Casino / FB - Journey to stable $X,XXX / Day (26)
Hey STM Crew! It's been about 11 months and I missed you ... 
This Follow Along will chart my progress as I enter, troubleshoot, and scale in the Casino vertical on fb. I'll be posting updates as developments unfold, and welcome anyone with questions or feedback. Welcome aboard!
Goals:
Immediate - Launch, learn the space, and start seeing xx-xxx% ROI days consistently.
Intermediate - Spend $x,xxx/day consistently for a whole month with no down time.
Longer term - Have a scaled out operation with a coule VA's helping to spy, build landers, craft angles, execute buys, and manage translations. Hit my first $xx,xxx rev day.
Right now am in pre-launch:
- Tracking: FF
- Cloaking: Used to use NoIP and love the crew behind it, but will be going on the recommendation of a friend and trying TA.
- Geos: To start will be CA. Want proof of concept and then will build out translations and scale to EU.
- Offers: Have 2 SOI CPL's - one pays $12, the other pays $19 - both variable based on quality.
- Accounts: Have a prepaid warmed and ready to launch. Will be building out a rental funnel to get some solid USA real accounts, and will also be JV'ing with a friend partner that has a solid farm.
*Pending before I launch.. One of the offers isn't firing test conversions in FF. Probably a postback issue, waiting for support to help shore this up. Hopefully launching Monday.
For those curious about my journey thus far:
Discovered STM in June '16 - stayed up a solid week reading almost constantly. I was living in NYC, a stereotypical broke actor/ waiter type. In July I took some savings, hired FB Queen to teach me some basics of Nutra/ FB, and hit the ground running. Saw initial success then Q4 (high cpms) + a slew of bad accounts, limited fb knowledge, undercapitalized, and I soon found myself close to broke, in the winter, in Brooklyn. Didn't want to go back to being a waiter. So I did some networking and landed a job at the best fb agency in the states, based in sunny Santa Monica. Off I flew!
Quickly learned that ecomm client services isn't a good fit for me, but learned a ton about scaling products. For some extra cash I was sourcing/ flipping fb accounts, pretty small time scale. One guy asked if I could also supply USA cards for him to run on the accounts, and boom, my card solution business was born. Tested a ton of BINs/ solutions over many months while still working at the agency, and eventually got the thing working really well. Word spread and I had more and more people asking about cards. In October '17 I was set to graduate at the agency from being a Junior FB Campaign Manager to a Senior, and I got to thinking about trajectory.. I decided to quit the agency and go full time with my card solution, and use profits to reinvest into affiliate marketing, and give it a try now that I'm more knowledgeable, have more connections, and am better capitalized. So here we go!
Crazy story David sounds like quite the ride... Looking forward to your follow-along, seeing that I'm considering giving nutra a go on FB too.
@craig88 - it sure has been. Wishing you luck with your journey!
Update
Hit some tech snags and didn't get up and running until yesterday.
Early results are... frustrating. Welcome back to running non compliant offers 
Going to be transparent here to help others following along, and because I'm not running an original angle. Not too worried about getting ripped off.
Angle - Son Pays Off Parent's Mortgage With Online Casino Winnings
Testing images pulled from the real video of this happening. Used Canva to add some text below and some red/ green border variations.
Copy is click baity, about his immigrant parents being dumb-struck. Targeting is broad.. 26+
For some reason CPM was insanely low - .43 EU. Wtf? And frequency was also nuts, 2-3 after 13 EU spent.
Got 19% Lander CTR, 7 clicks, no conversions. Offer rep said 20-60% offer conversion is typical so this is worrisome when combined with the weird CPM/ Frequency.
Decided one reason for this would be my lander needs optimizing, so I did that and opened it up in a split against the original - results pending.
Another reason could be my copy isn't mentioning gambling, too general, so maybe I'm getting people with low intent to actually sign up. Edited copy to include that the son won it gambling + tweaked my safe article accordingly to match.
Re - launched new campaign.
This one hasn't spend nearly enough to get conversion data, but already am seeing the same frequency issue.. averaging 2.52 impressions/ person. And .88 EU CPM.
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Hypothesises:
- Frequency/ odd CPM stuff could be account related. This is a farmed prepaid I bought that's based in Portugal, running in CA. Have 3 real person USA accounts currently warming, should be good to spend in 7-10 days. But for now my hands are tied on that front.
- No conversions.. well I really don't have enough data to have an informed opinion. Could be lots of things, including my entire angle being burnt.
Next Steps:
- Buy more data, test another offer with a lower payout, upload video creative to test.
- May hire B&L to craft some unique angles/ money articles.
With Casino CPA offers you really need to push a lot of data. Ofcourse their are immediate conversions, but from my experience conversions dropping in weeks/months after you stopped the offer still...
Originally Posted by stickupkid
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Worked through the night, made some pivots to a new angle (my own creation) and did a lot of grind work building new assets, some video/ some static. New tests are up and doing well at small budgets. Scaling slightly into tomorrow and hopefully see similar metrics.
Originally Posted by david2772
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Worked through the night, made some pivots to a new angle (my own creation) and did a lot of grind work building new assets, some video/ some static. New tests are up and doing well at small budgets. Scaling slightly into tomorrow and hopefully see similar metrics.
Update
After Scaling a bit ROI came down some but I'm not concerned. Potential reasons for drop in ROI:
- Maybe Saturdays convert better than Sundays
- Pixel finding its way
- Still relatively low spend = less normalized results
- FB is a 7 day testing platform. I learned working at the agency that even on big accounts with very warm pixels and optimized audiences that there are always fluctuations - better to get learnings over a 3 day or 7 day window.
LCTR's are looking healthy. From 5.5% to 7.8%
My strategy with this angle is a broadly appealing angle to get cheap clicks, then use my copywriting chops to convert them on page. This strategy of course will result in lower intent clicks than a more direct "This is an online casino ad" angle, but I like this strategy for several reasons:
- I can control and test my lander copy. I'm confident that with time & testing I can get conversions from people that would have never clicked on a more direct angle.
- High CTRs = low CPCs/ CPMs, better account quality score, less negative feedback, and henceforth longer account life.
Lastly, got a qual check on my leads and a bump, so this will help scale more and of course help my bottom line!
Next Steps
- Opened up another adset @ 100 eu/day, this one using my winning copy with emojis added.
- Will look at testing a link in the body of the ad. IE "Click Here -> {google shortlink}" to see about lessening the gap between CTR/LCTR.
Looking good man, keep them updates coming! With this work ethic you'll be hitting your consistently in no time!
Nice progress, good luck.
why did you choose the Casino vertical by the way to start with?
Depends on the offer, but you’ll likely want to target a much higher age range (35+ M) initially or face quality issues in the next few weeks.
CPCs are sky high at the moment with Black Friday and Q4, so it can mess with your placement and costs. I wouldn’t panic too much if you see roi drop.
You’ll want to get spend up significantly and on multiple accounts to keep the offer happy. With SOI your gambling on your signups depositing enough in the first few days for quality to be acceptable. More signups, more potential deposits.
Update
- Woke up today to the gut wrenching site of no tracker movement. Sure enough account went down for policy violations. I raised budget from 100 eu to 200 yesterday so maybe that put me on the radar. Had nearly all positive post engagement and ads were getting approved very quickly so qual score was high. Could have just been bad luck. Vendor may issue a replacement.
- Final stats for this account are great ROI wise but abysmal spend. For the dashboard screenshot loving crowd:
- It's obviously very frustrating to not be able to run because I have no accounts ready. Worst feeling in the world to have to sit idly when you want to be grinding and scaling. Luckily I have the capital to take steps so this doesn't happen again. Adding cards to the 3 rental accounts today and starting on small warming budgets. Will do a quick-ish warm on these, should be running dirty again in 7 days. Will put things in motion to source another 5 accounts.
Originally Posted by eduardo2
Originally Posted by nickpeplow
Thanks for your insight on deposit amounts and how more volume can help mitigate and normalize for the ADV. Fb was indeed slanting towards the younger end of my spectrum. Last thing I want is to get paused or have my payout decreased. The ADV initially advised that targeting 25+ on any device should suffice for lead quality, but better safe than sorry here.
And they did indeed indicate that getting a couple hundred leads/day is where they want to be sitting. So min 200 leads * ~target CPA of $8-10 = ~$2000/day spend min.
General strategy I'm using is to make whatever decisions I can to maximize account life and try to stay under the radar, so will likely limit spend to $500/day/account, at least until I have a steady baseline from which I can start testing more aggressive strategies. Call it 4-6 accounts up and running at any given time to hit my 200 leads/day.
Re: Q4 and ROI, makes a lot of sense with placements and CPCs. Frankly the results I'm having were above and beyond what I was hoping for. Considering it's a new vertical for me and it's the middle of Q4 I'd be OK with running @ 50-80% ROI while establishing SOPs for angle testing, accounts, etc.
Congrats on the progress. Casino on FB is going to be tough, they're ruthless at shutting down advertising accounts these days!
After some back and forth with the team that sold me my initial account it looks like they're giving a replacement.. so should be up an running again in a day or two. Decided to do a slower warm on the 3 rentals so now thinking those'll be ready in 7 days. Meaning in 2 weeks from now I should be spending ~3k/day if all goes according to plan.. which of course, it never does, but a guy can hope
Will be booking tickets to Vegas for ASW soon - hit me up if you'd like to meet!
nice to see the follow up ,wish you succeed.
Good Luck man.
Back in my 9-5 agency days, used to have a global sportsbook/casino client that was spending 6 figures per month on Facebook.
They allowed betting advertisers to run on their platform but after they whitelist them ( which means that they should guarantee a budget spend in a specific timeframe and abide the rules they set)
Originally Posted by geobak
I've heard about several whitelist opportunities with casino in the USA, albeit in limited geos with very strict creative guidelines. Something I'll be looking into as well. Sounds like you have experience in this space, if you're keen on a JV I'd be happy to discuss collaborating.
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Finally back up and running with 1 account, 3 more will be ready in a few days.
Ain't much for now, but I'm a screenshot slut.. this is from ~$15 spend. Good days to come.
Update
- Have been slowly scaling Account 1, ROI a little north of 100%. Then fell to 50%. Then break even.
- Many headaches later and I realized when I opened a split test of landers the action links in my tracker had updated too (duh), so I was essentially sending good traffic to dead ends. So stressful but it's solved now and back to ROI sitting pretty. Still have a glitch with my tracker missing URL params that I'm passing to show what traffic is coming from which account, but Zeno is giving great support at FunnelFlux and I'm confident we'll get it figured out.
- Finished warming 2 rental accounts and launched both of them tonight @ 100 usd/ day. Will launch another rental tomorrow.
- Re: the account situation, I'm VERY sick of using Teamviewer rentals. Huge pain in the ass coordinating times to log on, not to mention the kind of people that are cool with renting out their fb/computer to a stranger typically ain't the most tech savvy or reliable, I've found. Good news is that my partner on my card solution and a couple other ventures recently scaled up his farm capacity to a truly awesome volume, and he knows what he's doing. So now have access to a virtually limitless supply of affordable accounts. Thinking that scaling to 10 accounts up at all times with farmed accounts is far more sustainable than rentals.
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Going to be hiring a VA too. First to perform tedious day-to-day data entry with my card solution, but I really want a rockstar that I can teach other mind numbing but necessary operations to such as executing warming campaigns, setting up servers, safe sites with content/ SSL. Signed up for onlinejobs.ph and am completely overwhelmed by poor quality applicants and a shitty UX. Going to use Upwork instead and find a slightly more expensive helper from EE
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Current spend = ~$550/day
Spend goal 1 week from now = ~$1.5-2k/day
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Also looking into doing some intl travel after ASW.. If anyone at a similar level is posted up somewhere cheap and warm with fast wifi, good food, and would be up for doing some work together let me know. Really miss the social/ crowd-learning aspect of working at the ecomm agency.
Originally Posted by david2772
Originally Posted by stickupkid
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Guys while I appreciate the interest in my thread, let's not turn this into an account sales thread cus that's against STM rules and not what I want this to turn into. Let's stick to the matter at hand 🙂
If you want to talk about farming/ renting/ account flow methodology etc then please pm/skype me. @blackemil your profile isn't accepting pms.
And while we're on the subject, I'm happy to talk to people that are struggling to find success, but please don't hit me up asking a bunch of questions answered in this thread or my old forum posts.
Update
Nothing super new right now, just popping in with a little update because I want to keep this fresh.
Pushing 800-1k rev/day with 80-100% ROI.. Kind of underwhelming, but hey, it's late Q4 and early in my journey.
Have 10 farmed accounts warming right now that should be good to drop some real damage in about a week. Will probably start them small-ish, like 100/day for about a week and then start to scale them into January. Hopefully I have enough angles to run this sort of scale!
Also thinking about testing some casino CPA offers due to Nick's previous wisdom.
Cheers and happy hunting
are you still running nutra? if no, why?
Hey Guys,
On Whitelisting:
FB can whitelist online gambling - but only in regulated Geos which include the UK, IE, DK and one or two others.
In Unregulated Geo's they will not whitelist.
On Offers:
If you are going to run CPA with online casino you need to run the right software providers in the right Geos that can convert and retain those players so that the CPA is worth running - and If an operator is that good in a Geo it becomes worth potentially running a revenue share (40% of losses) or a hybrid deal such as 150 euro CPA + 30% revenue share if you have the reputation to get it.
Best,
C
Thanks for your info.
Hey,
How is going so far this year for you?
Add me on Skype: sanjeevan.ventures should chat more about casino
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