Challenge: FB Newbie Needs to Spend $2.000 in 20 Days (60-100 Campaigns) (14)
Yesterday i created 10 campaigns and launched one as a test campaign to get familiar with the whole process and catch as many silly mistakes as possible.
At first the campaign wasnt getting any traffic which i bet is because the estimated daily reach was 400-1100 even though the target audience (TA) is estimated to 100.000.
I changed TA to about 800.000 and increased the ad set budget which in turn increased the estimated daily reach to 5.000-15.000. Since i focus on pracising targeting I'm aiming for 100 clicks per adset at 1% CTR, so 10.000 estimated daily reach should be good.
To give myself the best chance of winning i'm taking care of some basic stuff until Tuesday where i'll hit it hard.
Until then I have to take care of the following:
1. Find a solution to sending conversions back to Facebook
2. Make a list of specific learnings i want to have at the end of the challenge
3. Figure out how i can hit an estimated daily reach of 10.000 when my TA is 100.000
4. Create a basic lander i can easily customize to each offer
5. Build a working structure/flow for the challenge
Regarding the tracking i have a couple of questions i hope someone might have an answer to (bulletpoint 1):
It seems like there are two possible options:
1. Insert the image URL from the Facebook pixel (old) as the S2S postback URL for the offer at the CPA network.
- I have done this and i'm waiting for my pixel to become active. If this does indeed work, how long should it take? - is there another way to activate the pixel?
2. Ask my AM to implement the Facebook pixel code (the network is using HasOffers)
- My AM has no clue about tracking so in this case i need to guide her or the tech team through it. Could anyone be so kind to explain what needs to be done?
3. Is there any other way to track conversions in Facebook?
4. If not, how do you guys figure out what part of your targeting is performing best when the tracking link parameters are static from Facebook to
You can't track FB conversion so don't even bother. Not in a meaningful way at least.
Theres only two ways to track. Label each ad combo/adset with url tags and run it through
If was afraid that might be the case although fbqueen mentions something that works for her here and Zeno here (scroll up to the "tracking conversions"-headline). Did I miss something? - as far as i can tell it should be possible with the Cake platform, no?
UPDATE
The test campaign had 85 clicks and 0 conversions. Interesting is that only 50% of the clicks made it to the network so most of the rest must be accidental clicks or the redirect loaded to slowly.
To my surprise I got around 30 likes to my best performing of the 3 duplicated ads and even 1 share which makes me think it was too clickbait-ish and/or the target audience was too random. I’ll leave it running until it reaches 100 and then cut it.
The Ad
The ad says “Warning: 100% not for women! Download Now” (translated) (+ download button) and has an in-game screenshot that isn’t too eye-catching. CTR is 0.75% but as I’m aiming for 2% there’s a long way to go.
I’m thinking it should work better to callout the game-genre or something similar so the user has a better idea of what they get when clicking.
The Target Audience
I’ve just launched a new campaign andonly changed the TA from 18-25 males with interest who likes pop rock AND animated films to something more specific and related. Although my ad probably stinks I imagine it should convert at least a bit on this TA – and I’d rather keep the ad the same to see the exact difference between the two campaigns. If this campaign gets 0 conversions after 100 clicks as well, I’ll move on to either a new country with the same offer and a new ad or a new offer altogether.
Based on what Zeno wrote here, my issue in the test campaign most likely is that i didn't target towards intent - at all. I should focus on mastering that first!
Questions
Another issue is that user may have the game already since it’s not possible to exclude people who already have the app except if you own it and add it to your account. Did anyone happen to find a work-around for this?
Launched another TA along with the second one today, around noon. So in total 3 different TA divided into one ad set each all within the same campaign.
As far as i can tell when i added the two extra ad sets the traffic stopped flowing in. Very frustrating! After 5 hours of waiting i paused the two new ad sets and suddenly the original ad set started getting traffic again.
As far as i can imagine this must be an issue on either account or campaign level.
Tried paying my first bill (threshold is $25); nothing.
Tried removing the campaign spending limit (dont have any account spending limit except for the paying threshold), still nothing.
Checked that all ad relevant ads, adsets etc were set to active and related settings such as scheduling, high enough CPC, budget etc - they all have the same daily estimated reach so i dont see what the problem should be on adset or ad level.
Also since when i pause the two new ad sets the original one start getting traffic just fine, i'm thinking it must be some kind of account issue.
Last thing i can think of is to duplicate the entire campaign and try to run one of the new ad sets there alone. Waiting for approval on that.
Does anyone have any suggestions to what the problem could be? I'm running out of ideas here.
UPDATE
I decided to wait a bit with testing new angles and instead test various clusters of the converting target group with a slightly more neutral headline. Which also means that it doesn’t make sense to test the same targeting/ad in a new country until I have the results.
So I made around 15 campaigns with different target groups based on the five “groups” in previous post and a few ideas I found around the forum. I kept the ad the same in all campaigns so I can see the direct result of the different audiences.
Just as I was uploading my campaigns from Power Editor my campaign got flagged and is now inactive due to unusual behavior. Hopefully they will open it again as fast as they did last week. I assume it’s because I’m creating so many new campaigns it looks suspicious on such a fresh account.
Anybody know if I can close down Power Editor without losing the campaigns i havent uploaded??
UPDATE 2
Silly, I just realised that in my excitement i forgot to check how performance was for the game in AppAnnie - of course it has been beaten to death in all geos available. I need a new offer!
UPDATE
Yesterday I realized that the game I was promoting had been promoted for quite some time, so I’d better look for a new one.
No news regarding my Facebook account. Pretty frustrated about it.
Not wanting to waste time I’ve instead been spending some time plugging lots of offers into Appannie and trying to figure out what the stats looks like when it’s too late to jump on a game offer. It seems like most of the subcategories for gaming are quite small so it’s "fairly easy" to achieve a top 10 rank.
That in turn lead me to another problem; trying to figure out how to download a game from GP that isn’t available in my country. Wasn’t able to find with by using VPN or downloading it from the desktop GP page directly to my phone.
Questions
- Does it make sense to jump on an app that has risen and fallen again?
- What do experienced game app promoters look for when doing offer research?
- Is it reasonable to expect that a game ranking high (top 10) in a certain geo in its subcategory (e.g. strategy) is hitting a plateau if its doing volume at the network(s) as well? - and i'm therefore too late to the party, or should i just try them out anyway? - I assume that if i want to do x.xxx/day profit i should probably be one of the first ones and the offer should be available in lots of geos but currently i'm just looking for an offer than can beat $100/day profit
UPDATE
Since my Facebook account hasn't been reactivated yet I've spent most of the day researching how to maintain an account for whitehat campaigns, what could have caused my ban etc. How naive of me to think that I wouldn't have any problems just because i'm running whitehat 
I sure have learned a lot. I've posted my findings here.
So at the moment i'm still without an account but if Facebook doesn't unban my account during the weekend i'll probably link my personal account to business manager and start running from there.
Things are not looking good as by the end of the weekend i'll be 30-50 campaigns behind schedule and since creating just 15 campaigns at once seemed to have banned me in the first place, it seems impossible to reach my goal. Perhaps it's possible to split the campaigns up between a couple of accounts using the same CC or run 5ish campaigns each day.
Also could a moderator please add the red follow along-tag to my thread? thanks!
UPDATE
Didn't have much to write about yesterday.
Nothing new about my Facebook account but i should have a couple of new ones ready in a few of days.
I've been doing some research in a couple of verticals on Facebook as inspiration for my own system. Can't wait to test it and run campaigns again!
As i believe that my account was banned because i created too many campaigns/adsets in the beginning (1 campaign with around 15 adsets and 3 ads in each), its not possible for me to reach my goal of launching 60-100 campaigns before the new year.
That sucks but at least i should be able to do 3 adsets (with 3 ads in each) per day which will be 20-30 campaigns in total. Hopefully my research will still make me able to find a campaign that is -50% ROI after testing targeting.
It looks like you've been making good progress so far man, and congrats on actually taking action! Something 99% of newbies don't accomplish.
I don't however think it's good however to judge your success on the number of campaigns launched. One successful angle could easily spend your $2k budget in a day. Launch slowly, so you have time to analyse the data and learn from your mistakes. It's hard for anyone to give feedback if there is too much going on at once.
It can typically take up to 3 weeks for your account review, but you should prepare yourself for it to be declined
Thanks for the advice. i really appriciate it!
I think i've definitely been guilty of not analysing and learning enough from my failures in past. Do you happen to have any idea how much time i should expect to "wait" until i'd be able to spend $2k a day without Facebook finding it suspicious and flagging my account? As i understand it's good practise to not increase budget more than double per day.
Thanks!
UPDATE
Haven't been updating the past days as planned but there hasn't been much to tell unfortunately.
I finally got my new accounts set up the day before christmas and I've been waiting for my AMs to open some offers since. I assume they work so slow due to the holidays but it's very frustrating when you want to run campaigns 
I clearly can't launch enough campaigns to reach my original goal but at least i've learned a lot during the past weeks so it has definitely been beneficial for me to do this sort of challenge even though i didn't reach my intended goal. I've used the waiting time to come up with a gameplan for how to nail Facebook and games in the next four-five months but that's something for another follow along perhaps. Not sure if i'll start one or not yet.
As Leo Burnett said it: 'If you reach for the stars, you might not quite get one, but you won’t end up with a handful of mud, either.'
I'm gonna stack that fucking money!
UPDATE
Quick update before the finish line. I finally got a campaign running yesterday morning only to realise after 24 hours that i've set my CPC bid too low. This morning i set it to auto bid and traffic has been coming in nicely along with a conversion. Unfortunately my offer is being paused at midnight.
Next i'll take a crack at Mobile Strike although it's probably too late. I've prepared four different types of targeting with the same ad that i'll launch as soon as its past midnight.
Has anyone had any problems running auto bid on CPC?
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