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My first try at facebook ads with gaming (19)

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Hi,
First post on here. Have been reading a lot. It is quiet a bit to take all this in all at once. So here is what I am wanting to try first and see if I can join the affiliate marketing success stories.


Platform: FB Ads
Budget: $1500 / Month
Vertical: Gaming
Networks: PKM, IQU
Tools: Prosper202, Custom
Here is what we have done so far.

1. MyWot
   
   • Our Tracking domain / landing page is Grey
   • IQU is a warning (is this okay)
   • Game page is green
   
   
2. Offer picked is Tera
3. Made 4 different landing pages
4. Made 10 1200x627 ads
5. Looking to put in news feeds
6. Tools we have prosper 202 installed or custom.

I have read a few different posts / guides about using Facebook and I am still unsure if I am picking the right ad type. I have seen news feeds ads should be good to try.

I have custom coded the landing page to take any geo location not allowed directly to the offer without any tracking.

So I have 3 different tracking/reporting systems. In my case it starts with

1. Facebook – for impressions, clicks and costs reports
2. My end (custom or prosper) – lands, button clicks and pixel/conversion tracking
3. My network – clicks and conversions

I am considering custom because I am a programmer who has some knowledge with affiliate tracking. Is it worth custom coding something or should I just use a system like prosper202?

Landing Page
So this is just an image, minimal HTML and no content. It is a centered graphic with a button image mapped out to the offer and some text in the image.


If I was to do customize the tracking… I would

1. Grab the offerID, adID, IP, geo, sessionID, timestamp on land
2. Track a click on the button press with offerID, adID, IP, geo, sessionID, timestamp on click
3. Create Pixel page to track the offerID, adID, IP, geo, sessionID, timestamp on pixel load. I could also load Facebooks pixel here too.

FB Setup
Our campaign name: US Tera
Our ad set: Gender | Age | AdLocation (changes with ages and gender)
Our Ads: Image00, Image01… Image09 (10 ads)


So my questions I have.

1. Are we setting up our ads the right way?
2. Should we use prosper202 instead of a custom tracking?
3. Did we read right? Use Newsfeed ads? Not side bar ads.
4. Should we just make the 1200x627 and let Facebook size down?
5. Is my landing page okay with no real content?
6. Is the IQU offer being a warning with MyWot an issue?
7. Am I asking too many questions?... Should I just start and test... test... test?

Thanks for looking.

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A. Don't worry about iQU's link on MyWoT (I presume mmotraffic.com). Why it's red-rated I don't know, but worry about the destination page not the redirect hops in the middle.

B. Use page link posts in the news feed.

C. Don't pursue custom coding a tracker. It will be a very poor use of your time that offers little in the way of value. No point trying to reinvent the wheel when there are several wheels out there (P202/Thrive/Voluum) that are likely better than anything you could build in less than 6-months even as an experienced marketer.

D. I wouldn't recommend this type of lander. Use a background that scales with page size and then use real text and a CSS-styled button. It will look better - a lot better.

1. Not sure - you haven't really detailed ad setup much other than gender/age splitting, which is definitely needed. Make sure different ads are in their own ad sets.

2. Use p202.

3. Yes.

4. Yes. Facebook resizes and uses image compressions processes (e.g. like MozJpeg / Kraken) to serve optimised images on the fly.

5. Maybe. Split test with a better designed one.

6. No, just don't direct-link to it. If using a lander you're fine, and it's a redirect hop not a destination anyway.

7. No. Questions are sensible. But now you should be about ready to get some data :-)

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Thanks for taking the time to answer zeno!

I know I will have lots of testing and learning but if you could suggest a good starting bid to get enough data to be meaningful. Maybe you could explain how I pick my cpc with the following?
CPC
Suggested bid: $0.83 USD($0.41–$1.15)
oCPM
Suggested bid: $4.42 USD($1.89–$7.55)

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Ignore the suggested bids.

It depends on the country and the targeting. You can just change the bid as required so it really isn't worth worrying about.

If it's the US for example, bid $0.47. Then raise it to $0.53 if you don't get traffic after a few hours. Then $0.59, then wait a few hours, and so on.

For oCPM, just use Facebook's default for now. Also, be sure to use the power editor.

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Thanks Zeno for sharing your expertise. We have some results for our first run.
From the source
AD 1
Clicks: 7
Imp: 691
AVG CPC:$0.61
CTR: 1.169%

AD 2
Clicks: 10
Impr: 731
AVG CPC:$0.53
CTR: 1.302%

Our tracking software is only showing 13 clicks of the 17. Our network is showing no clicks going from the landing page to the offer yet. No conversions either. Just sharing our steps.

We are going to add more ads into the mix now and look into the access log and make sure the clicks did not click through.

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Make sure you test your funnel.

Load your tracking URL. Click the CTA button. Confirm that you get sent to wherever and that this clickthrough is tracked.

With Facebook your clicks =/= website clicks. 17 clicks could be 13 website clicks, 3 likes and 1 share. Make sure you know these metrics well and are looking at the correct "click" term to compare to your tracking system data.

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It looks like it was clicks to our website. So we want to split test directly to the offer page.

Does FB look down on redirects from our landing page to the offer page?

We are trying to filter the bad GEO directly to the offer, without tracking. Plus we do not want send our source to the AF or Offer page.

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Use geo-redirection properly and this doesn't matter.

There's a reason I stress this over and over in my FB guide and now in the onboarding guides.

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So we have been running our ads and are getting some traffic and clicks as well as some converts. But we are also getting a lot of likes on our ads which costs us money. Should we / is there a way to turn off likes for our ads? Or does it help to get likes on ads? Thanks for all the help so far!

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No, it's not possible to turn off likes and social actions - such is the nature of Facebook.

They can be a problem or a benefit depending on the circumstances.

The best solution is to bid oCPM so that you pay per impression, not per click/action.

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@zeno - Quick question... I read all the onboarding guides and such... but still a little bit confused on the FB / GEO "thing."

I get it if you use a direct link on your FB ad's, you may not know where that link is always sending people... and I get the concept of why you want to GEO direct someone based on their location...

BUT, if I have my FB ad's going to my own landing page to one of my own domains... ie. not going directly to the actual offer page... do I need to worry about GEO with FB ads? Because if they test the link... it will always go to my page not the actual offer page that a person goes to when using the actual affiliate link.

Also, does this change if I use say Voluum?

That is another confusion area for me... say I use Voluum as a tracker... do I put the link that Voluum gives to me in the FB ad or do I "tell" voluum the link of my landing page... and I put my landing page link in the FB Ad and then perhaps Voluum has a pixel code on my landing page and can sort it out? ie. tracking data.

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If using Voluum then your ads need to always link to a Voluum URL, same with most trackers as this initial redirection is the first part of the tracking process.

If you are using a landing page then yes you can ignored geo-redirection and just send everyone to the lander.

But, and this is very important, you still need to geo-redirect on the outgoing clicks from the lander since they go to the affiliate link. So, in Voluum, you would need to add a rule regardless.

Don't think FB won't click through your lander CTA. They will, eventually. Once burned forever remembered.

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Thanks zeno... question though... for the geo-redirect on the outgoing clicks (I assume you mean the link that we send the user to that takes them from our site... ie. from our lander to the offer page)... what is the rule based on? The IP of the person? I assume the IP of known FB testers? Where do we get that info and I wonder how often they change that out? And is that outgoing link managed, adjusted or edited from within Voluum - not sure how Voluum can control a link from a link on our site or from a contact form redirect to a custom "thank you page?" Where should we send it to - ie. webmd.com if it's medical? Lastly, this may or may not be unrleated but I guess it may be helpful to host our landing pages on the same domain as the tracker? PS - Can Voluum do geo redirects?

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Woah there that's a lot of questions chained together.

Voluum's rules are simple. You Add a rule, and anything that matches that rule goes down the path that the rule contains.

So you add a rule like Country is US and ISP is not Amazon Technologies, Facebook, Websense or Digital Ocean, etc. I go over this specifically for Voluum in my FB guide.

All users can go to the same landing page, but in the default path you can have your offer set to something clean - either the offer link directly (NO affiliate link) or a clean other page.

Whether you have a form submit or something somewhere is irrelevant - somewhere you are going to have a hxxp://abcde.trackvoluum.com/click link and at that point users will be sent back to Voluum and redirected according to the path they are in.

There is no point in hosting landers on the same domain as the tracker here. It's not good practice. Of course Voluum can do geo-redirects, it's very basic functionality of any tracking system.

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thanks for the answers... yeah, I asked a bunch of questions - might as well knock them all out at once rather than string it out. Thanks again.

I am still sorting out if I should initially go with Voluum or Thrive... I will end up doing both at some point but looking for a push in one direction or the other. Which one would you do?
The server setup and such with Thrive doesn't bother me... I will be doing mostly FB and POF type "stuff" to begin with... and then mobile and go from there.

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It's really a pro-con discussion.

Voluum's key advantage is the global infrastructure which should lead to lower tracking latencies when running traffic abroad i.e. outside the geo that your server is on.

Thrive's advantage is a one-off price regardless of volume.

If you use Thrive then you have a server primed and ready for landers too. Each platform is different in terms of UI, usability, etc.

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Thanks... in terms of having Thrive and having a server primed and ready for landers too... I thought you mentioned before that we shouldn't have landers on the same server as our tracking software?

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Actually you said not on the same domain... but to put your 2 posts together... we can put it on the same VPS server... just use different domains (ie. don't run the landing pages on the same domain as our tracking software)... but can have those LP domains pointing to the same VPS server... and as long as we make our images be served from a CDN... and the sites on that server is just small HMTL/CSS files for our single page landing pages - should be ok and the Thrive wont be slowed down?

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Yes, it's fine to have them on the same server but with different domains.

A good server will handle both fine, but when you get to higher volumes you can consider separating them so that one doesn't impact the other.

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