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Diggy's Follow-Along - New to CPA+Paid traffic (33)

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Hey guys,
as you can see I joined the forum a few years ago but I never really got into paid traffic and affiliate marketing. I've been doing SEO, launching infoproducts and running SEO service-based businesses for the last few years and did okay with that, but nothing compared to some of my friends who went head-first into paid traffic and affiliate marketing.

So now it's my turn to start.

I recently bought the Rich Jerk program and in it there is a section about Facebook ads and CPA marketing by John Crestani, so I decided to follow that (combined with info from STM) and get started.

While I've spent a good $20kish on Facebook over the years, I still consider myself a total newb to this game. I'll catch up soon though.

I've decided to go with Nutryst as a network, simply because it's John's network and the training uses that network as an example (btw, smart guy pushing all members from an IM course into his own network )

Offer is health-related and Facebook compliant, so no need for cloaking.

I'm starting this follow-along about a week after starting the campaign, but from here onwards the info will be pretty much live.

So, initially I really struggled to understand Voluum and found it super hard to understand all the variables and the tracking and stuff. I created some ads on Facebook and ran to an advertorial style lander (it was a done for you lander provided as the upsell of the RJ program I bought) and I managed to make some conversions. But, due to my tracking not being setup, I didn't know which ads were working, and my stats were looking like:

4 conversions for $104
Ad spend of $205.34
So pretty much a -50% ROI

I read up a lot about Voluum since then, redid all my tracking links and offers, created new ads in Facebook with the new links, and since then (yesterday actually) my stats are:

2 conversions for $52
Ad spend of $25.99
Sp pretty much a 200% ROI




I'm pretty happy about the results yesterday, but I know that 2 conversions are very little data to be indicative of campaign success.

Going forward:
1 - Continue to run yesterday's ads and see how they perform (I'm running to the US only, so I'm manually turning them off at 1am EST at turning on around 10am EST)
2 - Brainstorm 10 different angles to promote this offer
3 - Research the market to find more info about ideal prospect (age, gender, etc.) to hone my targeting

The ads I'm running now are all post boosts. I will play around with clicks to website soon and see how that does.

Question for the pros:
How do I track with ads brought the conversions?

I always used the conversion pixel in Facebook with my own offers, but since I don't own the offer I cannot do that. Voluum is tracking [adid] but I have no idea which ads brought the conversion

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Interesting follow along and congratz for the good early results.

Can't help you with Voluum, i'm using funnelflux and i add tags to my campaign links for each adset to know which one is converting on my funnelflux account.

I see that you are boosting posts, do you see better results this way than with the normal ads ?

You have 156 post Engagements but 453 visits on Voluum is it normal ? If i remember well even clicks are counted as Post Engagements.

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@poulope972 - Thanks

I'm still learning and was recommended to use post boosts rather than clicks to website. I'm still testing things so I will have to see. I get nice engagement with the post boosts though. The thing with post boosts is that they look more natural, you can have longer copy, and make it seem like a genuine story, rather than an ad. But of course, testing is everything.

Update 24 Oct

Didn't make any more conversions and just spending money and I can't optimize because I don't know which ads my conversions came from. So, back to square one.

Bought my VPS hosting - $50 per month. Got all the info and setup filezilla for easy FTP access.

Transferred my self-hosted landers from my shared hosting to the VPS (did all the file and database transfers etc. and tested everything is working).
Removed all links, offers and campaigns from Voluum and redid everything from scratch (again).

About to make a couple of ads that can start running and then hopefully I can start split testing. Really hoping that Voluum is going to be tracking my individual ads now that I'm using the URL tags, because that is crucial to my success.
Btw, was chatting to a veteran in the industry and was recommended not to use Voluum as they apparently have an internal buying team, and since it's not self-hosted, who knows... Maybe not an issue when just starting out, but when you get a lot bigger, I was recommended to use Funnelflux.

And for any of you who are still trying to figure everything out, go out there and make your first ads. You'll make mistakes and you'll lost money, but it's the only way to learn.

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I created 3 posts to boost, but two of them were rejected. One for profanity (I missed the word bulls*** in the copy so I guess that is why), and one because apparently it would involve too much negativity. The first one got approved though so I'll have to be a bit more careful in future since I'm probably borderline banned if not banned already in future.

Spent $17.32 boosting this post to my target audience and made two conversions at a total of $52.

I like that ROI, and I did it a couple days ago too, but then that next day there was only ad spend and no conversions. Maybe I should just let it run and see how it averages over time.

Question: How do I scale? Simply increasing budgets is something I've had bad experiences with since the ad spend gets hit but the conversions don't increase.

Should I duplicate the post boost ad? Or create more posts to boost?

Edit: just made another conversion, so that makes it $78 revenue and $18.11 spend. Need to figure out how to start scaling this

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diggy friend of glen?

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Hi Rio,
yeah, friend of Glen.

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You created The Vault ?

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Hey Digmister!

Out of curiosity why are you just using post Boosts? Why don't you create promoted post ads in the FB ad manager? That is the most obvious way to scale and have more control over your campaigns.

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If those guys are here, then SEO must be definitely dead now

Good luck, I'm subscribing!

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Together with Glen, correct.

Hey Mr Green! Oh that is what I'm doing, from within the ad manager creating promoted post ads to custom and lookalike audiences. I'm not actually using the "boost post" feature from the actual post on the page.

Haha, SEO is not dead and we're still making good monies from it. But I'm definitely interested in paid traffic also Thanks for subscribing

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Update: 26 October.

After the initial success on 24 October with 3 conversions off a small budget, I wanted to increase the traffic I'm sending. I didn't want to up the budget, but instead just copied the current post boost campaign (twice actually). Everything is the same (audience, targeting, post etc.)

The middle one is the orginal, and the top copy is actually cheaper than the orignal (bottom copy is more expensive).



Unfortunately I didn't make a single conversion yesterday despite creating 350 post engagements (the day before I only had 60 post engagements and made 3 conversions). Might be due to it being Sunday.

The post get's a lot of engagement with shares, likes and comments, so that is good:


Yesterday I created a retargeting pixel on my landing page so I'm building an audience, it's up to 300 so far. I just created clicks to website ads for the retargeting audience, sending them direct to the sales page this time. Curious to see if that brings any sales.

Other than that, I will let the ads run for a few more days and see what happens.

I will also create another post or two that I can boost, but there should be no banner blindness or anything because my audience is close to 1 million and the reach has only been about 10,000.

The offer should be good too since I've heard that there are affiliates doing $10k per day with it.

If you have any suggestions for me or see anything I'm doing wrong, please let me know

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Update 27 October:
My facebook account got banned yesterday. I was using a personal one, and had 4 ads disapproved over the last 2 weeks so the ban was coming and it came yesterday.

I will appeal it of course, but otherwise I'll just move on to another account. I have a business account ready to go, and another personal account I just need to add a payment source to (luckily I have multiple cards so it shouldn't be an issue).

Decided to spend a day or two reading and researching some more, and then will get back to it and continue updating the thread.

In case anyone is interested:

It looks like your ad account was used to create ads that violate Facebook's Advertising Guidelines. Facebook's policies protect everyone on Facebook and help make it a good experience. As a result, your ad account has been permanently disabled.
Here's why your account was disabled:

User Trust
Ads may not promote a business model or practice that is deemed by Facebook in its sole discretion to be unacceptable or contrary to Facebook's overall advertising philosophy or to any applicable law, including but not limited to ad content that creates distrust with users.
All claims in ads must be adequately substantiated. Any offers promoted within an ad must not be false, deceptive or misleading or contain spam. Ads must not contain or promote illegal products or services. Ads must not offend or violate the rights of any third parties.
Ads must clearly represent the company, product, service or brand that is being advertised. Products and services promoted in the ad copy must be clearly represented on the landing page, and the destination site may not offer or link to any prohibited product or service. Additionally, ads can't suggest false relevancy to generic offers.

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Can you still use your Facebook personally? Ive always wondered if you got banned from advertising if you lost your entire facebook account.

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Yeah, not an issue. I have two personal banned accounts and both profiles are still active without issues. It's just the ad account that gets disabled, and the payment method you were using gets flagged so you can't use that again with another account (possibly with a business account though, I will try).

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Winner winner chicken dinner:

Hi Diggy,

Thanks for contacting Facebook. We've reactivated your advertising account and you should now be able to create new ads and manage your existing ones. If you have a campaign that's currently stopped, the ads within the campaign can't be restarted until the campaign is active again.

Going to look into planning my strategy tomorrow. Stay tuned

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Made a sale yesterday from my post ad without running any ads. I guess that is one of the benefits of using longer copy posts as ads, they get shared around naturally and can bring in organic sales.

I think I'll still play around with this campaign a little bit, but besides that I'm going to look for more whitehat offers to promote and stay within the rules of the platform. Will update here again tomorrow with my progress.

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Update 2 Nov:

I've been tying up loose ends and crossing off thing on my general to-do list.

I've been running a $10/day boost to my post and that is generating about a sale every 24-30 hours ($26 value, still the original campaign), so on a small scale this is profitable. Every time I've tried scaling up or increasing budgets though, it becomes unprofitable. I will try and make multiple posts, and create many $5 - $10 per day campaigns as those seem to bring the best results.

Today I've tried again, making 2 clones of the $10 campaign and will start running them at $5 daily to see if that will help increase sales. I still need a day or two with my general things, but after that will start putting more time into campaigns again.

Quick update on 7 day stats:

Spend:$70.06
Rev: $130
ROI: +184%




All those ad sets are copies of the original, everything exactly the same. Crazy how the costs vary so much. In pennies it's not much, but in percentage terms it's huge.

Need to figure out how to scale. Simply increasing budget lowers ROI so that doesn't work. Maybe lots and lots of copies at $5 per day each? I'll do some testing.

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Congrats on the positive ROI. Keep up posting the results. I'm interested to see how you'll be able to scale this.

How is the retargeting campaign doing?

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Thanks Dude. I just created 9 copies of the post boost, and they are all running at $5 per day budgets. So in total $50 per day spend now, let's see what that does for the next 2-3 days.

I actually forgot about the retargeting to be honest, I haven't been spending much time with this campaign and turned off all ads after the account ban except this post boost. The retargeting audience is up to 700 now, so I'll work on creating some ads for that list. That could help.

Since the start of my journey with this campaign, here are the stats:

Spend $604.26
Rev $416
ROI -31.25%

I messed up with various ads in the beginning, increased budgets (which was horrible for conversions) etc. But the last 10 days or so it's been a +150-+200% ROI so slowly the overall ROI is moving closer to being black.

I'll get there

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Subscribed. I've been following you guys for years when I was full time SEO.
Interesting move.

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Update 6 Nov:

I've launched 2 more posts to boost under different angles.
I cloned the initial campaign to 10 ads of $10 a day to see if I could scale up.
Started a retargeting campaign.

Overall the results (ROI and engagement) have gone down, every time I try to scale it in some way.

Lifetime stats:
Spend: $807
Rev: $520
ROI -35%

In the meantime I have learned a lot about tracking, Voluum and passing variables so that's a plus.
I've also learned that people have been running this offer for over a year already, and the demographic is limited.

What I'm going to do is drop the campaign back to $10-$15 per day and let it run, since at those numbers it generates 150-200% ROI and not spend any more time on it. It was a good learning experience, and I'm going to move on to another offer.

I'll keep posting in this thread. I've seen it takes 3-6 months of consistent action before I can expect to make good money with this, so I'm prepared for it. I have both time and budget and can happily put 5 figures into ad spend without breaking a sweat, so onwards we go

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70$ spend, 130$ made = good start!

Now its time to scale it up and add some zeros before the campaign performance starts going down. Timing is everything so scale it up fast.

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Thanks @cbrughmans.

Update 11 Nov:

That campaign isn't making me a good ROI anymore, I've tried various angles and I don't think there is enough potential to continue with it. On a small budget it still does well, so I'm leaving it running on there.

In the meantime, I created a page and a post for a nutra offer that pays $50 CPA.

Spend $43
Revenue $150
ROI - good enough

Again, it's only small numbers and it looks good. Need to scale it up and see what happens, but it looks promising.

Currently I'm only running 1 post boost at $10 per day, and paying $4.66 per engagement which is high, but if this ROI keeps up I don't care of course.

Going to try if this one is more scalable than the last.

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Hey guys,
haven't posted in a while but not because I gave up.

I took a week's trip to Singapore for my birthday and took some time off IM. Enjoyed it thoroughly and am remotivated to get back to kicking ass. Seeing young twenty year old girls driving in brand new convertible mcLarens, and overhearing people talking about the millions they are making and spending over dinner is good motivation.

In the mean time I've also been working on opening a new company for my media buying (need to setup everything properly from the start and have it all legit), and I've also started the process of getting a software developed from an Idea I've had for a while. This will likely be a 6 month process before we can launch to the public, but the intention is to build it up as a legitimate SAAS over the next 2-3 years and plan for a high buyout or exit.

In the background I also have a few Va's doing some cool stuff with IG, so that has potential too. (This isn't costing me any time to manage, and it's building up in the background so I say let it grow).

I was running a diet CPA offer that was doing okay, but the offer got paused so back to square one.

Keep hustling everyone!

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Hey diggy,

I've never really had much success with low budgets. I always start off with $50 and in a few days, CPC's decreases gradually if you have good CTR.

If you want to change your budget, don't do it randomly. Do it just after midnight of your ad account's timezone.

Changing the budget in the middle of the day will give you bad placements and high cpc's from my experience.

Cheers.

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Hey Diggy,

there is some good threads on How to Scale FB in the forum, but they are not really conclusive yet. Especially not for boosting posts, as most members are doing ads directly.

Cheers

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drOz and neta - Thanks for the feedback.

I do apologize for the lack of daily posting. I understand why many people start follow-alongs and then stop posting after a while. However, that's not what I'm going to do. I will keep documenting and soon I will start posting daily again.

Right now I'm in BKK for the AWA event. I'm excited about this as there are a ton of people I want to meet, and the parties and overall time is going to be awesome. I won't be getting much done in the next 2 weeks, but after that I'm going back home and I'll be grinding non-stop the next 4-5 months. Not going anywhere for xmas or new years, and not taking any trips soon. I will sacrifice this holiday season so that next year I'll be rich and celebrate in style.

Also, after the AWA event I'm going to cut out alcohol completely, no more partying and just focus on work and fitness (gym/muay thai 5-6 days per week).

Formal business stuff (company formation etc.) is coming along nicely.

I have a software project in the works that should be ready to launch end of March.
I have another info product that should be ready to launch end of feb-march.

As I'm spending more time with this stuff, I'm starting to think my direction is going to be my own SAAS and infoproducts and then using media buying and paid traffic to drive leads to that, rather than churn and burn CPA. Reasons being:

1 - Profits are higher
2 - It'll build up an asset that can have a big exit value.
3 - It'll all be whitehat stuff so I'll have far less problems with compliance, account bans, cloaking etc.

So that's my update. Feel free to PM me if you're coming to AWA and want to meet up. If you're not coming to AWA, why not? Book your ticket now, it's not too late.

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^^ Good decision since you have the know how to build and promote your own product.

See you in a few days!

P.S. a few of us are going to do a Muay Thai session on the 9th, hola hola!

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Muay THaiiiiii

Threw together a small Clickbank campaign Yesterday within the health vertical.
Direct-linking to VSL
Traffic source - not Facebook.

Spend: $63.71
Rev: $130.20
ROI: 104%

Total clicks: 51
Average CPC: $1.25
CTR: 2.14%
Total sales: 2 (one which took both upsells)

Will keep running this for a few days and get some more data, and try to optimize.

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Wow - congrats !! keep it up. Still doing FB only and very excited to see your results here

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Awesome dude -keep it up.

I have to start running on bing as well.

If your campaigns are white hat then double kudos

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Rev of course, but things are looking to be going in the right direction, hoping to break 6 figures this month and then continue scaling.

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Appreciate the follow along! Any networks you'd recommend for their offers?

Definitely motivational

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