Wax on, Wax off - Facebook Training (27)
Hey guys, I'm new to affiliate marketing (just dabbled with POF for a bit in Jan) and joined STM 2 weeks ago. Wish I had done it sooner... it's been an incredible resource for the short time I've been here so far. Already met 2 successful guys in person from the forum who also live here in San Diego (props to francis and egan, thanks for all the great tips/advice), love how positive and helpful a lot of you guys are, both on and off the forums.
I'm working at this 7 days a week, along with some ecommerce sites I'm working on too, and my big goal for 2014 is to be doing this full-time later this year.
Anyway, baby steps... I want to master Facebook and this Follow Along will track my journey. And I'm going to start out with Gaming, good way for a rookie like me to learn the ropes.
- I'm signed up to A4D, Neverblue, and PeerFly. My AM at A4D hooked me up with a gaming offer, will check some more out on my other networks. Have Prosper202, hosting, and all that set up.
- Going to familiarize myself with the Facebook ad platform and do some test ads with it, read up on the guidelines, etc
- Going to study more of the FB Follow Alongs here to get a better idea too
- Signed up to SocialAdNinja, will do more hw on my offer, other gaming ads, and plan of attack
Also, before I was thinking that I was gonna do the 30-day challenge and commit myself to doing 3 campaigns/day. Talked to some more experienced guys and they advised against that... better to focus on quality, not quantity. That's what I was kind of doing with POF before, just throwing darts and not really thinking about all these campaigns I'm running or really making it work.
Just read this great post by Smaxor related to that: Conversation with an affiliate with 9 months of experience and stuck
So that's the approach I'm going to take with my affiliate training from now on, more of a sniper approach focused on making one offer work.
Next post will detail my first FB Gaming campaign.
Nice progress Adsurfer, what is your criteria for "picking" a gaming offer for promoting on Facebook? I ask this not to question your approach, but to hopefully open up the conversation about going from throwing darts at POF offers in quantity --> to throw gaming darts at the facebook wall.
That make any sense?
Subscribed and following along with my 1/2cent.
subscribed, glhfgg
Originally Posted by bikerkarl
I'm still wrapping my head around everything in Zeno's FB guide that was posted recently... once I feel like I have a better handle, I guess then I'll start being picky about certain offers I should go for.
For now, I just feel like I'm at the point where I need to dive in and make as many n00b mistakes as quickly as possible.
04/06/14
- Switched up my hosting to Linode.com and set up Prosper202 on it. Before it was on my personal server with other apps/projects I have up... bc of speed/performance, I'm just dedicating this Linode server 100% to my affiliate campaigns.
- Created a new FB account which I'll use for managing ads from now on, instead of my personal acct
- Selected 3 gaming offers to work on. Plan is to focus on 3 offers at any given time from each of my networks (A4D, Neverblue, Peerfly) starting off.
- Got a MMO/game-specific domain for landing pages I'll be pushing for my gaming offers
- Also randomly decided to run Booking.com, it's travel not gaming but just looking to get my feet wet with FB. Uploaded the ad and waiting to get approved.
- Got an ad disapproved a few days ago for one of my gaming offers, was probably because I tried direct linking my affiliate offer (exactly what Zeno says *not* to do here: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...king-Campaigns)
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Last two weeks have been pretty busy for me with some ecommerce projects I've been working on. Time to hit it hard with this everyday, and I'm actually glad now that we have Zeno's FB guide for reference: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...el-Guide-to-FB
Biggest tips/advice for me right away was to not use your personal FB account, use the FB power editor instead, always check offers and LPs on MyWoT, and to never direct-link an affiliate link on Facebook ---> these are all such basic rookie mistakes, but I would've been pretty clueless had I not read through his guide (so thanks a ton to Zeno). And it's also a reminder just how much info there is to consume for mastering FB, need to make incremental progress everyday.
Next step is to finish my creatives and LPs for my 3 gaming offers, upload them, and hopefully get them approved. Then will need to figure out tracking and split-testing...
[EDIT: just got my Booking.com ad approved, no LP yet, just direct-linking it for now, and per zeno's advice I had a php redirect set going straight to the offer with no affiliate link just to get it approved, now I just switched it to my prosper202 tracking url, yay]
My SEO plans are bearing fruits, my forum keyword density is getting heavy.
Looking good bud!
Originally Posted by zeno
04/10/14
- Did a lot of studying on the forums last night... I searched for Case Studies, Campaigns, and Tutorials on the Facebook and Affiliate Marketing forums, subscribed/bookmarked all of them and read through it all till 6am last night. So glad I did it, it cleared up a lot for me and has definitely changed my basic approach to this.
- I'm focused on one offer now - just submitted a teaser direct-link ad that got approved (just to test out and make sure this offer LP is ok for Facebook, had a yellow WOT rating for child safety so I wanted to make sure). Waiting to see some spend/impression activity before I start thinking about angles and creating ads/landers for it tomorrow
- Also can't be running FB without getting bitched out by the platform at least once I suppose... was puzzled why this ad I submitted wasn't getting impressions right away (someone just told me that I should wait like 3-4 hours even after they're approved), so a bright n00b like me figures I should try submitting the same ad on my personal account to see some impression activity. It instantly gets disapproved and my personal ad account gets flagged for suspicious activity, will need to submit my personal ID if I want to keep advertising for personal stuff. What a dumb mistake... anyway, lesson learned. On my other acct, seems like my cc is flagged too so had to use another one to update the ad and get it through - still waiting to see some impression/spend activity though, we'll see in the morning hopefully...
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Most important things I learned from reading a ton on the forums and other blog posts last night:
a) I need to stop fucking around with so many different offers since I'm still learning the ropes.
Need to just focus on one offer, one traffic source. I need to go through the motions and execute the 13 steps of a campaign, instead of blindly throwing darts at a bunch of offers and not really thinking about it.
Great advice from Malan Darras (and also mentioned by Smaxor in that blog post of his I linked to earlier):
I was initially excited about running high-payout offers, like this Booking.com offer I was looking at that has a $15 payout. That's probably the worst thing to do as a n00b... you want to get as much data as possible for testing and doing that with a high-payout offer also requires a much bigger budget (rule of thumb is to test out offers 10x the payout sum). Excellent advice from stackman and caurmen that's steering me in the right direction:
- http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-New-Affiliate!
- http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...e-Often-Better
c) I finally have a basic idea of what ANGLES are in a campaign.
One big question mark I had was that I wasn't sure what the right testing strategy would be... do I test my ads, find the best one, then test my landing pages and get the best one, then keep changing page elements, colors, etc, and keep testing... again throwing darts and not having a clear game plan. Seems like the guys who know what they're doing test for angles initially and then once they have that figured out, then they'll optimize all the different elements within it. So they work a campaign top-down and look at it from the big picture initially.
redrummer hits it on the head: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post120449
Mr Green's testing strategy:
- make a few ads.
- make one lander/angle.
- check results.
- If profitable or break even, if losing split test with a different angle.
- check results.
- make a few more ads.
**Only until I am break even or profitable, I will start changing minor things on my landers.
- http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...icient-Testing
- http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...campaign-angle
- http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-7-Deadly-Sins
- http://charlesngo.com/angles
And some really good overall guides:
- http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-000-In-Profit!
- http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ur-CTR-amp-%29
- http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ides-amp-Posts
- http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...avorite-Guides
04/13/14
Familiarized myself with Prosper202 again this weekend. Set up my campaigns and added the postback on my network, followed these really helpful guides on STM:
- http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Campaign-Setup
- http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...cker-or-CPVLab
One thing that bugged me was that I couldn't remove click history for testing in Prosper202. So If I was just testing out my tracking before actually launching the campaign, the click data would still be there. Apparently you could do it in the pro version, but not in the basic P202. Found this solution though, easily done via MySQL: http://prosper.tracking202.com/forum...t-clicks#19829 -- so that's what I do from now on after simulating some test clicks.
My offer has 7 different signup page variations and I want to find out which has the highest conversion rate, so I've been testing for that. Using one of the banners provided by the offer and direct-linking it to the offer. Initially, I actually had 7 different ads set up for this... lol, a buddy later told me that I should simply have one ad and rotate them, a lot more efficient.
I never rotated URLs with Prosper202 before, so read up on that in this great guide by CTRtard. And since I'm direct-linking and not using a LP yet, I pretty much just substituted my affiliate links into that offer.php script. Done and done, campaign's still running and I'm targeting games similar to my offer from gameslikefinder.com. Getting some clicks, 0 conversions so far, but it's only been like half a day.
Also, this same buddy told me that I'm wasting my time testing for the offer LP variation. Apparently your AM should have this info, so I should ask her tomorrow. Whatever, still good exp messing around with tracking and prosper202. And also getting to understand the Power Editor and targeting options on FB a lot better...
Next, I did some hw on my offer. Things I never really did before when I was just throwing darts around on POF dating offers, before I joined STM. Probably critical to help you understand the target user base and who you're marketing to:
- I spent 30min actually signing up and playing the game
- Browsed through the website's forums reading posts from top users, took note of this tag cloud of users' profile interests, took note of topics and interests in the Off-topic section in the forums
- Looked up stats and demographics on SocialBaker, Google Trends, Quantcast, and MetricsMonk
- Studied similar sites and competitors: similarsites.com, topsimilarsites.com
- Scoped out popular bloggers, twitter users, youtube channels, and Google+ users who are obsessed with this game
Gave me a great feel for this game and its user base. Was also giving me lots of ideas for creatives, took lots of screenshots of pics being shared and even advertisements I was seeing. Best insights came from looking up this game, and one of their big competitors, on moat.com and seeing the angles that they're hitting in their ads and which other websites they're spending $ on - it tells you a lot about the user base and different clusters of demographics within it. Not all the same... some are the WoW/LAN party nerds, some are Miley Cyrus teeny boppers, etc.
Now I have a lot of ideas for angles that I would want to attack and a pretty good idea of the different kinds of users I'm going to target for this offer. Next I'm going to focus on one of these user types and think up a few angles for this demographic, create several ads for each angle, and start testing.
All looking very good so far! In particular, actually taking the time to install and play the game, look at the forums, and so on is an excellent idea, and will serve you well. Just make sure you get starting pushing the angles out now!
Good shit adsurfer - empathising with your demographic will help you sell to them, just don't spend too much time on it. When you find interests the users tend to like I would recommend forming interest clusters, i.e. groupings of similar interests, rather than hitting them all together.
Granularity is important on FB - with so many targeting options it's easy to overlap everything and miss the golden pockets of traffic.
LP variation is a very good idea with gaming. My first big success netted me ~$20k in revenue and I was a noob at the time but I split test 6 different landers for every single age, gender and angle. I found that different age/gender pockets converted wildly differently on different landers.
E.g. M 18-21 converted highest on L1, M 22-25 on L3, F 22-25 on L5 and F 26-40 on L1. If I went to a different angle/targeting nothing followed over, it was just a whole new set of data. There was no coherence to it, the data just told me what to do and I estimate my average EPC was about twice what it would have been without split testing landers.
Originally Posted by zeno
Thanks for sharing that and really inspiring to hear too! Question... just to make sure, so these are offer landing page variations you were testing (signup pages like I'm testing for right now too) or are you talking about LPs you created for each angle? Were you simply direct-linking them too when you net that $20K? Props man...
I plan on creating my own landing pages for angles after figuring out some winning ads and signup page variations, but was just wondering...
Yah was just RHS ads direct linking to the offer, where the gaming advertiser had ~7 different sign up page variations.
Btw, the affiliate network didn't have these originally - I found them and asked them to get them. Gaming advertisers tend to make many landers but often give one or a few to an aff network. They will do their own internal testing and find the 'best' landers but that doesn't mean shit to us - there best =/= the best for our campaign.
Often the landers are just called l1, l2, l3 etc. so if you ever see incremental page names in a gaming offer URL, change them and see what you get. You'd be surprised at what you find hidden in there. Aeria games does it a lot, as do publishers like Game321, game337, gPotato, etc.
in for the follow along
Originally Posted by zeno
04/20/14
Spent the past week just direct-linking my offer on FB, figuring that I need to test for the best signup page variation first. And it's definitely a good idea (as Zeno mentions in comments above), but half-way through the week I realized that I'm probably wasting my time with the LP variations for this offer in particular and the data probably made it clear.
The game that I've been focusing on, and was recommended to me by my AM, is: IMVU - Social Chat, US, 18+ (Payout: $2.45). It's a virtual fantasy competitor to Second Life and it seems like they've been crushing it and stealing their market share over the last few years.
Spent around $150 over a few days in hopes of finding the best converting signup page for this offer, was rotating between 7 offer LPs and direct-linking them. Highest CTR I was getting was 0.04% and on one of the days I got 100 clicks and 1 conversion - apart from that, I didn't get any other conversions. Half-way through the week, I realized that this is probably a bad idea because out of these 7 LP variations, only one of them was a direct link to the 2nd-page sign-up form (which results in a conversion). The other 6 were landers that you had to click through to get to that 2nd page.... so obviously I'm probably just best off working with linking directly to that 2nd page signup, rather than having users have to do one more click to get to the next page.
Also made me realize that with this sort of game, since it's a virtual social chat, it requires a lot more pre-selling than say some typical MMO action game. So landing pages are probably key and direct-linking simply to that 2nd page sign-up probably won't go anywhere.
As far as my targeting goes, I did my research on IMVU users and broke it down in 4 big demographics: 1) young black girls, 2) teeny-boppers, 3) emo/punk girls, 4) WoW/Role-Playing nerds (single males drawn to IMVU for socializing/dating, believe it or not...)
So to start, I'm targeting young black girls. They're actually huge on IMVU and I've noticed a lot of their advertising going to sites like blackplanet.com, hiphopwired.com, rap-up.com, etc. Unlike POF, you can't target race/ethnicity on Facebook, so I tried by targeting Females 18-24 and added a bunch of hip hop/R&B artists (2Chainz, Beyonce, Jay Z, 50 Cent, etc). And I used one of their banners I saw to test out my signup pages:
As you could imagine, using music interests wasn't really smart, not that great of a filter for ethnicity. So overall, a lot of mistakes made and lessons learned last week.
I scrapped this campaign for testing for the signup page variation, instead I'm just going with the one that links directly to the 2nd page registration form. Thought of a good angle, designed a landing page and 5 banner ads, and just submitted them and got them approved. Set up tracking and checked it all out. Tomorrow morning I'll run it and we'll see where it goes. And instead of trying to target young black girls via music interests think it's better to do it with specific websites, this time I'm simply doing: Female 18-24, Interests: BET or BlackPlanet (2.4M people)
04/22/14
$50 daily budget on this campaign, 18-24 F, IMVU - US - Social Chat. Targeting young black girls. Thought of a Rihanna angle for this and created 5 banners and 1 LP for it, today's data:
My highest CTR from one of the ads was 0.053%:
Got 92 clicks from my ads going to my LP and out of that, only 10 clicked through to go IMVU's signup page. 0 converted... got some work to do:
And the 5 sidebar ads I tested today:
This is the winning ad so far (Rihanna5 - 73 clicks, 0.053% CTR, 6 LP click-throughs):
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- Since my offer payout is $2.45, based on the 10x rule I should be spending about $25 to test each banner (please correct me if I'm wrong)
- I had 92 clicks and 10 LP click-throughs from that... maybe it seems like I didn't connect the offer value well enough with the ad copy. And I think the same goes for my landing page.
- Still too early to tell, but I have a hunch that I was too focused on spinning the angle and selling it but wasn't really communicating what exactly IMVU is. I bet a lot of these visitors just saw "Rihanna" and "free designer fashion", and perked up. But then they see virtual fantasy avatars and they're thinking WTF... and just X out.
- I'll post elements of my landing pages later, but it's basically a similar layout to IMVU's signup page, but has a picture of Rihanna and a picture of a Rihanna avatar side-by-side. Also sprinkled a few social proof elements (BET, Blackplanet, Vogue, Cosmo logos).
- Thought of a new angle, created 5 ads, and another LP based on this angle. Will test it out tomorrow and report back. What's awesome about setting up one angle/LP I find, is that you could fairly quickly test new angles/campaigns (just about switching copy and images on the landing page), everything else I'm pretty much keeping the same.
I'm not sure that IMVU is a great offer.
Personally I would hit the #SWAG OVERLOAD / YOLO angle but this will work better with the younger demo - do 18+ users really want to join a virtual world for chatting when they can just do this on FB? Seems like something high school kids would find entertaining. Honestly I have no idea how to really angle IMVU to older people on FB... it feels like asking people to come outside to watch TV in your van instead of inside their comfy lounge.
In any case, at the moment I would say your lander is the biggest issue. For this kind of offer/ad performance you really need 40+% lander CTR.
Originally Posted by zeno
I was thinking there's some disconnect between my angle/lander and the offer too, I need to bridge that gap more I think. Created another angle and testing that out tomorrow.
FYI, I've tried to push IMVU in the past with little success. Definitely not saying it can't be done, but I never managed to make it work.
I've tried to push IMVU in the past with little success.
IMVU was one of the worst performing games I ever tested.
@caurmen @htgred It's funny you guys mention this, bc a buddy of mine who I met off STM said the same exact thing about IMVU. Also probably confirmed by the fact that I can't find much on it on SocialAdNinja. It's been a good way for me to learn the ropes so far though, and I have a few more ideas. We'll see...
Big issue I'm having now though is that I can't get my landing page conversions to get picked up: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ting-picked-up
Was curious why I was getting quite a few LP click-throughs but still 0 conversions... trying to figure out what wasn't set up correctly.
04/27/14
So my head-scratching and suspicions turned out to be right, apparently this offer signup page that I was directing all my traffic to wasn't communicating conversions to the network.
It' s been super-frustrating trying to figure it out for the past few days and adding to that, the fact that my AM on this network was never responding to my IMs or emails about this. Finally got fed up and shot a cold email to another AM on this network who I've heard great things about, he responded, finally switched over to being my AM on this nework, and has been a total rockstar in helping me out and giving me guidance. He was testing my landers and tracking out, everything was set up correctly, we finally realized that the offer LP I was using wasn't working and their tech guy couldn't figure it out either. He relayed me to a different offer LP that they've been getting conversions with, I tested it out and it works. The LP I was using was a link to the direct registration/signup page, saving visitors an extra click, and all these other LPs are to the offer LP which requires them to click through to a 2nd-page registration form... I don't like it at all, but guess I'll have to deal with it. Also will check out other networks to see if they have the same issue with this LP variation.
Total bummer... but I'm just glad we finally figured it out. Really sucks that I spend some $ testing these ads, still super-early, and this had to happen. But the big positives to come out of it is that this new AM is going to be great for me going forward, and it's a reminder to myself to check all of my offers for conversion tracking with a private browser/no cookies just to make sure.
- I'm going to re-test my 2 angles for IMVU with this working offer LP variation. Also got approved by my AM to run IMVU internationally with no age restriction (current offer I'm working on is 18+), I think that'll really help me sell this to teenagers/teeny-boppers. So that's going to be my next campaign/angle.
- Also recently got an idea to run something else on Facebook apart from IMVU, spending all day today hashing that out. May post about it later on if it goes anywhere.
- Another kickass post by Malan Darras this weekend, he also commented on it saying that posting a follow along here is a great way to learn the game and improve your skills: If I Started Over in Affiliate Marketing
- Yesterday, I got to meet a guy here who's netting 7-figures a year, a buddy of mine was hanging out with him around my area and we all grabbed beers for a bit, before I spent the rest of my weekend working. He's legit, has been at this for the past 6 years. I asked him how he got to where he is today and he said he was a loser for the past few years (socially, that is), completely focused on making it happen, grinding away and working non-stop... pretty inspirational hearing his story and seeing screenshots of his campaigns. Smart guy who earned his success in life.
Stick with Facebook, and test some new offers. Throw some stuff at the wall with unique angles and see what comes back with the highest ROI and grind on that for a bit
Thanks stackman - yeah, that's the plan. Got some hot offers in mind, working on it right now. Thanks for all of your past FB posts/threads - bookmarked a lot of them, they've been super-helpful.
Are you leveraging the Power Editor or a third party program? I started using AdEspresso but I am not sure how it stacks up, when compared with Qwaya.
We'll have some posts on third-party Facebook ad management tools soon - stay tuned.
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