Quick thanks to those here at STM, been lurking around the forums for a few weeks and loving everything in here.. you crazy little data lovers are a special breed, (and my kind of people)
so, up to finding STM i have built a few niche sites in the industry (as if BIKERKARL did not give anything away here) around specific niches. Clothing, jewellry, and a few others. I think after reading "I am not going to teach you to build shitty $10 adsense sites" on Dr NGO's blog, I knew it was time do something a little bigger.
,... or AH Ha. I was off to build another site in the biker niche modeled after the viralnova/upworthy types. Is it a wave? sure. Can I ride it? just trying to stand up on the board at this point. and so my daily shitty adsense money has turned into data-buying cash.
Passion= yes
Money = yes
Audience = huge.
Week 1 Goal: increase page likes to new FB page- viralmotos
I started split testing ads on FB for new page. Writing catchy headlines and using images was the starting point.
Details:
Started w/ 10 images all with same copy. ran for 2 days (>5K impressions). paused the shit and split the winners
took 2 best images and ran with 5 new ad copies on top. (was getting wierd feedback, and then i read some post here on double testing FB ads as Facebooks stupid algo will choke off "your losers" for you, and funnel to the one it likes best. Long story short, the control gets dropped in with the new ad set twice.
I attached the campaign stats, as you can see on set I am able to get the .25 per like. From what I read on STM, that should be more like .03 / like ??
Turns out the best performing images are those with women..... (Facepalm)
Going to run 10 more images (bikerwoman) and split the winners, add in 5 new call to actions, and split those up. Doubling in the control.
Money BIT:
Adsense CAT menu bar - amazon aff links - and running ads (to my own niche sites) to collect impression data to potentially use for pitching bigger advertisers down the road.
Questions:
Keep split testing ads until i get to .03 per like?
Linking up these sites will help/hurt SEO?
The primary goal here is to optimize the top end of the funnel to buy and get traffic cheaper than it can be monetized on the back. Am i off in left field?
Side note- i can see the skills needed to accomplish this being valuable in many areas of online and offline business.
Thanks again for having me here in the forum! Has been invaluable to read through the wealth of knowledge in here.
Reading that back the next day i was able to answer all those questions. (double facepalm)
my experience:
a) ctr on links = v v low as their algo is: .1 * <total fans> *.1 ctr (unless niche/targeted/historically high ctr)
b) with shares of pics and likes, there are almost no new fb fan-page likes, and traffic to pages has high bounce + low ctr
c) you will get cheaper clicks if you incorp non English countries, then the issue is, adsense in turn does not pay high for these counties..
It's tough but will subscribe and follow along. A page I managed got up to 5500 paid likes then another 500 natural over 3 months of posting at least 4 times daily. Couldn't turn this into a winner, maybe I was doing something wrong. I think I needed more likes (30k as a base).