAM camp and this has been running for a while longer, because damn it I'm going to stick to this one and exhaust all my options before calling it quits.

LATAM Camp:
From June 8th to the 25th

• Spend: $234.67 | Income $52.59
• Impressions: 3.375.384
• Clicks: 5768
• AVG. CTR: 0.171%
• AVG CPC: $0.04
• EPC: $0.009
• ROI: -77.41%

Hopefully, I can move the needle with the tests I'm performing right now. I'm also rotating offers to see if I can find a better one.

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Curious about your PPC campaign prior to this facebook test. You were getting some really nice ROI. Is this Adwords (not affiliate friendly), Bing, or what?

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Wow! I haven't updated this follow along for two months... so much stuff happened since then!

In my last post I told my self that I was going to stick with it and oh boy did I!

I actually ditched the LATAM campaign (at that point I had no clue about how to increase my chances at getting cheap clicks and in LATAM you need them) and switched to another GEO I believed it had less competition and I could make my move with the few small advantages I have.

So I went right ahead and launched my new camp. Shortly after I met someone on Skype that would turn my short aff career upside down on it's way to profit! (he's from the forum, but not outing him unless he wants to chime in).

He started mentoring me, letting me ask a million questions and giving me the right tips at the right time. This was critical because it helped me set my mindset. Before this I was all over the place: things like I had 5 conversions and I was worried about how in how I was going to scale? (da fuck?). That sort of things.

Then he said: look at this camp as an exercise on profitability.

And that for whatever reason got stuck with me and it gave me a weird peace about the whole chaos around it and allowed me to take one step at a time, which I gladly did.

So based on his mentoring and a shit ton of golden nuggets I've found here, I went from -400$ to

13.000$ Revenue with a profit of about 30%!

This shit is awesome. Oh yes it is.

And one of the things that I'm most proud of is that this whole thing happened with one offer in one geo. That's it. Focus like a bitch.

I've probably testes around 500 ads, found a golden nugget, drove it to exhaustion and I'm now reviving some of my old winners with moderate success (which I'll gladly take)

I have also had the incredible luck of experiencing in these two months:

• PayBumps
• Being told I'm #3 in terms of quality and volume
• Being placed on weeklies
• Being dropped by the advertiser for bad quality
• Having touch code and of all the sudden my landers don't work anymore and I can't for the life of me understand a single fuck about what's going on.
• Finding out that your lander is taking 14 seconds to load and managing to get it under 1s.
• Etc...

Sufficient to say that the last 60 days have been a complete wild ride and learn a thing or two:

• Don't be lazy and read STM. There's more than enough info in here to make it.
• Don't stop asking questions. I've found people are very willing to help out (but don't be a dick)
• Build your relationship with your AM. They hold the keys to the big city.
• Get a good host and VPS... just get it. (my feeling this is very hard to explain and can only understand it when you go trough it)
• Test.Test.Test. x 1.000.000 and you still haven't tested enough.

I'm still a complete n00b and have so fucking much to learn. But then again this excites me like a blonde in a g-string and louboutins (damn reds...)

Anyway... I won't be updating this follow along per se, because it has morphed into a lot of things, but hope you can get some value out it.

Thanks!
F.

Btw: I'm still killing it with my AdWords camp


...oh and don't forget to test mofo!

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Congrats on your success Fabian , keep going!

And this :

is basically all you need to be successful in AM

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@bbrock32 thanks man! It's been amazing. Let's keep grinding

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AWESOME stuff. Thanks very much for coming back to this thread and letting us know how it's going for you!

Looking forward to hearing about you hitting $130,000 and $1,300,000 in revenue now

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@caurmen thanks man! Hopefully will be able to do that soon Anyway, thanks for all the articles an amazing tips you keep pushing out!

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