Mation's FB Case Study: 800k Revenue in 42 Days - 1 Campaign - 97% ROI (38)
Mation's FB Case Study: 800k Revenue in 42 Days - 1 Campaign - 97% ROI
Hey everyone! Do I have a big treat for you all today!
STM member "mation" has generously divulged to me details on a big campaign he's CURRENTLY running. He took a profitable campaign and turned it into a 6-figure campaign in 1 week by scaling to multiple GEOs.
DO check out some of his posts here on the forum - many of them are littered with gold nuggets. You just need to pick them up and apply them to your campaigns. At a minimum, you should at least check out the two posts of his that were so valuable they were stickied:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-REAL-Business!
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...LES-(In-Depth)
NOTE: In case anyone's questioning the authenticity of the numbers in the screenshots, I have personally verified Mation's revenue and ad spend claims via TeamViewer, where he logged into his affiliate account as well as various FB accounts in real-time to show me key metrics. So stop doubting - if you dare to dream big and take action, anything is possible.
Before I reveal details of the campaign - a couple of important disclaimers:
1)The campaign is grey-hat, and Facebook accounts have been banned in the process. Of course your experience will vary depending on the specific offers you run and how you run them, but please be informed that neither we at STM nor Mation will be held responsible for any Facebook accounts you may lose by implementing any of the tactics revealed in this post (or any other posts on this forum for that matter).
Having said that: No matter whether you're running whitehat or blackhat, you can benefit from many of Mation's suggestions in this post, as most (if not all) of the tactics shared in this post can be applied to hats of any color.
2)Because this campaign is on-going, Mation has understandably chosen to keep certain parts secret - such as the nature of the offer, and advertising angles. (He is already revealing too many details for an ongoing camp, as you'll agree by the end of this post.)
Be prepared to be blown away by the amount of gold you'll be taking away from this post! Without further ado – here are the juicy details of Mation’s mega campaign!
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Overview:
Vertical: Finance
Traffic Source: Facebook
Time Period: April 16th, 2018 - May 28th, 2018 (42 days)
Revenue (approx.): $780,000
Ad Spend (approx.): €338,576 ($393,631)
Profits (approx.): $386,369
ROI (approx.): 98%
Screenshots of Revenue and Spend
Let's start off with some sexy screenshots:
Total Revenue From Affiliate Dashboard:
Highest-Revenue Day from
Ad Spend on Several of the Facebook Accounts (more accounts were/are used - this is just a subset):
Vertical & Offer Selection
Amy: Without revealing the exact type of offer you're running, can you give us an idea on the general vertical?
Mation: The offers are from the finance vertical. I've been running finance offers for a while now, so has gathered some experience in this vertical.
One of the main reasons why I like this vertical is because I can scale big and fast, since it's evergreen, and has international offers that allow me to scale to multiple geos.
Amy: Do you have any tips on how to pick the offer?
Mation: The most important tips is: Develop good relationships with your affiliate managers!
Affiliate managers can offer so much help - they are definitely one of my biggest assets in this business.
At first your AM may just give you a bunch of offers to test. But over time, when they see that you're serious in doing volume, they will put more effort into helping you get to the next level.
Finance offers are a bit different than some of the other offers, in that financial offers have a 2-step funnel - lead registration and actual sale. For some offers the click-to-lead rate will be very high but the lead-to-sale rate will be low, whereas for other offers the click-to-lead will be low but the lead-to-sale will be high. It all depends on the content of the offer page and how well your lander correlates with the offer page to pre-sell the offer.
I also tested the same offer on multiple networks to see which one performed the best.
And I'm always testing new offers to potentially increase profits further - even now. Here's a screenshot:
Amy: Any tips on maintaining a good relationship with affiliate managers?
Mation: In order for affiliate networks and advertisers to take you serious, it's important to deliver volume.
About 25% of my campaigns are breaking even, but I still keep them running just to maintain volume with affiliate networks and advertisers.
Tips on Combating Erratic FB Behavior and Flagging of Accounts
Mation: There's something really important I want to talk about.
As we all know, Facebook behavior has been erratic the last weeks/months! They are flagging accounts like never before, even if you are running whitehat and are 100% compliant with their terms of use.
I had a lot of ups and downs with FB over the past 42 days of running this campaign - see the screenshot below.
I lost many accounts until I had a chat with one of my friends, when he told me how he solved this issue by eliminating redirects. I did as he suggested, and suddenly was able to spend properly again.
Amy: Can you please explain what you mean by eliminating redirects?
Mation: I will provide this information later.
Mation: And I have additional tips on how to combat weird campaign behavior and accounts getting flagged.
First of all, create multiple accounts so that when some go down, you'd still have others you can run on. Another good reason for having multiple accounts is because even the exact same campaign can behave differently when run on different accounts. So by running from multiple accounts you can ensure that at least some of the campaigns will have good performance.
Secondly, test your whole setup before sending traffic! The worst thing that can happen is to have something broken on your website, server’s infrastructure, tracking/pixel, or even your offer. You'd basically be spend money without learning anything. Also make sure your web host can handle the volume of traffic you'll be sending to it.
Also, have a different website for each FB account if possible. For the payment method, I just put one payment method in my business manager settings and that was enough.
Amy: So you just create all your accounts under one Business Manager? How many accounts have you lost so far for this campaign?
Mation: I create multiple accounts under several Business Managers. I've lost 22 accounts so far.
Angles and Ads
Amy: I know you're wanting to keep your creatives and angles secret, but can you go over how you do your research when designing creatives?
Mation: I use Adplexity Native for spying. I like to go to non-FB spy tools to get angle ideas, then if necessary tweak them for use on FB.
The reason I use non-FB spy tools, is I like to take working campaigns to a virgin traffic source to avoid competition and saturation. I do this all the time - it even works between different networks of the same traffic type, for example different native networks.
Amy: How many angles and ads did you test?
Mation: I took the best angle I found from spying on Adplexity Native, and created 13 different ads based on that angle.
Amy: And you translated the ads into different languages to target different geos?
Mation: Yes! But converting between geos is not only about translation, it’s also about market research to adapt the same or similar angle for use with different geos. For example - showing pictures of local places, changing people's names into local names, using pictures of people that look like locals, etc.
Amy: What's your average ad CTR?
Mation: People always ask me about CTR. To be honest, I don’t care about CTR. All I care about is how much I'm paying for each conversion and how much each conversion is worth.
Amy: But high CTR is important for low CPC, right?
Mation: That is correct. However, a high CTR doesn't always translate into more money. I can make a super click-baity ad to achieve a high CTR to keep the CPC low, but the CR of such ads would typically be low.
Amy: Which ad format is performing the best for you? Image/video?
Mation: I use both image and video ads. But in this specific camp I'm using image ads because that has been working the best.
Amy: Do you use carousel or single image?
Mation: Single image.
Audience and Geo Targeting
Amy: How many geos did you test?
Mation: I started with UK, then scaled successfully to AU and MX. I tried ZA and IT as well but didn't get very good results. It was worth the test though. Let me show you some stats:
Amy: For audience, do you target broad or narrow - by gender/interest/behavior/etc.?
Mation: I target broad because I want higher volumes as mentioned before. With narrow targeting you'd be limited to smaller audiences and therefore smaller volumes.
I'm working with European geos mostly, so if I target narrow on those geos, the audience would be super-small, and I wouldn't be able to achieve large scale. However, I'm aware that you can make 300%+ ROI with narrower targeting.
So I'm not saying it's bad to target narrow. It's just not my personal style.
Amy: Do you segment by gender or age at all when testing?
Mation: Not initially. However, sometimes FB gives priority to one gender over the other, and when that happens I would duplicate the adset to target the under-represented gender.
Amy: Can you illustrate what you mean using an example?
Mation: Sure! For example:
It's obvious that FB is sending a lot more female visitors than male visitors. So I would duplicate the adset to target males, and leave the original adset unchanged.
By the way - rule of thumb: Never touch a running adset. If you want to make changes, duplicate the adset to include the changes you want, then either disable the original adset or leave it running depending on what you're wanting to accomplish.
The FB algorithm can be very confusing. Based on engagement mostly, FB decides very quickly what the preferred audience is for the specific adset. Often, as in the example screenshot above, FB would display your ads to one gender more than the other gender. Why? Because FB decides that that gender would convert better, and often, this "decision" is made before FB even collects enough data.
And because of this behavior, we can lose a HUGE portion of the market (male visitors in the above example), in cases where the market is made up of both genders.
Amy: What do you usually optimize for? Conversions?
Mation: Yes - conversions. But I cloak the pixel, which is very important these days.
Amy: Why would you cloak the pixel? And how? And is this necessary for blackhat/greyhat only?
Mation: I will provide this information later. (UPDATE: This information has been posted further down the thread!)
Bidding and Scaling Strategy
Amy: Any advice on how to bid?
Mation: Basically for testing always use auto-bidding. When you have a winning campaign, play between manual and auto bidding. There's a whole theory behind this approach. I would highly recommend to watch James Van Elswyk's stuff. He's very knowledgeable about manual bidding and I learnt a lot from him.
Amy: What's your scaling strategy?
Mation: I've written extensively about scaling in my article in this post:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-REAL-Business
Main Reasons For Success
Amy: What would you say are the main reasons for this campaign's success?
Mation:
1)Great relationship with AMs leading to good offer recommendations.
2)International offer with good scaling potential to multiple geos.
3)Running from multiple FB accounts to combat erratic FB behavior and flagging of accounts.
4)Eliminating redirects and cloaking the pixel.
5)Spying on non-FB sources to borrow good angle, testing different creatives for that angle, then adapting the angle to multiple geos.
6)Effective bidding and scaling strategies.
One last thing I want to point out, is how important it is to stay humble and continue to learn from everyone else. For example, tips on eliminating redirects and cloaking FB pixels, I learnt through good networking with other affiliates. I picked up these tips from a guy who's running $XXX a day and it’s still changed my whole POV. Bottom line, be down to earth and open-minded to other’s people experiences and ideas no matter how big or small they are - no matter whether he's making $100k a day or $100 a day.
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And that's a wrap! Hopefully by this point you're excited by the potential and eager to do more testing on Facebook or even specifically, offers in the financial niche. I know I am!
There are a couple pieces of information missing from this case study: 1)How to cloak the FB pixel, and 2)how to eliminate redirects. Mation will be providing these later, at which time I'll update the case study. So please check back!
Lastly, Mation would like to announce that he does not offer any coaching (and probably won't in the future either), so please don’t contact him with coaching requests. Also, please respect his time and not PM him with any questions - ask your questions here in this thread and he'll be more than happy to answer for the benefit of everyone. (This is already a huge favor and a big sacrifice of his time, and he's not being compensated in any way. I hope everyone understands!)
A BIG THANK YOU to Mation on behalf of everyone on STM - for being so willing to provide details on such a lucrative campaign. It truly takes a saint to be willing to risk introducing more competition to his business by revealing so much detail. May this act of goodwill result in your receiving it back hundredfold!
Amy
Wow! Thank you for this inspiring interview.
Sick setup, Mation!
Guys I've edited the case study - please note the new paragraph regarding gender targeting:
By the way - rule of thumb: Never touch a running adset. If you want to make changes, duplicate the adset to include the changes you want, then either disable the original adset or leave it running depending on what you're wanting to accomplish.
Amy
Well played!
Loving the spy-tool tip. Such a simple yet extremely effective approach.
Mation is the man!! I'm making money right now thanks to him If he didn't help me out, i would have gone broke and probably been found lying around dead somewhere.
There's not many people like him. Thank you so much Mation
Originally Posted by moneym
Amy
This was a good read, thanks.
1. Not sure what the author means by "grey hat." Based on screenshots, this is likely a binary/crypto campaign? That would be blackhat, not greyhat. Unless I'm missing something?
2. ROI seems great when looking at ad spend, but what about account costs? How ad accounts were needed to generate $800k in revenue and how much did they cost?
Great Post.
Looking forward for this info to see if i am doing it right.
Mation: I will provide this information later.
Boom!
Thank you Amy and Maion for this very inspirative interview!
awesome share, thanks!
Great share, thanks for taking the time to doing it!
I have something special cooking up as well, hope to share it soon 
Cheers,
Andrew
Originally Posted by symba3
Hey,
Thank you for your comment!
1. Well there's no accurate definition for whitehat, greyhat and blackhat. When I say "greyhat" is about how agressive I am with user experience (landers, ads and offer). These days FB flags based on bad user experience, not really on cloaking - this why so many "whitehat" guys are still complaining about getting flagged.
2. I don't buy accounts
Great numbers!
"For example - showing pictures of local places, changing people's names into local names, using pictures of people that look like locals, etc." this one is very important to get a good CTR + gain peoples trust to convert eventually.
When we talk blackhat or whitehat, I think we have to divide strategy vs campaign. Blackhat basically means decepting (deceiving people, decepting is a word I just made up) people into something. This could be on campaign level "you have won sh*t, enter your number now" and they stuck to a certain subscription. The marketing strategy to pull people to the campaign could be really grey or even white ofcourse.
Even crypto offers could be whitehat, I'v seen some really legit and decent campaigns from a-level companies. So not talking about the Binary code or other shitty VSL-kinda offers.
Originally Posted by stickupkid
Thanks for that and thanks for your consistent contribution to the forum with amazing information!
Eliminating redirects- As you said you are cloaking, so Fb wouldn't see any redirects anyways. Or am I missing something?
Originally Posted by AdzMed
thanks for your great post ,I learned a lot .
as you don't buy accounts, do you mean you create BM accounts by yourself?
Awesome job, Amy!
And thanks for sharing all this info, mation!
Very much looking forward to the follow up of the case study.
Originally Posted by cpalead_hotmail
If you treat the accounts properly, you will be able to raise the limit.
Great interview! Looking forward for more info about it. Thank you a lot, Amy and Mation!!
Thanks Mation! Amazing case study and I love your story, how you basically "grew up with STM", crazy times we're living
Amy - as always, you rock, thanks for taking the time to create this inspiring content!
STM is still the best
Now this is something, thanks for preparing this case study Amy and thanks for revealing so much mation! Great job
Originally Posted by stickupkid
To me, whitehat means there is absolutely no need for cloaker at all.
Greyhat means being aggressive with the landing page in order to boost conversion rate (like having exit popup, or autoplaying video or fake testimonials), and hence needs a cloaker, but having a legitimate offer that could be direct linked and would be approved without cloaker.
BH means the entire business model of the offer (like binary or hidden rebills) is banned by facebook.
Damnnn! Fantastic write up there Amy and you're killin it Mation!
Great advice on the zero redirects, that rule seem to come in play about mid through last year and was one of the simpler lines of defence FB ai was attempting to stamp out 'bad ad practice'.
It definitely is important to note before the not so experienced with FB get super motivated and jump inbetween the lines of what is and isn't allowed on Facebook, that you want to make sure you have an idea of how to obtain accounts which is a constant changing environment these days. You will get enticed by the profits haha but my god the headaches come when you wake up to locked accounts even on "white/grey hat" campaigns.
Also you really hit so many other factors of successful campaigns on the head, running more volume to keep the offer conversion steady and your AM happy is a great one. AM's always seem to be nicer people 
haha and more accomodating when the numbers are high, more faster responses and bargaining power of payouts and caps is a great competitive advantage.
Finance is still a mega market for Facebook!
.... Awaiting your cloaking pixel write up eagerlllyyyy
Thanks Amy and Mation for an awesome case study. This is EXACTLY what STM is all about!
Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app
Boom!
Great case study Mation.
And I still hear people saying affiliate marketing is dead
Originally Posted by bbrock32
Great case study Mation.
And I still hear people saying affiliate marketing is dead
Thanks guys for amazing feedback!
Really motivates me to share more of my experience.
Are these accounts being created brand new from a fresh IP? When one account bans in a BM, im usually not able to make anymore. I assume you are making new accounts unless you are buying?
Originally Posted by symba3
Legendary!
I am gonna meditate so that my shiny object syndrome is not activated :P
Sorry newb here...but why would one want to cloak their FB pixel and/or landing page? TIA
Originally Posted by adubasu
Cloaking isnt 100% bullet proof though, thus bear that in mind if you do decide to go down this path.
Cloaking without redirection - could it be using iframe with script injection?
1. Load safe page
2. Safe page has a reference to a javascript on cloaking service
3. Cloaking service determines if request is permitted based on (2) data collection
4. If traffic is permitted, returned script would then create an iframe and load the content of the money page
5. If traffic is not permitted, returned script would still load an iframe but display safe content instead
Originally Posted by vortex
Cloaking the Pixel with Facebook
…Actually, all traffic sources
Copy the code below into a new html file and call it “thank-you.php” and right after that upload it to your hosting, so it will be like that:
Here’s the code:
<html>
<head>
<title>Thank you!</title>
</head>
<body>
<img src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=PIXEL-ID-HERE&noscript=1&ev=PIXEL-EVENT-HERE" />
</body>
</html>
If you access that thank-you.php file from the browser, you will see that the pixel is active.
Now, all you got to do is to setup the pixel on the affiliate network. On this stage I suggest you consult your affiliate manager, but the idea is this, you want to take the IFRAME script below, and paste it on the network side, so when conversion is happened, this IFRAME will be loaded.
<iframe src="http://domain.com/thank-you.php" width="1" height="1" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Here’s how it will look like:
I have a few questions here:
1)How would we use the "thank-you.php file"? Did we just upload this "thank-you.php file" to our server and it's done? Do users need to view this "thank you" page after they complete a conversion in the offer page?
2)Do we just replace the "http://domain.com" in the IFRAME script with my landing page domain and paste it in the network platform?
3)I usually saw 3 options in the platform of a network(See below). If we paste the IFRAME script, which option shall we choose? Image pixel or javascript code?
4)Could we just input our "lead" or "purchase" FB event pixel code directly in the Javascript code on the network platform. Will this also work?
Thanks.
Originally Posted by aaronljx
I have seen techniques similar to the one you are mentioning. The most difficult part is classifying the traffic.
Originally Posted by fuyuzhelianmeng
I have a few questions here:
1)How would we use the "thank-you.php file"? Did we just upload this "thank-you.php file" to our server and it's done? Do users need to view this "thank you" page after they complete a conversion in the offer page?
2)Do we just replace the "http://domain.com" in the IFRAME script with my landing page domain and paste it in the network platform?
3)I usually saw 3 options in the platform of a network(See below). If we paste the IFRAME script, which option shall we choose? Image pixel or javascript code?
4)Could we just input our "lead" or "purchase" FB event pixel code directly in the Javascript code on the network platform. Will this also work?
Thanks.
Tell us if you are running your own offers, affiliate offers, cloaking or not. Based on that, we can suggest options.
send a computer to someone and have them install teamviewer to be able to access their computer remotely and make sure the computer is on never sleep
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