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$3,500 Budget With Facebook And Gaming - See If I Can "Make It" (40)

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Sup STMers,

It's been a while since I first joined and guess it's my turn now for a new following along thread

Although I'm not new to the game of affiliate marketing (have done SEO and Amazon niche sites for 2+ years), I consider myself a total newbie to the world of CPA and paid traffic.

Recently, my sites tanked due to some Google's algo updates and Amazon decided to close my account with most of my money inside. I'm now left with a budget of around $3,500 that I'm ready to blow up with Facebook ads and gaming offers. It's not a lot but it for sure can fuel my campaigns for quite some time.

The reason why I chose gaming offers is because gaming has always been one of my biggest passions (alongside making money lol) since I was 3. And although I haven't played much recently due to time priorities for life, work, and this biz, I think I still can leverage this passion of mine to make some money out of it.

For the traffic source, to be honest, I spent almost 1 week deciding between mobile and Facebook. And in the end, I chose Facebook as it's more familiar to me as I've run some local FB ad campaigns before thus reduce the learning time significantly. Although I know FB is much like GG in terms of not giving a damn to the small guys, I will commit to it from now on.

OK, enough with the background information, here are the things that I've in place ready for my first gaming campaign with FB:

- My very first VPS: Beyond Hosting starter plan. Good and smooth!

- A good offer: At least according to the stats I have inside Peerfly, it looks like this particular one is doing a good job. After reading other threads, I realize the importance of picking a good offer to promote first to increase my chance of winning. Not sure if this one could help though, we'll see This offer has a payout of $1.1 just fyi.

- A basic landing page for PC traffic: Not something to be proud of but I think it could do the job to some extents. I used Muse to craft it out after seeing Zeno's tutorial. For mobile traffic, I'm trying to create a separate lander for that offer also with Muse. Not sure if it would work. If you guys have any other recommendations for creating basic landers for mobile traffic, please do suggest. I'm not a coder so the more noobie-friendly it is, the better lol.

- Tracking set up with Voluum: I'm using their Noobie plan so no custom domain track. Not sure if it's optimal but if the basic plan can do the job, I can save that $100/mo to reinvest back to my campaigns. I've test-run the tracking path and it worked as intended.

- Angles to split test: I brainstormed 10 different angles to promote this offer. Some are more commonsense, some sounds unusual. But I will try them all. Start with the first one of the more commonsense angles though.

- Images for the chosen angle: I gathered 10 different images to run with this first angle. Pumped them up with Paint.net and sent them to my AM for approval check. Hope they approve them all. I'm still waiting for his reply.

- Campaign set up & optimization strategy: These ones are the aspects I'm still puzzling. After reading Zeno's guide on Facebook, I can see his approach is a bit different to the one I used for my previous ad campaigns. He uses CPC bidding model while I rely 100% on oCPM. The reason is because I don't know how the FB bidding system works so I stuck with the "auto" mode. However, I agree with Zeno 100% on splitting ad images into separate ad sets and have for them their own budgets. I used to stack 6 images into 1 ad set and then let the oCPM algo decide which images I should keep and which ones to cut off. This time, I will do it differently. Here goes:

For each angle, choose one type of placement: PC, mobile, or RHS (right hand side), then collect 10 different images to create 10 different ad sets all targeting the same demo. Ad headline and copy will stay the same as well. And after that, I will let them all run up to 5,000 impressions (as Caurmen suggested in his guide on cutting ads). If any of them has less than 0.3% in CTR, I will cut them off, then replace them with other images similar to the best performers of the batch.

I will split test ad headers/copies, landers and offers as well but that comes after ad image split testing I guess? And if all the optimization works don't lead to an acceptable positive ROI, I might consider split test another angle.

That's a very basic draft out of my optimization process and tbh, I'm still visualizing it in my mind and reading other guides for more ideas. Feel free to add and critique my process as I'm still new and I'm very open to suggestions.

- Mindset: Alright, the last but definitely not least prerequisite. I won't say that I have everything sorted out in my mind before coming into this game. I still have doubts and confusions lying around. Many of them. But I'm fully aware about the fact that I will lose money first in order to make money later. Hell, I might even lose all these $3,500 and still not making shite. But I will try my best to not giving up! Because I know the game will be over if I throw in the towel. Guess after 3 years of playing with Google's random brain farts (i.e: algo updates), I'm now totally normal with losing a bit here and there

That being said, my goal now is to spend my budget as "wise" as possible so that I can learn and grow as much as possible. Let's do a simple math. Since my offer's payout is low, say I will spend around $50 for each campaign to test and gather data, that would lead to 70 campaigns in total before my budget dry up. So hopefully, I can find at least 1 winning campaign among those 70.

This is my first time doing a follow along, so please let me know what should I do/write/include/update in my thread so that everyone can take something out of it. Any critique/advice/suggestion are welcome!

Will update my thread everyday with as much detail as possible.

Wish me luck guys.

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Gaming on Facebook has definitely good potential for a big pay day. The best thing about is you don't need bother with all that cloaking crap.

Great idea to follow Zeno's guides too, he has mastered gaming on Facebook

Looking forward to following this one!

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Interested in this thread

BTW looks like Facebook is the only traffic source for successful games downloads & installs (both web & mobile), do you agree ?

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You can do some damage with Adwords too!

I'm sure there are quite a few others that aren't talked about.

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Games on Facebook are still hot if you can manage to pull high CTRs.

Zeno's guide will give you a good start, after that it's a matter of testing and not giving up.

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Thanks guys for your support

I've just received the reply from my AM, turns out it's true that I can't use images from other related games to promote this offer. So back to the image searching phase.

This time I will register the game and play around with it myself as Zeno suggested. After finish scraping another 10 images, I will set this campaign live on Facebook.

More coming.

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I have one question about brand/copyright when advertising.

Can I mention the name of other games/products in the ad headline and ad copy when setting up my campaigns? I guess it might be troublesome but just want to hear your opinions on this If there are other related sources regarding this topic, please point me to them.

Thanks guys.

P.S: I just registered and have been playing around with the game a bit. It looks good I must say. Have screenshoted some images as well.

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I'm thinking you should include newsfeed ads in your testing phase since newsfeed has proven to be better than RHS in many occasions.

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Yep buddy, I will split test all 3 placements: Desktop newsfeed, mobile newsfeed, and RHS I will run with desktop nf and RHS first since I already have a lander for PC traffic. I'm still trying to build another lander for mobile with Muse. Do you have any recommendations on building mobile lander?

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What country is the offer in? I would be cautious if it's US, $1.10 payout is simply prohibitive given the ad pricing on Facebook.

A few points:

1. You should start using Photoshop - you need to focus on images on Facebook as they have the largest effect on CTR at least, and Photoshop can unlock the guru within. You can get a trial free for 30 days so there is no excuse.

2. CPC and oCPM both have their place. When testing a new offer I'd recommend CPC first simply because you pay for data that also had potential to provide offer conversion data. If the ad sucks and you pay a high CPC you might still get some conversion data. If in a CPM bidding mode you can burn through your funds and not have any backend conversion data, which puts you on the back foot.

3. Avoid using other games images. Easy to get burned by this on FB and it's not likely to get through creative approval anyway. As for game names, these are trademarked so it's the same deal. Less likely to cause a fuss especially if you use acronyms like LOL (rather than LoL for example) but you should really try to be creative and attack audiences without infringing on IP.

4. I'd recommend doing News Feed ads only, ditch the RHS ads. Focus on the best placement stream first. Here, set a CTR benchmark of more like 1-2%. You won't need 5,000 impressions. Just base it on spend or clicks if bidding CPC. If you do bid oCPM, 5,000 impressions could cost you $50. Not a sensible culling point for a $1.10 offer (again, if US, $1.10 is going to make things difficult).

5. Split test images and landers first. Then headlines. For gaming there's no reason to split test offers - rather you can split test offer landing page or the same offer across multiple networks. Remember to also test direct linking to the offer page(s) as well.

6. Do an initial test such as: 4 campaigns - M/F 18-21 and 22-25 with angle A. In each campaign make 3 ad sets with an ad in each and set the budget to $5. That $60 should get you ~100+ clicks to the offer (depending on lander). If you get no conversions, it's probably not going to work out unless you come up with a killer angle and/or targeting. Run small compartmentalised tests like this for gaming offers to gauge potential. If you send gamers to an appealing gaming offer, someone will convert.

What's the game offer anyway?

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Thanks Zeno! Killer advices as always

For the product, without having to expose things too much, here are the stats for that particular offer that I chose:

Payout: $1.1
EPC: $0.16
CR: 13.31%
Countries allowed: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden
Conversion point: SOI

I'm a bit confused with this comment. Does it mean when I choose CPC model and place a bid, FB will automatically deliver my ads to the people who are more likely to convert on the offer? If that's the case then I'm not sure how FB even knows that as all the conversions happen outside of FB? Anyway, I will go with CPC as you suggested for the initial tests.

I read somewhere in your guides when you replied to other STMer that you're now mostly using oCPM, is that correct?

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When you bid CPC you pay for clicks. This does include social actions that make up a % of your interactions. However, say your ad sucks and pulls 0.1% CTR in the news feed. Even in this case, if you spend $5, you'd probably get 10+ clicks to the offer.

You now have a pathetic advert that at least got you some offer performance data - even if it's 10 for zip.

Take the same example but bid oCPM.

You pay a $10 CPM. You spend $5 and get 500 impressions and at a 0.1% CTR you don't get any clicks.

You just burnt $5 and have nothing to show for it and no clicks to the offer.

Ergo, all else being equal, CPC is a safer bidding mode when first testing an offer/campaign.



I use both oCPM and CPC for the reasons outlined above.

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I see now I'm setting up my campaigns now. Will update you guys when they're live. Cheers!

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Update time:

It's 0:32 A.M on my end and my first ever CPA gaming campaign is officially live. I don't know about you guys but for me that's a really big achievement when just a week ago, I was still confused as hell about all the picking traffic source, tracking, image tweaking and other stuff

Here is my set up for this offer:

- 2 main campaigns targeting the US and UK audiences using my first angle
- Within each campaign, I split it down to 2 main age groups: 18-24 and 25-34 (as what I saw from the audience insights report)
- With each age group, I basically set up 5 ad sets with 5 different corresponding images, each ad set has a lifetime budget of $5 spread over 2 days
- All the targeted interests, ad headline, and ad copy are the same

That results in 20 different ad sets that I'm current running for this offer. And when I'm done testing this first batch, it will cost me 2 days and my first $100. Can't wait to see the data coming in!

One weird thing I want to ask you guys though, it's about the data I have inside my tracker Voluum.



It's weird that even when my campaigns haven't had any impressions yet, Voluum already shown some data here? Not sure if it's because the ad reviewers over FB clicked on the links to check stuff out or not? I used Power Editor to create all these. Not sure if that would cause a problem like this?

I imagine it would screw things up badly later on when I try to optimize my campaigns. Any ideas guys?

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It's Facebook's automatic link/destination checking.

Check the ISP/Carrier tab and they will all be from Amazon Technologies, Digital Ocean, Amazon.com and Facebook.

Be sure that during approval all clicks go to the clean offer page and don't touch an affiliate URL.



After ads are approved I would recommend doing the following:

1. Set default path to a passthrough offer (offer page URL directly)

2. Set up a new rule that sends all users with ISP = any of the aforementioned ones direct to this passthrough offer as well.

3. Add a 2nd rule that sends users from the offer allowed countries to the affiliate link.



This way, someone has to be from the correct country and NOT be from a FB ISP in order to get to the affiliate URL. All other clicks default to the passthrough.

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Awesome. I'm excited to read your follow-along!

Why did Amazon close your account? What did you do? lol.
Was this from wolfmmiii's strategy?

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Hi Zeno,

That makes sense. And after reviewing the ISP/Carrier tab inside Voluum, here are the things I have:

US:



UK:



I can see things are like you said with the US campaign, but the UK has some weird names - that Linode with 50 visits and DediPower with 20 visits lol. Not sure if it's because the campaign targeted at UK audiences so FB used another network to auto check the links out?

One thing I want to ask is about the shortened links I placed inside the post text. I used bitly.com to shorten the campaign URL and put it in the post text so the users can click on that link rather than having to click on the image. Something like this:

"...blah blah blah. Come check it out: http://bit.ly/XXXXXX..."

And after checking the stats inside bitly, I found out that some users did click through those shortened links (even more often than clicking on the image link). Might be the reason why the stats inside Voluum is a bit higher than the clicks FB reported for me.

So, I just want to ask if this practice is something of productive since it's actually driving clicks or it's counter-productive since it distorts the CTW reporting function of FB?

I think I just blew something up here.

I used the campaign links that link directly to my lander during the reviewing phase. They got passed with no problem. But I can see why it was wrong here since it resulted in unwanted visits I have inside Voluum at first.

I'm rereading your guide on setting up tracking with Voluum. I passed that part earlier. Will report back if I have any other questions.

Thanks man!

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Nothing related to him buddy.

My account got closed due to some violations with their linking policies. Something like "click here to get 30% and free shipping" while the actual product only has 25% in discount (since Amazon price and promo changes all the time). If you're still doing Amazon, I suggest you go back and check the way you word your links. That's my $12k lesson

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^^This. Not to mention it's a classic quality killer, so all your work will be for a few short days traffic before getting kicked off the campaign. If the gaming experience is too different than what the user was sold on and they never transition from play to pay, you'll be optimized off within a week. Good Luck!

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Facebook's reviewing process and servers used will vary with country.

As for the shortened links, I've actually never tried that for games.

You should split test it. I'm not actually sure if you get charged for inline link clicks - probably not, so if it did increase clicks it would be nice. However it will probably just pull CTR away from your image, which isn't going to help with performance on CPC and would be detrimental if running oCPM. Who knows though, if 50% users clicked the inline link instead of the main ad, and you weren't charged for this, then it might be cost effective.

As I said, split test it.

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Update:

It's 0:00 A.M here on my end, and here are the updates I have for my campaigns.

We have both good news and bad news.

Good news:

I've made my first $9.9 in my entire CPA career My AM must be proud of me lol!





The feeling is exactly like when I made my first $17 with Amazon back to the day. I was like: WTF! What is this? Did I "make it"?

And the conversion rate for my clicks are currently at 50% and the EPC is $0.55. Not sure if it's something unusual but I think the CR is pretty high. I didn't expect this CR at all when I started. However, I also see that the numbers might not be enough to come to any conclusion here. We will see later on.



Bad news:

I thought I screwed something up either with Voluum or with the trackback URL inside Peerfly for this offer as I couldn't see any conversions inside Voluum despite the fact that the money is here already.



I've managed to drive a total of 119 clicks today to my lander. And out of those 119 clicks, 21 did click through to the offer page thus making the lander I had initially for this test having an average CTR of 17.65% atm. Is it acceptable or I'm lagging behind the average CTR for a lander? Anyway, will try to push that number even more by split-testing the landers down the road.

Now for the 2 campaigns I have on Facebook for this offer, here are the stats at the end of the day:

Overall:



Total spend: $70.84

Total number of website clicks: 77

US campaign:



UK campaign:



As we can see here, the CPC's for both of my campaigns are ~$1 each. Pretty high. But as mentioned in my previous post, I did use some shortened links inside my post text and people did click through those links to come to my lander as well, so the total number of clicks are higher than what FB have for me. And since Voluum did track all the visits (119 for today), I think I should calculate the average CPC for these 2 campaigns as follow:

CPC = 70.84 / 119 ~ $0.6

Still higher than my EPC so no profits for today.

Summary:

Day 1 (24/10/2014):

Revenue: $9.9
Cost: $70.84
Profits: -$60.94

I will let these first 2 campaigns finish by the end of today and then draw out some insights before deciding on what to optimize or moving up to the next tests. Yesterday, I intended to make a new lander for mobile to test out mobile placement but ended up reading too much about the Facebook ad bidding system. Will have some questions to discuss with you guys for sure.

Time to sleep.

Peace

Bonus: Just for the lol's

Here are some comments left on my newsfeed ads. Can you guess which angle I'm using here?

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Are you split-testing with some ads w/o the bit.ly link?

It's quite an important difference to test - for all you know the conversion rate via the bit.ly link may be half what it is if someone goes via the image.

Anyway, <20% is quite low for a gaming lander on FB.

Perhaps reveal a screenshot and get feedback?

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Thanks Zeno for your suggestions.

Actually, I'm on my way to launch a new campaign targeting the same audience but this time will test out RHS ads with oCPM as that combo was my first intention to test.

Sending you a pm regarding my landing page

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Zeno,

There is one thing I'm still not figuring out with Voluum is how can we get rid of the unwanted visits that Voluum tracks during the approval phase from FB like what I described in my previous post?

I mean all the visits from Facebook, Websense, Digital Ocean etc. How can we get rid of them inside Voluum as I think it will affect the reporting considerably.

I followed your guide on setting up campaign with Voluum. And when I tested my campaign URL, it looks like Voluum still records the visits even when the enabled paths are sending visits to the official page not my lander.

Thanks

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They only have a prominent effect during approval.

Easiest way is to upload ads in bulk a day before you run them.

Voluum doesn't yet let you reset campaign stats or remove any.

You can however just drilldown by offer > something > something else and just look at the clicks you have sent to your live affiliate link.

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hi guys

sorry for asking dumb questions
but where can i see Zeno's tutorial?

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It's in his signature buddy.

Anyway, my first campaign ended yesterday without spending the whole budget. Only $70 out of $100 was spent. I'm on my way looking at the data to make some senses out of them. I think with this first run, I screwed things up all over the places. Talk about the bit.ly links, misfigured Voluum a bit, etc.

However, I do take the positives out of this since I've made my first $9.9 with CPA and knew for a fact that all initial used images bombed except one.

But I'm still puzzling with this "bidding" thing. Tbh, during my last test run, I adjusted the bidding CPC up and down all the time. When I didn't see impressions coming in, I kicked the bidding CPC up (as high as $2.5), but when I saw the actual cost per website click went high, I lowered my bid (to the final point of $1.01). That resulted in a fluctuated set of CPC all over the place (with something like $4/site click in one ad set lmao).

I'm back to the drawing board again to come up with my own testing process. But will set up a new campaign today to keep the data coming in no matter what.

There is one thing I want to ask you guys though, it's about how we create ad sets in Facebook. Say I want to test 10 images using the same angle and targeting the same audience. I can see the logic that we need 10 separate ad sets with dedicated budget for each to test each image out. But that comes the question of whether or not I'm competing with myself since all those ads are practically targeting the same set of people?

Am I looking at it the right way or there is something more about it?

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No time to read all the texts.. so not sure if anyone mentioned it or not.. look into qwaya to make your life easier.

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You should avoid playing with the CPC bid much when campaigns have just started. You will mess with ad performance.

Whatever your bid is (e.g. $0.67), wait a few hours for traffic before upping bids - if it's too low you won't know immediately as the traffic doesn't start instantly.

$1.01 is a very high bid for gaming - much higher than I would bid for US traffic. What CPCs were you actually getting and what % of your clicks were website clicks? The cost per website click is obviously going to be very high if a large % of your clicks are likes/social actions, at which point oCPM may be more practical for those specific ads.

As for the ad set splitting, don't worry about competing against yourself. In terms of bidding, you will have negligible effect on the auctioning i.e. will not raise prices. FB ads in the news feed are frequency and delivery capped at the brand/page level and to the best of my knowledge running multiple ads through the same page does not result in elevation of CPMs/CPCs. Even if it did, it's certainly not going to matter at small spends.

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Hey,

I had success with affiliate campaigns on Facebook (almost X,XXX$ per day ) and I had some questions when you started the campaign.

I think there are offers that are SOI with like 2.5$ per conversion and almost the same CR in the LP. why not to choose them over the 1.1$ campaign?

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Hi Zeno,

Here are the stats for my first 2 campaigns:

US campaign:

Website clicks: 43
Cost per website click: $0.87
Conversions: 7
Revenue: $7.7
Spend: $37.5
Profits: -$29.8



UK campaign:

Website clicks: 36
Cost per website click: $0.93
Conversions: 2
Revenue: $2.2
Spend: $33.37
Profits: -$31.17



So it looks like things went exactly like I expected lol. Deep in the red.

With these first 2, I did wait for around one day for the impressions to come in. And just when I thought I need to up the bid for more impressions that I messed up with my bidding.

There is one thing I'm trying to figure out here. It's about when to cut an underperforming ad.

When looking back at these ones, it looks like I'm cutting ads way too soon as none of them even reached 1,200 impressions like Caurmen suggested in his ad cutting guideline. But at the same time, I see other respected STMers also suggest to cut ads at around 2X the payout. So in this case of $1.1 payout, it looks like I've done the right thing? What's your take on this Zeno?

My thought is I need to also look at the conversion rate for each ad (i.e: which ad actually brought me money), but up to today, I'm still not able to set up the postback inside Peerfly so that they can ping Voluum when there are conversions. I shot an email to my AM yesterday asking this question. Still waiting though.

Another thing I want to ask is about the initial campaign setup inside Voluum. I followed your guideline and came up with 3 rules like your set up:

Default path: direct linking to the global offer passthrough link (in this case, the offer's official homepage)
All allowed countries: go to my lander
Facebook/Websense/Digital Ocean ISP: direct linking to the global offer passthrough link

After the ad approval phase, I turned off the 3rd rule and let the other 2 running. And looks like we can't turn off the default path, right? But here is when I thought I messed something up.

I left the default path's weight "100" and the allowed countries rule's weight at "100" as well. My thought was that if the visit originated from the US for example, it will go through rule #2 that leads to my lander. But when I looked back, I can see that visits from the US also fall into the "global" category thus making it possible for those visits to land on the offer's official homepage (not my lander or my affiliate link). And that means even when they did sign up, I won't get credited for those conversions.

I'm asking this because I'm seeing a much lower CTR on my lander compared to the first 2 campaigns. The lander is still the same.

I can see the purpose of this setup is to pass the approval phase as smooth as possible. And I'm not quite sure if my hypothesis is true. But if it is, then it looks like I'm unconsciously setting up a throw-away split test lol.

I've downed the default path's weight to "0" now. Will see if things get better.

Anyway, I set up a new campaign yesterday and it has made me $1.1 so far with $28.87 in Will update when the campaign finishes its run.

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Hi vitamin_p,

not sure what network you're referring to as I'm using Peerfly and only browse their gaming offer section since it's the area that I want to dive all. But yeah, I'm sure there are many other great offers to try out. I just gathered some gaming offers they have and this one seemed to have the most checkmarks.

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try Matomy adsmarket, or affiliaxe - they have offer of SOI and DOI with an higher payout - I think also neverblue.

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I would check out IQU, Gamespipe, Secco Squared and Glispa as some solid sources for gaming offers.

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Hey Fanatic4K! I'm a newbie too, just starting out, but I think at least I can help with the postback issue. Log into volum and click on settings (the engine wheel thingy). Click on the Setup tab. Scroll down and you'll see a field called " Secure postback URL". Copy that url into a text editor, since you'll have to play with it a little bit. When you set up your peerfly offer link in Voluum, it should have looked somewhat like this: http://trkur.com/#pubidnumber#/#offeridnumber#?s1={clickid}&s2=...&s3=... right? Now, you should edit that postback url so the last bit (after trackvoluum.com/) reads like this: postback?cid=%subid1%&payout=%commission%. Log into peerfly, search for the offer you are promoting, and once in the offer page you should see, next to the offer title, a green rectangle that says "Tools". Click on it and choose Setup postback from the dropdown menu. Enter your customized postback url in the blank field, click on submit, and voila!! That should make the trick. This way, everytime someone clicks on your link, a unique user id (called clickid) is generated and stored as sub id 1. Voluum passes this sub id to peerfly, and if the user turns out fill the offer, peerfly sends back this unique identifier to voluum, so voluum can pinpoint who converted (and trace back the banner/landing page that person went through). That's why it reads postback?cid=%subid1.

On a different subject, sorry to read what happened to your sites and your amazon account. Do your sites still receive some traffic? I've read good stuff about Zazzle's affiliate program, although I haven't used them myself. 15% commissions and less draconian rules. So maybe you could use them to monetize the remnant traffic from your sites, or you could sell your sites to someone with an amazon account and enlarge your budget for testing campaigns... anyway I hope you reach success pretty soon mate! Keep up the good work!

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Thanks guys for your help and suggestions

I had a chat with an AM from Peerfly yesterday. And it turned out that I mistyped my offer URL inside Voluum. In stead of "?s1=", I typed it "&s1=". I fixed it and everything is fine now.

Update:

My 3rd test campaign just stopped and here are the results so far:

Revenue: $1.1
Cost: $41.94
Profits: -$40.84

With this 3rd campaign, I used RHS ads solely with optimized bidding for clicks (the one that FB recommended). And looks like the overall cost per website click does lowered a bit ~$0.8/website click. But looks like it didn't make any considerable improvement in ad performance. But that's ok as I did expect things to be like this



I've set up the next test campaign with the 3 ads that had the highest CTR (0.17%+) from the above ad sets and let them run with CPM this time. This is from reading a guide of Mr.Green back to around 2011 on his blog. Sounds a bit too outdated but the logic seems to hold true. So I test it out anyway. Set up 3 new ad sets for the 3 highest CTR ads with $5 on each. Will report back how these things go.

I'm now thinking whether the payout of the offer I chose might be too low? Or it's just because I've targeted mostly the US market so that it's hard to make a decent ROI?

Also, if possible, I want to ask you guys for your "acceptable" ad CTR range on FB that is used to work for you guys. I know it's too broad of a question and it depends on many things. But just want to use the information to develop my own benchmark

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Yeah buddy, it's still getting around 10,000 visits a month. And actually, I've set up a new Amazon account and put my links on my site. Will see if Amazon recognize me and use the ban hammer again. If not, then that could net me an extra $300-$400/mo in profits. And when my CPA campaigns need capital, I will try to sell it. Thanks for your recommendation!

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Seems like this offer isn't converting for you, move on.

The RHS will likely perform like crappy - especially on CPM. 2011 is a long time ago, FB has been very different for years.

Disregard the 1200 impression benchmark you saw - that is NOT for Facebook. Different traffic source, different rules. Never forget.

On Facebook 1200 news feed impressions might cost $10. On PoF they might cost $0.50. Spend vs payout is a much better benchmark metric to use.

In this case, I would suggest aiming for news feed CTRs of 2%+ and culling ads with CPCs >$0.50 and spends higher than $4 with no conversions. You will need to burn through ads quickly to get testing done. At $1.1 payout you will need to be ruthless and frankly, given your CPCs, it just isn't going to work.

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Hey Zeno. I just joined 2 days ago and I am blown away by the quality of info on STM... not to mention your posts. Qui to te possibly the most useful I've found on AM.

Question... i know im supposed to be AB testing this but when you said When testing a new offer I'd recommend CPC are you referring to click to website or clicks?

And what's the logic / thought process for that reasoning?

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He just gave you the reasoning in that same exact post and CPC was referring to how you pay for traffic. (paying per click instead of per thousand impressions)

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