Al Pacino goes Dating on Facebook ALL IN (25)
Hi all,
Past month I spent learning as much as I can about this Facebook game, and also started to try various things. I first started in a niche I am very familiar with and promoted a software product. With the tips and tricks over here on how to lift CTR for cheap clicks, I managed to get this campaign profitable. It generated over €50 euro per day in profit.
I also spent 100€ on a dating campaign for men aged 25-55 years (demo: 280.000). The purpose of this campaign was to test 7 images. There was just one image that did good with an CTR of 0.128 and CPC of 0.11.
Spent: €100
Revenue: 94.5
Lost: 5.5€
I was very happy with this result as I thought that I would lose a lot more testing.
I was ready to do more tests, but on the 3rd day Facebook couldn't charge my PayPal account for some reason I still don't now. I contacted them to give me more details on this, but didn't get a single reply. My credit card was back home, so I had to wait until I was back from my vacation.
Today I am. And today will my Facebook journey really start... I will put all my efforts in Facebook/Dating starting in The Netherlands using a landing page.
I just created a campaign targeting men 50-60 in The Netherlands (demo: 38.000) with 4 images of 50+ women to test which one(s) will generate high CTRS and thus low CPCs...
First Question 1: Is a demo of 38.000 too low?
My results for today:
Spend: 31.48 €
Revenue: 17.50€
Result: -13.98 €
My senior dating campaign did today relatively good. The costs were 23.50 € and the revenue was €17.50 (7 leads á 2.50 €). When I reach 40 leads, I will get 5.50€ per lead, so in fact I made a profit on this campaign today. See image below:
Then today, I created a new campaign targeting male 30-35yr, which generated a loss of 7.95 € euros (36 clicks, zero leads).
For both campaigns I am getting images with CTRs above 0.11%, but it's still not enough to get profitable. Next step is to find images that attract higher CTRs.
I also use a simple landing page for both offers. Next step is to test direct linking to the offer, test if that's making a difference.
Today my senior dating campaign with a demographic of just 38.000 did get really worse in terms of traffic. I think it's dried out after only 2 days, because the frequency is 14,4 which (if i'm not wrong) means that one person has seen my ad on average 14 times. So I paused this campaign. Today I just spent 0.98€ on this campaign and got 2 signups a €2.50 each. So I made actually a profit of €4.92 today.
My other campaign didn't as well get a lot of traffic for some reason. I am bidding far above the suggested price, but still got just reach of 3.100 on a 108.000 demographic. However, also this campaign made me a little profit. Spent 0.80€ on clicks and in turn got 1 singup a €4.50 which means that I made a profit of just €3.70 euros.
Total profit for today: €8.62
My campaigns don't get volume for some reason, so I will pause them and look for new opportunities. Also, I found out that I don't keep proper track of my campaigns in terms of conversions that each ad is making. It could have a high CTR and generating a lot of clicks, but if that specific ad is not converting, it's worthless. Also, I see that my affiliate network is reporting less views than I actually got from Facebook, so maybe they didn't make it to my landing page or something. That's why I decided to get my tracking right so that I have good date to decide what to do next. I will setup a VPS server with Beyond Hosting with Prosper202, before I continu doing anything!!
Definitely a good plan. Tracking will really help you narrow down what's working.
Update: I stopped all my campaigns, because I didn't want to spend money on campaigns, hope that they will profit somehow and don't track anything. I do want to know which ad/picture made the conversion, what the LP CTR is of my landers and so on. So that's why I first bought a VPS Server at BeyondHosting and installed Prosper202 on it.
Tip: if you want to use the 50% off the price for 6 six months for the VPS Starter Package, the coupon code is STACKTHATMONEY - I did use this one, but paid all the money upfront, and then this coupon code somehow didn't work. I guess you will have to pay per month to get 50% off the price. Stupid me!!
Anyhow, I got Prosper202 installed quickly with their easy to use installation system. Then, I setup my first campaign - an offer that runs on a dutch affiliate network called Daisycon. Everything was easy to setup, but tracking my conversions with this affiliate network didn't work for me... I tried everything, but I didn't get it working. Contacted them on this and still no reply. So I applied to international affiliate networks as I had to do that anyway...
I signed up to:
- PeerFly (approved)
- ClickDealer (approved)
- F5 Media
- Neverblue
- Adsimilis
I heard good stories about Adsimilis, so I am waiting for their (dis)approval. At the moment, I am working with ClickDealer and it's working great. This time I got the conversion tracking easily setup with Prosper202 and tested 3 offers right away yesterday by rotating them on the same demographic (10 Sept. 2013).
From the start of my journey until 9 Sept 2013 my costs and revenue were as follow:
Spendings: €174.02
Earnings: €149.50
Lost: 24.52
Costs/Revenue 10 Sept 2013 (Clickdealer)
I'm still split testing the offers, but they did all good (I mean the EPC of each offer was above the average CPC, so I ended up profiting a little bit).
Earnings: €34.15
Spent: €25
Earnings: €9.15
It was not much, but I was testing some images first and got a winner at 14.00 PM, then I paused all other ads that didn't well but ate some proportion of the total budget. Today I set the budget for this campaign from €20 to €50 and this single ad is doing well today. I am expecting a profit of over €30 today if everything goes as planned, partly because another campaign that I re-launched yesterday targeting 50+ men is doing also well. I just tested one image for the campaign that I re-launched, duplicated it a few times to see which one is going to stick (credits to Polarbacon for this approach) and this one ended up doing a great CTR of on average 0.211% delivering 0.10€ clicks. I directed linked this offer, so I will test a LP this week to check if I can get the ROI up!
That's it for now!!
nice work!
Tracking properly is a prerequisite.. you always want to make sure that everything is setup properly so you can understand what's working your campaign.
Sounds like you're getting the hang of things though!
Keep it up
I hope so.. It could also be beginner's luck!!
What I am afraid of is that the demo will dry up soon, because I am working with demo's of under 200k.. so what you will see is that after a couple of days the ad frequency is too high.. But for now I will try make as much money as possible and then pause the campaigns and reactivate them after a couple of weeks!
I already have one campaign ready for oday for testing purposets in Australia.. I made 1 campaign and 1 image that I've duplicated 4 times to check which is going to stick. It's also a small demo, men between 30-40 in Australia (104k people). Just a question for you out there...
As far as testing images, what's better to do?
A. Test 4/5 images per day, each one in its own campaign with a small budget
B. Test 1/2 images per day, each one in its own campaign wit a higher budget
From my experience, I see that the CTRs are low in the morning and in the midday, but higher in the evening... so if I choos option A, I'm afraid that all the money is spent in the morning/midday and that I will delete the image on data that's not accurate. I could also be wrong, maybe it is just better to test out which approach is better, but I hope there's someone here who can save me some time hehe!!
Statistics from yesterday: 11 sept 2013
Earnings: €150,5
Spent: €79,83
Revenue: €70.67
I hope to get this stable!!
Very nice alpacino! Im still struggling to get these kind of ROI. Are you still targetting the Netherlands?
Very nice 
. How do you pick an offer ? Do you look at the best EPC ?
I wish my follow along campaign can be like yours .
Testing Images: Choose the option that lets you get the images to a statistically significant number of views as cheaply as possible. I'm just putting a post about those numbers up in an hour or so.
@ Massimo
Yes, I created also a new campaign for Australia... This one will work today. It's my first campaign outside of my home country and from what I understand a much more competitive country so I will see how this will perform for me today!
@ rudysudarto
I don't know what the EPCs are, because they are not listed within the most affiliate networks. You will have to ask your affiliate manager which offers are currently doing well. I just ask my affiliate at ClickDealer/Daisycon what's working best for each country at the moment that I am targeting and they will tell you which one got the best ePC.
@ Caurmen
I will look definitely to that one. I feel that having a consistent and proven way of testing images is 50% of the work for getting a campaign profitable!
Income report for 12 Sept 2013
Earnings: €141.24
Spent: €86.47
Revenue: €54.77
In an earlier post I wrote this:
Lesson #1 learned: Triple check your campaign settings/landing page (if you use one) before you go live with your campaign!
Lesson #2 learned: It doesn't matter when your ad/landing page is written in Dutch or English, they somehow perform even better in The Netherlands (I got a higher ad CTR + LP CTR with the English ad instead of the Dutch ad keeping the image the same!).
Anyway, those 2 lessons charged me €19.21 euros so I ended up with a revenue of: €35.56!
Wow higher ctr when you use english for dutch audience than you use their own language , now thats good share .
The post in question: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...he-Winning-Ads
At least it was a profitable mistake!
I'd like to accidentally spend $1000 and $5000 revenue show up in my account.
@ JasperP
Who doesn't like that haha...
Today went better. The Australian campaign did very good in terms of conversions, but I didn't get an image CTR above 0.1% so I ended up paying a lot per click +/- 0.37€ per click. I tested 3 more images for this campaign, but still no big winner. Today I am doing another test with 3 new images hoping that the CTR will go up. This campaign can be very profitable if I manage to get 0.10-0.12€ clicks. So I will not make new campaigns anymore, but focus on testing images and images until I get my hands on some big CTR-sluts for this campaign. Then I will move further!!
Now, my income report to keep track of my progress, for 13 Sept 2013!
Earnings: €262.44 EUR
Spent: €190,73 EUR
Revenue: €71,71 EUR
ROI: 37.5%
Let's see what tomorrow will bring us!!
I try to not only work on my current campaigns, but also find new demo's/countries to test out to expand AND as a backup if a campaign suddenly starts to dry up...
I didn't mention earlier in this follow along, but together with my Stack That Money-membership I bought a membership on Social Ad Ninja just to check out what other people are doing, which kind of images are they using, what kind of landing pages are used at the moment, that kind of information is really valuable for someone who start as a complete newbie on Dating/Facebook. It's also very useful to quickly get an ad copy/text ready in a language that you don't understand. First, I check a couple of ads, translate them with Google Translate to understand roughly what the ad is saying and then mix different ad texts up to get something new. As the most landers are using in general the same rules/texts it's also easy to replicate this process for landing pages.
That's what I did today for a new campaign I will start today in Germany. I will target men between 30-40 broad (without any interests specified). It's a demographic of approximately 280k people and from what I heard Germany is also a more competitive country. That's why I will start with an budget of just €15/day to check out what kind of conversion rate, CPC, CTR and so on I can expect on this demo. I got 4 images approved today for this campaign to test out.. I hope I will hit some good CTRs to get the CPC to a decent amount..
I also deleted today one campaign on an age rang of 20-30yr. In the first place, because I couldn't get ad CTR above 0.1% and thus paid relative high CPCs. This campaign didn't profit, I was around break-even/little bit of loss. Secondly, I am starting to run and thus manage more and more campaigns simultaneously which is becoming more difficult. That's why I deleted this campaign in the second place, to focus on the more profitable ones. Maybe I will get back to this campaign in the future to try again (with the help of hopefully new insights).
As I told earlier, the CTRS of the ads for my Australian campaign are also < 0.1% and thus paying like +/- 0.37€ per click. However, I still profited so I re-created this campaign to test a couple of new images and these are doing a little beter with a CTR of 0.14% and a CPC of +/- 0.24€, but the conversion rate is now lower 
.
I also discovered something interesting. Look at these pictures below: you will see the exact same targets, but with different approximated reach - because of I single element that Facebook automatically adds to my targeting (right column on Desktop computers). Does someone now how to get rid of this element, because - as you can see - it lowers the reach of my demographic significantly!
Image #1:
Image #2:
Enough talking for today. Let's get to the numbers.
Income report for 14 Sept 2013
Earnings: €213.69
Spent: €117.83
Revenue: €95.86
ROI: 81.35%.
The number of people in an audience doesn't depend on where or how the ads are shown. The ads you are making will be marketplace ads that serve in the right-hand column. Whether this is explicitly stated in the ad targeting options or not will make no difference. Either your targeting is different and you don't realise it, or it's Facebook that has changed something. When did you create the original ad? My bets are on exact age match being different between the two ads. Facebook recently removed it I believe. In any case, using broad age match is silly if segmenting demos.
http://allfacebook.com/exact-age-mat...anager_b123825
Nice! Are you tracking everything on an ad level now as opposed to just a campaign level?
@ Zeno
Next to my age targeting there's no box that I can (un)check to require an exact match. That can't be the case. I checked a numerous times if there's a difference at all in targeting - but they are seriously exactly the same. Maybe Facebook just changed something...
@ Mscimitar
At the moment I have one ad running per campaign. So tracking for campaign level is in my case the same as ad level..
When did you create the former ad... Like I said, Facebook rolled out some changes a few weeks ago and removed the exact age match option. So if ad 1 is 13 days old and ad 2 is 5 days old... may have just been created on either side of the roll-out in your country.
@ Zeno
Thanks for your help. It could be that Facebook changed this, because every campaign/ad that I start now will have this "setting" added automatically. Only when I edit OLD ads I can get away with it (and don't get the extra setting which is fucking around with my reach). I just accept it and move forward.
Last couple of days I did almost nothing to my campaigns. That's why I didn't update this thread.. I had to work on my other income streams to get my main source of income stable.
Yesterday, I created a new campaign for Australia and it ran for a day... Notice that all the campaigns that I created for this country in the past were just profitable for 2 days or so and then turned out to be shit.. I deleted them and yesterday I did another try. I targeted 40+ men in this country who were single and I ended up with a 280.000 demographic and after Facebook added the "Only on the right side column on Desktop computer"-setting I got a demographic of 200.000 40+ men.. Still nice!
I made a nice $36 profit on this one yesterday - but I wasn't happy with the results. Look at the picture below why!
In Australia it's almost 12 o'clock right now and the stats looks like I am going to lose today on them.. It looks like this at the moment:
I don't know why the fuck people are clicking on an ad, going through my 3-step funnel which is pretty much saying to them what they will get when they click to sign up and then they DON'T signup. It makes me feel out of control!
However, I will try to optimize this one by editing the landing page and ad text... This is the first picture that got me a decent 0.233% CTR which I am happy with. Fucking with this image will mean that I will have to pay like $0.52 per click instead of $0.14 per click right now. So I will not touch this one for now!
Let's get to the figures for the past couple of days to keep this thread as updated as possible!
Income report of 16 Sept 2013
Earnings: €177.56
Spent:: €93.44
Revenue: €84.12
Income report of 17 Sept 2013
Earnings: €118.77
Spent: €52.84
Revenue: €70.43
Income report of 18 Sept 2013
Earnings: €190.04
Spent: €106.21
Revenue: €83.83
I still didn't manage to get past the €100 p/day mark. But I don't care, because I am also afraid I will/can not maintain this kind of revenue as campaigns/demo's are not always stable and new campaigns can turn out like shit ruining your ROI and your mood- but I have a winners mentality and my inability to make a nice profit from a demo/country makes me focused as hell to get this shit working! (that's why I probably want a revanche each time someone kicks my ass on FIFA 13 until I win!)
Why dont you just increase your spent to hit that 100/day mark?
I already did Massino. The Australian campaign ran on a 25 dollar budget the first day. The next day it ran on a 75 dollar budget and I ultimately ended the day break-even.
I think the problem lies in the landing page or the offer is saturated. My signup rate is very low compared to my other campaigns. How are you doing?
Still going strong. CR is stable, but im burning through my images very fast thus CTRs are dropping and CPC rising, so overal ROI is decreasing a little. But I cant complain. Just need to test get out there and find more images. And im going to hit my limit a few days, see if I can get a bump or ban... its scary..
@ Massino
Nice man. I wouldn't be scary... The worst thing that can happen is that they will ban you.. So what? Open up a new account and get back to work. However, I am happy that I don't have to worry about that at the moment.. I'm spending at most €200 a day, but my limit is set to €1400 p/day. I guess because I did some small (non-dating) campaigns in the past. Nothing serious, just playing around back then.
Income report for 19 sept 2013
Earnings: €250.11
Spent: €170.79
Revenue: €79.32
The Australian campaign (40+ men) that I created 2 days ago did a profit of just $8 today. Just by increasing budget from $25 to $75 I managed to earn $28 less. Maybe I will have to increase budget with small steps. I set back the budget to $25 to check if it makes a difference. If not, I will have to look to my lander and ad texts.
I also created a new campaign for The Netherlands (40+ men) today and this one did very well on a €25 p/day budget. I ended up earning €83.68 and just spent €25. My revenue on this single campaign is thus €55.69 which is the biggest part of my total revenue. I increased budget from €25 to €100 by midnight to check if it is going to be still profitable.
I ran two profitable campaigns since the beginning and they finally dried up today. It's strange, but the CTR is the highest ever since the beginning, but I don't get a reasonable reach. They run on a €50 p/day budget and I got like 6.000 impressions. I don't know what to do. Shall I increase my bids? My conversion rate is also significantly lower compared to the better days, so I am afraid that increasing the bid will lead to a huge loss... Anyone tips/advice on what to do with these 2 campaigns?
In summary:
1) They were profitable for +/- 2 weeks.
2) I still have high CTRs, even better than before (strange?!), but I don't get a lot of reach!
3) My conversion rate is lower, but this could be the result of significantly lower impressions/reach.
Anyone advice on what to do? Just pausing these campaigns, or bid higher?
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