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Is BH A Waste of Time In 2019? (37)

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Hey STM,

So I've been delving into the world of BH on Facebook for the past few months and I know there's a lot of posts that pose similar questions, but the answers are always vague and/or outdated. I'm sure BH was awesome in 2011 and I'm sure "some people are making 'good' money," but as a newbie, that doesn't lend itself to the cause very well. Every time I overcome one issue, another pops up and I'm in the low $xx,xxx working out these "kinks."

For the sake of encouragement/reality check for me and people in a similar boat, I'm wondering if low xxxx profits is still possible on FB without a massive team running blackhat ads or if I'm better off abandoning the idea and exploring native or switching to WH (which I know many people are going towards anyway). Not looking for an explanation of how to do it, just want to know my time isn't invested in vain.

Thanks guys!

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I think if you have a lot of patience and start building from x to xx to xxx a day it’s still doable. Loads of non agressive angles work on Facebook, for example sweeps.

But it’s true I am more aware of the stuff my team does. I would go insane if I didn’t had them!


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First thing first, learn how to cloak. Then cloak on Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can achieve wonders. No better traffic than these search engines in the whole world. and i am not speaking just theory, if you know what i mean

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Isn't cloaking likely to get an account banned with those traffic sources sooner or later?

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Yes, and to combat that, you need a plethora of accounts. That is one big piece of the puzzle when it comes to BH.

If you have winning campaigns with 200% - 400% ROI + a lot of accs, you will be hit 7 figures in a quicker time than doing WH `

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From my experience BH on FB has become much more of an account/ constant relaunching grind than compared to a year ago (or even 6 months ago for that matter, 2019 has been brutal for bans). Still makes decent money but much more effort required for less return. In the process of pivoting to full WH stuff at the moment.

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Hi @atsatlantic57. Black hat is difficult to get into but can make money very fast. Because it's all about accounts now, it requires a lot of effort. White hat, on the other hand, can provide consistency. There may be lower margins but it's more sustainable and easier to scale IMHO.

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Thanks for the input guys. I've got the cloaking setup down and I'm getting decent at sourcing accounts. The plan is definitely to go WH, but ideally I'd like to earn mid xxx on BH until I have a decent amount of liquidity. I guess I'm just trying to figure out if that's still doable or if I'm chasing something that doesn't really exist any more.

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Have you read this report?

https://stmforum.com/whats-working-2019/

A large part of the report consists of answers to your exact question.



Amy

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BH feels totally saturated, it's easier do start out earlier, easier than WH and there is a lot of people that you'll need to competite. It's worth to try, learn some aspects from this, for example how to cloak, how to setup campaign correclly etc, but there is nothing stable with that.

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The space has changed a lot this year, if you want to get into it you really need to keep the account costs at a minimum and have access to plenty of them.

A scary place to be is to be buying accounts from sellers for $500+ and at the same time testing for new campaigns, it can become expensive very fast.

Reports from most is accounts can last anywhere from $200-5k (experience this too), so its turning more into a 'churn n burn' game. ROI issues are the biggest echos at the moment.

What we've done to keep ROI decent is

- Source our own accounts from T2 geos

- No english campaigns

- Unsaturated geos most stay away from with still performing offers. Nearly all our clicks from FB is <$0.01

- Test a tonne of offers

- Appeal, appeal, appeal and appeal again lol

- Angles are 100% own created and we rotate in new ones every 2-3 weeks.

- Our ads currently resemble an e-com feel, yet they have a written adtext on them which is much more blatant then the headline/adcopy in FB. I used to have PTSD this was triggering bans, but I've sat multiple times speaking to FB chat support for the ad to go into 1-2-3x manual reviews and still be active by the time I woke up lol

- Dependant on multiple angles/geos rather then pushing to slay 1 big geo anymore

- Using slang and many localised aspects of the targeted geo (thankfully found some good translators on Fiverr we call upon often now)

- Every single FB ad account we ever use is 100% unique, never double images, never copy headlines/adcopies exactly the same everything is fresh in some way

- Duplicating adsets 5-10x and raising adsets accordingly to best CPA, instead of just raising 1. Our ROI was kinda hit or miss when running 1 adset, but now the pool is spread better across each account.

- Airtable <3 (f##k doing all this management with google sheets lol ) With this tool you can tag campaigns with geo, angle, mark it flagged/appealed/in review its dynamic capabilities have been life saving for managing many accounts alive at once

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Couldn't have said it better. Specially I see many people who manage multiple ad accounts with shady stuff, they just copy their winning campaigns EXACTLY. Remember that facebook's DB saves all images with a single hash, so even if you add a black border or anything minor to the image and upload it, it comes up as a completely different hash code and becomes unique.

Same for the ad copy and headline. Just add an extra "!" or maybe ".." and its a completely new piece of text for most part.

Secondly, if you want to try the most prominent GEOs (US, UK, CA etc) try targeting people with different language. Target "People who speak italian" in the US with an italian ad copy/headline combination, which in turn would give you the benefit of the high EPCS/payout for USA as well as amazingly cheap CPMs as well as more lenient approvals.

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0oo0o nice tip man - that definitely opened my mind to some new ideas

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Glad I could help.

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Hi maynzie,

I find appeal kinda hit or miss. Sometimes they just reactivate the account after the first appeal sometimes on the second but most the time after they denied the appeal for the first time, they will deny all suceeding appeals. How many times of appealing in your experience in which the account have a chance to be reactivated?

Do you duplicate the ad sets with same targeting and get the same or better performance(cpc and cr%) most of the time?

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Is it possible to make money promoting affiliate offers through WH on FB? Seems like the margins are thin as is and most WH ads are for dropshipping. I'm assuming these types of offers arent what you find on the usual affiliate network and you really have to track them down.

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Had some come back on the second or third appeal, its a low number but its easy to appeal with VA so we just shoot for a few more coming back but any denying after that its gone

Yep, exact same copies, usually 2 of them is better, 1-2 is similar or 1-2 is less then original is what I find.

I've had adsets do 3x+ better then original though quite a few times this week

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Some great info in this thread.

What's VA? We usually appeal through the standard forms with similar wording for different accounts. Lately it seems harder to recover accounts.

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I think he meant Virtual Assistant

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Haha yeah meant Virtual assistants, for sure if your account spend more then 50$ before it flags its much harder to get back but before that in spend we get nearly all back and they're much stronger at that point.

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In our case, we have a template for appeal and a VA will just copy and paste. But the past couple of month we also noticed its much harder to recover an account either in the first appeal or in the succeeding ones even ad spend is more than 1k.

Do you know other factors that they consider when handling appeal?

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Oh yeah I notice if they go down anything past $50 its harder for us to get back ($1k+ flags we don't get back at all, unless its flagged on a new campaign submission on the account and there has been no traffic to that new campaign then there are quite a few times we get it back) but most of ours policy flags are very early and we get them back.

So many people have different experiences with the flags.

And I got no idea how the appeals work but my friend who handles many many accounts says he sends in profile pictures of horses and appeals of like "F##k you" and they will reactivate so I'm kinda unaware the process behind it lol

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Will have to try that out. lol

Lately I have seen fb support repsonses have been smarter than before too. Not like generic templates in many cases.

Today I appealed for a banned ad account for the third time (after a few days gap) and the response was like "I took a look at your account for the third time and we are sorry to say..." blah blah.

They are evolving haha.

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Lol, fucking brilliant!!

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haha yep for sure, and yeah it seems to get tighter on appeals towards end of months and quarters anyone else notice this?

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With some our BH stuff we've been getting this message on a lot of campaigns lately, anyone has a similar experience?
It eventually leads to a grind of relaunching campaigns, tweaking the creative every time.
But recently it seems that it doesn't matter and ads get flagged almost immediately after launching.
I know this type of message has been around for a while but it seems to be a lot harsher these days.
I'm thinking this might be more of a post-click experience issue.

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Running BH native is a lot harder than running BH facebook.

Its almost impossible to get Taboola accounts nowadays.

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Running BH native is a lot harder than running BH facebook.

Its almost impossible to get Taboola accounts nowadays.

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I see quite a few people mentioning that accounts is the issue, when you have a solid farm this shouldn't be an issue tbh. For us it seems to be more about getting the right traffic because over the past 3 weeks our ROI dropped to the point where we have stopped allot of our campaigns at the moment figuring out what to do.

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New/fresh ads and images. Recycle more.

"`when you have a solid farm this shouldn't be an issue tbh." Setting up a proper farm takes proper time/money/manpower...

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Thanks for your reply! We're doing new ads/images all the time, never posted on STM before but we've been running for the last three years and build a nice team over that time period. But for some reason the last three weeks have been a bit hard for us, low CTR low CR just feels like we overall are getting the wrong traffic at the moment, could be temporary tho.

As for the farm, totally agree, don't under estimate the effort of setting this up it cost us allot of time & money to get it right, even redesigned the entire process after one year because we hit some issues back then. Besides that we have created a-lot of custom tooling thats helping us dropping the cost of farming each account over the years. For us this results in no account issues at the moment.

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You're not alone (can confirm the same thing happening to huge % of others), since a few days before AWE something changed. It feels so random which roll of the dice of traffic quality you will get at the moment. Some accounts do well, some do poor, even when rotating new ads and copies, even some so far from profit yet very similar on another account is profitable.

... Bit of a labyrinth atm lol

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Seeing the exact same thing also, CR has dropped significantly on the nutra offers I usually run since a few days before AWE like you said. I'm still getting decent CTR's on the ad copy, and great CTR's on my landers, just a terrible conversion rate. I've used my normal LAL, tried broad targeting, and other interest targeting that use to work but nothing...

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It sounds like your angles getting ripped fast and/or your accounts are too weak man. Don't underestimate the differences between accounts like @maynzie mentioned.. poor accounts get bad placements, resulting in bad results spread over the whole funnel.

In contrary to above stories, our last weeks were one of the best ever honestly. I am not saying FB is giving is GOLD traffic only (since it's also because of a new angle we did), I am just saying there is not a significant difference in quality of traffic here. And I know other sweeps guys are ramping up big time too! Could be a vertical thing maybe? I mean Nutra ofcourse is one of the verticals getting hit hardest lately!

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How are you using AirTable? And why is better than google sheet? Curious because we used google sheet pretty extensively. But I see a lot of people love airtable


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Using Airtable for everything lol, P/L sheets, account renting management, account status (toggle status of warming, ready, in review, appeal, active, flagged etc), all campaigns (geo tags, angle tags, budget tags, CC tags etc) etc

Its kinda like google sheets quantum leaped, all dynamic and visually presented well without having 10+ sheets. Its been game changer for us to keep management easier.

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I would suggest lead gen if you want to promote WH affiliate offers for FB... Solar, EDU, auto warranty are some examples...

And if you want to build an asset I recommend creating a funnel to collect your own leads before sending people off to the offer page.

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