Gaming on Facebook to $100/day (32)
Platform: FB Ads
Budget: $1500
Vertical: Gaming
Networks: Adsimilis, C2M, Peerfly
Tools: Prosper202, Social Ad Ninja
My goal for this follow-along is to make a steady $100/day profit on FB with gaming offers. I've never had a profitable campaign before and I hope to learn a lot from this.
Here is what I've done so far:
- Asked my AM's to recommend some gaming offers
- Done some competition research on Social Ad Ninja
- Screened for offer URL's with good/excellent ratings on mywot.com
- Selected 8 offers to test (US traffic):
- World of Tanks - $3.20
- Warframe - $1.50
- Total Domination - $2.40
- Stormfall - $2.40
- Elsword - $1.20
- Tera - $1.40
- Drakensang - $1.60
- Star Wars TOR - $1.20
- World of Tanks - $3.20
- Made 5-6 ad images for each offer
- Set up Prosper 202 with all my affiliate links
Next Steps:
I'm going to submit a few ads for each game to get a feel for which offers have potential. I'll target based on similar games to each title. My current FB account spend limit is $50/day so I'll see how much data I can get.
That's all for now. After I submit my ads i'll post them along with the reach, bids, etc. All questions/comments/feedback appreciated!
Looking forward to your results!
Don't forget to test a couple of angles for each offer. An offer may perform great with some angles and terrible with others.
Subscribed! Been trying to profit from games and Facebook myself the past 2 months. It's been difficult to do so. Are you testing out LP versus direct?
Subscribed and look forward to seeing how it goes.
Some preliminary offer comments:
- World of Tanks - $3.20 - Good luck, hasn't worked well for many and is quite 'exposed' already.
- Warframe - $1.50 - Good offer. Good game. It's definitely on my 'to hit' list.
- Total Domination - $2.40 - Ideally positioned for social, could do OK with the right angle/imagery/audience.
- Stormfall - $2.40 - Is social allowed? Double check. Plarium likes to run their social stuff internally.
- Elsword - $1.20 - Quite a low a payout for the US... and Elsword has a habit of not converting too well. There is a big audience to hit their though... fans of DDTank, battle arena games, rusty hearts, grand chase, and general arcade/anime-styled games.
- Tera - $1.40 - Great game and offer. Low payout though. Can get much higher elsewhere ($2.45 at iQU). Has a nice LP if it's the one I recall.
- Drakensang - $1.60 - Could do OK, needs the right angle. Doesn't have any unique appeal to MMO fans in my opinion...
- Star Wars TOR - $1.20 - Really low payout... ($2.10 at iQU....) I wouldn't bother with it at this payout. Huge audience of course but definitely target SW related games and not SW in general - 95% of SW fans probably couldn't care less for an MMO.
Update: Submitted ads for four games, half of them were not approved.
Hit my first bump in the road. FB is not approving any of my ads for Elsword or WarFrame. When I tried to upload them from the power editor I got the message:
I changed one of the tokens in my link (prosper202 tracking link) and then it let me upload them. However, they all got disapproved for the following reason:
All my ads for Total Domination and Stormfall got approved.
Here are the ads i've submitted so far, along with targeting/bid information:
I had that problem when I tried to run world of tanks. I didn't know to check the links with WOT and one of the hops was bad. I had to get a new domain to submit, changing a variable didn't seem to help me.
Caurmen: Thanks! Coming up with creative angles does not feel real intuitive to me. Will have to keep working on it. Practice makes perfect.
volkad: Currently I am direct linking. Once I zero in on an offer or two I will make some landers.
zeno: I plan on zeroing in on one or two of these offers so your feedback is greatly appreciated. Yesterday Tera stopped accepting US traffic on my network, so that offer is not currently available to me. I will apply to iQU today and see what they have. When I requested permission to run Stormfall I said I would be using FB Ads traffic and submitted some of my creatives and I got approved.
I would also recommend putting World of Tanks on the bottom of your to-do list. I never managed to get it working.
Good game, from what I hear, but it seems to be hard to push.
None of the new ads I create are being accepted. I think they've black-listed my tracking domain.
I have registered a new domain, ubergame.club, and I'm waiting on the nameservers to propagate. Once that's done I'll set up some redirects and submit more ads. Maybe using a cleaner looking URL will help.
In the meantime, my ads for Stormfall and Total Domination go live soon and i've submitted an application to iQU. Will update this tomorrow with my progress.
Originally Posted by hustlerado
These games are all fine to run.
Read my FB guide in my sig, specifically the part about geo-redirection and avoid submitting anything until you've got that fully under control.
Thanks Zeno. I do have your guide but I'll re-read that section more carefully. It didn't occur to me that geo-redirection could be the issue. Will get this fixed pronto.
My current objectives are:
- Get the geo-redirection issue fixed so everyone clicking my links is being sent to the correct page.
- Re-submit my Elsword/Warframe ads
- Create ads for SW:TOR, Drakensang and Tera (If I get approved at iQU)
I read the Zenos FB Guide section about geo-redirection and now understand why it is important. I got one of my networks to change the geo-redirects on my offers (not sure if that's working properly or not...) and I also set up geo-redirection on my end from within Prosper 202. I checked my links from a few proxies and traffic from non-approved countries is being sent to FB-compliant pages now.
I did run ads for Total Domination and Stormfall yesterday. My budgets were not very high ($6/ad and $5/ad) but I've got some data to look at...
For Stormfall I had 80,454 impressions, 37 clicks (.046% CTR), 4 conversions (10.8% CR)
For Total Domination I had 89,203 impressions, 34 clicks (.038% CTR), 3 conversions (8.8% CR)
One more thing is that Prosper is not telling me when i get a conversion. I must not have set up my tracking pixel correctly so I'm going to fix that. I can still figure out which ads got the conversions so it's not a huge issue.
Screenshots of all stats here:
Cake Stats:
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FB Stats 1:
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FB Stats 2
Hmm, looks promising! Was this with or without landing pages?
Update: Ads approved for four games. Working on ads for 3 more.
caurmen: No landing page yet. Once I zero in on an offer or two I'll start testing landers.
I got my ads for Elsword and Warframe approved so i'll run traffic to them the rest of today and tomorrow. I also got accepted into iQU and the payouts for Tera and SW:TOR are higher than I was getting. I'm currently working on ads for both of those games plus Drakensang. Once I get a few days worth of clicks to those offers i'll make a decision on which game(s) i'm going to move forward with.
I have a couple questions:
- Should I continue sending traffic over this upcoming holiday (in the US) weekend? Or should I pause it for the weekend and wait until Tuesday to re-start it?
- What CR should I be shooting for?
Thanks for all your help so far guys.
Is there any reason to stop?
There is no ideal conversion rate goal, it entirely depends on the offer payout vs traffic costs.
However, in this case I'd say you want >15% banner-to-offer to do well - ad CTR and the resulting CPCs will likely be your biggest challenge.
Definitely keep running traffic. Holidays = free time = people downloading games 
If you were running without landers, then I'd say both games have promise for you - keep on testing!
Well it looks like Elsword and WarFrame are duds. I've sent 53 and 63 clicks to the offer page, no conversions.
On the plus side, Stormfall is showing promise. My ad ctr is not good so my clicks are expensive, but if I increase that I believe I can be profitable.
- Stormfall: 102 clicks, 16 conversions, $38.40 rev, $65.65 ad spend, -41.5% ROI.
- Total Domination: 106 clicks, 6 conversions, $14.40 rev, $61.06 ad spend , -76% ROI.
- Elsword: 53 clicks, 0 conversions, $35.89 ad spend, -100% ROI.
- Warframe: 63 clicks, 0 conversions, $32.60 ad spend, -100% ROI.
Stormfall is a solid offer with a lot of room for scale.
Focus on making that work.
Well my primary FB account just got banned out of the blue. I had not run traffic the past 2 days as I was busy and not able to check on campaigns. Today I logged on and all my ads were disapproved and my account is flagged for "unusual activity" - so i'm dealing with that. Hope to be back up and running soon.
I'm very frustrated about getting my account flagged. I checked and all of my geo-redirects were working. If a person from the US clicked the ad it took them to the game offer. If someone from another country clicked the ad it took them to a wikia site for the game i was advertising. I checked from multiple proxies and my redirects were working as they were suppose to.
So now i'm debating if I should switch my traffic source or keep trying to make FB work. I really want to keep running with FB so I'm going to re-read Zenos guide and read up on everything I can do to not get my account flagged again. I already know I wont be using the same domain, so I'll have to register a new one of those.
Did you fill the form and send it to Facebook? I tried it and Facebook reactivated my account
rongtuchien - I did fill out that form and send it to FB. I received a nice but generic letter telling me my ad account would not be re-enabled.
I'm not actually sure if any of my ads triggered this or if it had something to do with my credit card. I received a billing statement from FB, then an email from paypal that my credit card had been charged, and then immediately after my account got flagged and all my ads were retro-disapproved, including ads that had been approved within minutes of being submitted and never having any issues.
I'm going to try again on FB but if my account gets flagged again I may move on to a different traffic source.
Oh man, sorry to hear that!
Don't use Paypal with FB, I guess they don't like it as a first payment option, it raises a flag.
I had my personal fb account flagged and I guess it was because of the CC zip code or for trying Paypal.
What I will do know is.. I will re-enter payment method with new CC and I will just play some games and pay for virtual goods, so they know the payment method is legit.
But this won't guaranteed they reactivate my Ads account. *sigh
Originally Posted by hustlerado
All traffic should ultimately land on the offer page.
It could have been PayPal - did your account details in PayPal match your CC billing info and that in Facebook?
Originally Posted by hustlerado
Did you include a valid black and white ID?
Originally Posted by hustlerado
zeno: I had my redirects set up so that if the click came from an IP address in a country that the offer was not approved for it would send them to a wikia site. I did this because the offer page itself was geo-redirecting and my affiliate network could not turn it off. So when a FB reviewer in another country clicked my ad it would send them to an unrelated page that was not about gaming. I couldn't get my own geo-redirects to send people outside the US to the correct offer page (maybe I did something wrong?) As for your other question - the paypal info is current and all the information matched what I told FB. My real name, my current address, etc.
cosmeivan: I had heard that FB didn't like paypal, i'm not sure why I used that method of payment instead of just using my CC..
rongtuchien: I emailed them twice, the second reply they sent me said "please consider this decision final".
de_sean: Yes, I included a color copy of my drivers license with the license # and my street address blacked out
I have decided I'm going to proceed and make FB work. I have a good amount of work to do before I can run on FB again, but I will get there.
My current to-do list:
- Get new nameservers
- Get a new domain for landers/redirects/etc.
- Get a PO Box
- Get a new credit card
Well, sucks to be in this situation so early! So the advertiser lander was geo-redirecting? Can you provide a link to the offer lander? This is unusual but can happen and if it does, indeed advertisers are often stubborn about changing anything for an affiliate/network.
The rest of your plan is reasonable. For new nameservers, just use a DNS service like that provided by Rackspace, Route 53 by Amazon, etc. Their nameservers are never going to cause any blacklisting issues.
zeno: Thanks man. Yeah, it does suck. It sucks most because I'm a perpetual tire-kicker and over analyzer. I had finally gained some momentum and was taking action and I got shut down right out of the gate. But, I am going to persist and continue on. I'm glad I started this follow-along, it is motivating me to keep working. And I've already met numerous cool individuals through this forum.
Thanks for the tip about the name servers too, I did not know that. Will definitely do that.
When I do get back on FB my plan is to represent myself in more of a "BIG BRAND" type of way. I'll use an email address from my gaming domain instead of a gmail, take the time to interact on FB with other people and pages and add some friends as well. And ensure that there is NOTHING linking me to my old account and all my ads are squeaky clean.
How are things looking nowadays? Haven't seen any updates from you in a few weeks?
I'm stalling. I've got a new CC, a new phone # and a new domain. I need to set up my new nameservers via Rackspace/Route 53 as per Zeno's suggestion, create my new FB account and start grinding again.
No excuses. I'm simply being a pussy.
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