Doryphoros VS Facebook: An Epic Noob Battle (51)

After reading some of the journals here, I was inspired to write one of my own. This is probably the best way to get all my newbie questions out and hopefully answered instead of starting new threads all the time (as I've been doing) whenever I have a question. Hopefully this will entertain some of you.

Just in case anyone cares, my name is Tom, I'm 22, I live in LA, I work on the critical care transport team at a hospital, and I'm a college student.

I first heard about IM a few months ago through a thread on the bodybuilding.com forums (what up miscers). In reading that, I got the gist of affiliate marketing/blogging for adsense pennies etc. That thread led me to the nickycakes guide, which led me to wickedfire, which led to STM. At the beginning of december I read up on html, watched a few videos on wp, bought some hosting and domains and put up a site. I learned a lot by doing that.

A week ago, I started my first venture into AM. I started selling a game guide (leveling, pvp, gold farming etc.) from clickbank for a popular PC game. I decided to advertise with facebook, and I've been just about breaking even. Some days I've been making a little profit. I'm going to start up a few more camaigns tomorrow.

I started with about 3 ads, all with the same creative, and slightly different titles/text, and a $20/day ad spend. I lost money the first day or two, then started breaking even. I've added some more ads, started targeting by age, and I'm now split testing about 10 ads/creatives etc and spending $50/day (and making back 40-60/day) My best day was $70 gross. I'm learning a lot about advertising. There are a shitload of little tricks that apparently work. I changed the title of one of my ads from asdasd guide to BEST asdasd guide and it started getting a hell of a lot more clicks. Also, it seems that calling it the "best-selling asdasd guide" makes people a lot more likely to click. I've found that using a pic of a hot girl character from the game gets me a lot more clicks as well

I've obviously got a lot to learn, and I'll be sharing my plans, mistakes, smart moves, epic fails etc. and hopefully receive some feedback from all you internet ballers.

Hmm. Earlier today I added the UK to my targeting (created separate ads for them) and they're not showing...at all. The bids are well above the suggested range. It's 9am there, I'm sure some of them are up and on facebook.

On another note, yesterday fb decided to f me in the b. One of my ads got 102k reach x 3 freq. in 5 minutes, which gave me 116 clicks. That destroyed my ad budget for the day because for some reason my cpc on that ad was $0.70.

No longer breaking even. I'm testing out some new ads now, and applying some of the info I've learned here (in one day!), like not pausing my campaigns, just reducing the bid to $0.01 during the hours I don't want them running.

Tomorrow I'd like to start looking into some CPA stuff to run along with this ebook (I'm determined to make it profitable).

Anyone got some good suggestions for verticals? I know dating is always good, but I feel like it would be hard to compete with the big boys on that one unless I go really niched or target non US, UK, AUS, CAN.

Any suggestions or help would be infinitely appreciated. I'm determined to be a professional money stacker, and you will watch me become one by the end of this thread.

Score:

~$400 spent
~$250 made

FB: 1
Me: 0

congratulation bro on the progress even if you're not making ROI right now but am sure you'll as long as you're a member here.

I just launched my first facebook campaign ever yesterday after reading a guide here and i was breaking even with 0.2 CTR ad so if I managed to break even with my first ad ever and am not even native am sure you'll make Decent positive ROI soon.

Good luck

I think I have a theory as to why my ads aren't showing.
I've got all my ads in the same campaign, and I had about 3 ads per age group (same text different creative) targeting the same exact demos, same exact bid.

Are my ads competing against each other for imrpessions? I mean, I figure my ads would be showing ($0.81 max bid with cpc around .20-.30, targeted by age, UK geo, interest) and its like 10am in the UK. In total, these ads target about 100k people.

Well I guess that wasn't the case. I really don't know why these ads aren't showing. Anyone got any ideas?

I usually upload 4-5 of the same ad, and run them at the same time, and just see which one(s) take off and delete the others. One might get better placement over the others, therefore likely giving you a higher initial CTR which is what you need to start out with to get the CPC down.

Nice follow along!

Yeah I just unpaused my ads. For some reason they just are not getting impressions...literally 0.

These same ads got plenty of impressions/clicks yesterday with the same bid and everything. I have no idea what's going on here.

EDIT: When I go to the "full report" it seems to show a few hundred impressions for some of the ads, and a couple of clicks here and there (still nothing like yesterday), but they're not showing up on the dashboard. I've never seen FB stats lag this badly.

Maybe it's just because it's Sunday and people are sleeping in or something.

EDIT AGAIN: Woo they just started going. .4 CTR on almost all of them. Lowest CPCs I've seen since I started $0.11-$0.14!

I'm beginning to realize that I need to start using prosper202. So far I've been tracking CTR on FB, and giving each ad a unique TID for the clickbank hoplink.


It works, but it's exhausting to keep track of.

Will CPC continue to go up/down after about 6k impressions, or does FB kind of make a decision right at the beginning and stick with that?

Originally Posted by doryphoros

Will CPC continue to go up/down after about 6k impressions, or does FB kind of make a decision right at the beginning and stick with that?

So would it be a smart strategy to delete/resubmit ads that have good CTR after a few thousand impressions, but don't get the best CPC right off the bat.

Wow...

Organizing and optimizing, and adding the UK and AUS market had a HUGE effect on the campaign. I'm not quite breaking even for the day (pretty close), but I spent a LOT less today for more clicks.

Adding the UK/Aus is nice because now I've got three timezones to make money in (I stop running the ads around 5pm local timezones, start around 8am)
Also, I'm no longer pausing the campaigns thanks to info I've learned on this forum, just letting the daily budget max out (even if that means lowering it to $1) when I want the ad to stop running.

Here's how day 1 in the UK ended. These are some of the best CTRs I've seen and I'm hoping the CPC goes down tomorrow. Otherwise I could just resubmit all of the good ones from here in the hopes that the CPC will be lower. Will update with US and AUS stats later today.

UK

another piece of advice never pause and resume your campaigns.. simply change the budget to $5 and this will work better.. fb algorithm is weird and not similar to other platforms therefore it's been observed that when you pause and resume it hurts the pefrormance..

on p202 - you need to get a server check out beyondhosting.net (tyler is a member here too) they have some VPS which come pre-installed. You also want to make sure you add an SSL (they can install it for you it's really no hassle) so that you can do secure directs (some networks need secure pixels anyway like EWA).

keep grinding and keep us posted

Originally Posted by sm1810

another piece of advice never pause and resume your campaigns.. simply change the budget to $5 and this will work better.. fb algorithm is weird and not similar to other platforms therefore it's been observed that when you pause and resume it hurts the pefrormance..

on p202 - you need to get a server check out beyondhosting.net (tyler is a member here too) they have some VPS which come pre-installed. You also want to make sure you add an SSL (they can install it for you it's really no hassle) so that you can do secure directs (some networks need secure pixels anyway like EWA).

keep grinding and keep us posted

no what I'm saying is it doesn't matter what your budget is.. if you feel like pausing simply change the campaign budget to $5 if you're over $5 it will just stop delivering the ads and will show the triangle w/no delivery msg but it's better than hitting pause

Gotcha

Originally Posted by doryphoros

So would it be a smart strategy to delete/resubmit ads that have good CTR after a few thousand impressions, but don't get the best CPC right off the bat.

-Today's summary-

In case anyone's wondering how I have this structured, the campaigns are split up by offer(2) and by targeted location(2). Within those campaigns are ads which target the age ranges. 4 Campaigns total.


:/ Still losing money.

The good thing is that I got about 4x as many clicks for the same price I've been spending (got CTR down to about 1/4 of what they were across the board.) Which means I'm obviously doing something right (mostly stuff I've learned on this forum in the last two days, no joke)


So, seeing as how I have more clicks, lower CPC, way higher CTR...It actually converted a hell of a lot worse than it has been in the past with the crappy stats. Same ads, same target demo, same everything, just better.

The only problem seems to be the offer/LP not converting.




Two theories as to why:

1. Random off day.

*Side note* I started split testing a second offer along side the original one (just another guide for the game from Clickbank, with a different LP. A better LP in my opinon) with the same ads. Both are getting approximately the same CTR/CPC/Clicks. Both are getting approximately the same number of order form impressions.

2. Maybe (and this is just a noob guess of course) because I've been targeting the same group with the same ads/creatives/copies, the people are seeing them and going lolwtf when they click the ad and see that sometimes the same ad takes them to one offer, sometimes to another.


Any help or suggestions are enormously appreciated, and a huge thank you to the guys who have helped me so far.

-One step closer to being a professional money stacker-

End of Day Score:

Spent: $75
Made: $16

Campaign Lifetime:

Spent: $533
Made: $316

Even though it sucks that I'm still in the red, my mindset can not be shaken.

I will NOTrest until I make this campaign make back all its money plenty more. All I can think about is how much I want to succeed in IM.
I don't care if I spend every dollar of every paycheck, eat nothing but ramen noodles (I'm talking 5 for a dollar Top Ramen that comes in a bag, not that fancy ass cup of soup shit).
I don't care if I have to sit at my computer 24/7 and only leave the house for work and cigarettes (I feel sorry for my girlfriend lol).
I don't care if I don't sleep.

My eyes are on the prize, and if I become successful at this, these tougher times will just be a fun story to look back on.

This is Sparta.

your CTR is definitely solid.. I assume your CVR is not up to part so now you need to focus on that... not sure if you're running international (from the CTR if it's dating I assume that's yes) but now it's time to play w/keywords + targeting..

PS I'm blind yes it's CAN/US so play w/keywords should be a piece of cake since all of them are English speaking you also need to start noticing trends in age groups some groups convert better than others.. split your ads in 5 year increments and monitor your CVRs like a hawk.... optimize, optimize, optimize then scale

Firstly, it would be better to structure the campaigns as:
Country A - Gender M - Age group 1
Country A - Gender F - Age group 1
Country A - Gender M - Age group 2
Country A - Gender F - Age group 2
Country B - Gender M - Age group 1
Country B - Gender F - Age group 1
Country B - Gender M - Age group 2
Country B - Gender F - Age group 2

Split test between offers using a PHP redirect rather than multiple campaigns or ads. You want to be able to funnel that traffic to whatever offer without touching your FB campaigns at all.

Split your demos at the campaign level if possible. Splitting M/F is very important as there can be a huge difference in CTR/CVR, the main drawback being if the demo is small you can lose volume. But you usually more than make up for it with better optimisation and insight into where the money is!

Are you tracking the demos precisely with subids so that you know the CTRs and corresponding conversion rates for each age group/country/gender? If you have that data then optimising off that should be your ticket to profit. You may have to kill off an unprofitable demo but don't get emotional about it, just trust the data. If you really want to make that demo work test it again with a new, separate campaign with different ad copy or images. As a gamer myself and someone who runs primarily gaming campaigns I would recommend trying some tweaked ad copy highlighting a specific benefit - i.e. mention fast-track your way to xxx gold daily, or find the secrets to making huge $$$ using X crafting profession.

Originally Posted by sm1810

your CTR is definitely solid.. I assume your CVR is not up to part so now you need to focus on that... not sure if you're running international (from the CTR if it's dating I assume that's yes) but now it's time to play w/keywords + targeting..

PS I'm blind yes it's CAN/US so play w/keywords should be a piece of cake since all of them are English speaking you also need to start noticing trends in age groups some groups convert better than others.. split your ads in 5 year increments and monitor your CVRs like a hawk.... optimize, optimize, optimize then scale

Originally Posted by zeno

Firstly, it would be better to structure the campaigns as:
Country A - Gender M - Age group 1
Country A - Gender F - Age group 1
Country A - Gender M - Age group 2
Country A - Gender F - Age group 2
Country B - Gender M - Age group 1
Country B - Gender F - Age group 1
Country B - Gender M - Age group 2
Country B - Gender F - Age group 2

Split test between offers using a PHP redirect rather than multiple campaigns or ads. You want to be able to funnel that traffic to whatever offer without touching your FB campaigns at all.

Split your demos at the campaign level if possible. Splitting M/F is very important as there can be a huge difference in CTR/CVR, the main drawback being if the demo is small you can lose volume. But you usually more than make up for it with better optimisation and insight into where the money is!

Are you tracking the demos precisely with subids so that you know the CTRs and corresponding conversion rates for each age group/country/gender? If you have that data then optimising off that should be your ticket to profit. You may have to kill off an unprofitable demo but don't get emotional about it, just trust the data. If you really want to make that demo work test it again with a new, separate campaign with different ad copy or images. As a gamer myself and someone who runs primarily gaming campaigns I would recommend trying some tweaked ad copy highlighting a specific benefit - i.e. mention fast-track your way to xxx gold daily, or find the secrets to making huge $$$ using X crafting profession.

Note: Don't delete your running campaigns when making the new ones, they may perform far worse so you want the others to fall back on.

First off you need your own hosting to put the redirect file on - you will have the FB ads point to this file. I split them at the hosting end into folders based on demographic, makes it easier to control each demographic's traffic flow independently. e.g.

http://mytrackingdomain.com/campaign/country/gender/agebracket/index.php

http://mytrackingdomain.com/campaign/country/gender/agebracket/index.php?tid=something

<?php

   $tid = $_GET['tid'];
   
//simple redirect split
$redirect[0] = 'http://xxxxxxx.hop.clickbank.net/?tid='.$tid;
$redirect[1] = 'http://yyyyyyy.hop.clickbank.net/?tid='.$tid;

$number = mt_rand(0,1);

header("Location:$redirect[$number]");

?>

Originally Posted by zeno

Note: Don't delete your running campaigns when making the new ones, they may perform far worse so you want the others to fall back on.

First off you need your own hosting to put the redirect file on - you will have the FB ads point to this file. I split them at the hosting end into folders based on demographic, makes it easier to control each demographic's traffic flow independently. e.g.

HTML Code:

http://mytrackingdomain.com/campaign/country/gender/agebracket/index.php

Make sure you test the links properly before submitting your ads - you want to use a proxy service like overplay to test redirects for outside your country if using affiliate URLs that do redirect (not a problem with Clickbank). When testing links I recommend using Google Chrome in incognito mode or Firefox in private browsing to avoid any browser history/caching effecting things. Press F12 in Chrome -> Network tab or Ctrl+Shift+K in Firefox to watch the http headers as you process the link (more important when doing geo-based redirection!)

Now for your Clickbank links you want to have your TID (or in other cases subids) passed through your redirect:

FB ad URL will look like this:

HTML Code:

http://mytrackingdomain.com/campaign/country/gender/agebracket/index.php?tid=something

Then your redirect file is a simple PHP file with this inside:

Code:

<?php

   $tid = $_GET['tid'];
   
//simple redirect split
$redirect[0] = 'http://xxxxxxx.hop.clickbank.net/?tid='.$tid;
$redirect[1] = 'http://yyyyyyy.hop.clickbank.net/?tid='.$tid;

$number = mt_rand(0,1);

header("Location:$redirect[$number]");

?>

From there on you can change the target that traffic goes to by changing to mt_rand(0,0) or mt_rand(1,1).

Also, when you go to run non-clickbank campaigns that go through affiliate networks you will no doubt deal with geo-redirection on the affiliate link, meaning reviewers/people not from the target country get bounced elsewhere. Bad news during review. When that time comes you'll need to get GeoIP stuff installed on your server and use geo-based redirection in your PHP file. If by that time you're with Beyond Hosting they will be able to install all GeoIP stuff for you.

$564 spend $316 revenue isn't bad at all for a first week man, when I first started I clean lost like $850 on an offer that went nowhere. That sucked. Then on my first campaign that was profiting (bout 2 weeks later) the offer went down overnight, while I slept, just after I had upped my FB budgets to $1000/day. Lost $550 that night.

I tried 'free' marketing/SEO stuff a while back and sucked ass at it so I have no advice.

Originally Posted by zeno

Then on my first campaign that was profiting (bout 2 weeks later) the offer went down overnight, while I slept, just after I had upped my FB budgets to $1000/day. Lost $550 that night.

Sometimes online Marketing can be an exercise in Frustration management. I probably lost over 1K per traffic source to learn them. I think Adsonar was the most expensive at around 5K lost. Your losses are low but I it does suck to loose money. So I feel ya.

POF is one of the easiest to make money on but I am sure it sucked over 1k in losses before I learned it.

Facebook is not the easiest traffic source to start with. So it is great that you started there. I can attest to the fact that I worked really hard to make bank on FB and then got banned. then banned again.

I would always advise someone starting out to use traffic sources you can get a rep and talk to them and won't ban you randomly for no apparent reason.

Good luck. Hope you crush it.

Getting banned after spending that kind of money would literally be the most frustrating experience known to man.

What did they ban you for? Was it easy to make another account, or did you have to jump through hoops (different IP, CC, etc.)

Ugh...not being able to move forward while waiting for this paycheck SUCKS.

I'll be back at it in a couple of days.

Hey Tom, nice follow along campaign.
CPA marketing can be a little frustrating in the beginning, especially when you're paying your dues.
Once you get a hang of how tight your cashflow situation is, you might like to generate some cash by selling away unwanted stuff, doing some freelance stuff. That's one of the challenges in dealing with paid traffic and once you've got over that hurdle, your business is pretty much set.

Paycheck just came in...finally!

Game on

Hey doryphoros, just finally got a chance to read some of this.

I'd recommend your last point ^. Also you need to get your CTR, it's going to be a hard battle at 0.057% CTR!

Originally Posted by stackman

Hey doryphoros, just finally got a chance to read some of this.

I'd recommend your last point ^. Also you need to get your CTR, it's going to be a hard battle at 0.057% CTR!

Yep scrap it, set up again and get prosper all decked out, will be a good exercise anyway.

New batch of ads seems to be doing a lot better. CTRs hovering around .1

About 80 clicks so far...still not a single conversion...

Is the AYI app maybe a bit too saturated? These people might already have it installed.

YEEE BOIIIEE 1 conversion

Alright, I'm excited for today. Going to hit a slightly different angle/targeting. Same basic idea. Got tons of new creatives as well.

One thing I've realized is that only one age group, 25-26, is clicking the ads. I think it's a good idea for me to just optimize that age group into profits, then work on the others.

Ohhhh snap I found a keeper! Nobody even saw it and they still clicked it. hahaha

Haha I like how 0 impressions and 1 click is equal to a 0.236% CTR.

Nice work Harvard nerds.

Things are looking up today! Got a lot of creatives approved, got some good CTR going (all those initial .3 ctrs stayed between .1-.2 after a lot of impressions) CPCs are still relatively high 30c-40c, but I expect those to come down as this CTR holds up. $$$

Spent $31 (Still got $9 to spend for the day...hopefully this ratio improves with all the horny bastards looking for dates on a friday night)
Made $10

Still in the red, but it's looking like its moving in the right direction, and I can get this off the ground!

I still don't have prosper completely figured out, but at least I'm tracking ads and conversions, and I know how to update CPC (all those things are thanks to zeno)

The main thing I need to learn right now is how to update an individual ad's CPC...I've just been using 1 prosper link for all my ads (different kw for each though) there must be a better way to do that than to create a new prosper link for EVERY individual ad. At least I hope there's a better way.

Another thing is that I really need to figure out how FB works with regard to impressions. I have ads that do really well, then the impressions stop, then they go again, then they stop again. It really seems like nonsense, and it makes it hard to really know what's ACTUALLY doing well, as opposed to what's just getting lucky clicks.

My main worry is that I'm not going to have enough time to bring this up to profits...I chose an angle that has an end date...and It's coming up soon.

Oops. I upped my spend to 100k for 5 mins just to see what happened and....

I spent like $70 in that time...facebook doesn't fuck around. Lesson learned

Good news is that my CTR held up through that shitstorm, so my CPCs should go down for tomorrow.

Bad news is I only saw like 5 conversions.

hmm my CPCs still seem pretty high...Even with some ads at .154 and close to 100k impressions, CPC is still .35

There's no way I can make money at this rate since my EPC for that ad is $.04

Lowered my bids, raised my spend. Getting plenty of clicks, but this thing is just NOT converting. Under 1% today and yesterday...

Trying to drop my bids SUPER LOW now. If I could get clicks at .10 I could potentially make money, assuming someone installs this thing.

Basically, I've had 7 conversions in the last 530 clicks...and paying a lot for those clicks btw.

I guess I have two possibilities.

-My ads suck...I mean, people are clicking (most are above .15ctr), but maybe I'm just not SELLING the offer. Obviously I've got some good pictures, maybe polish up the title/copy

-The offer sucks Supposedly AYI has a 10% cvr at the network. I'd be ballin already if I had a 10% cvr.

Dropping my bids to .01 for the time being until I can get some new ad copies approved.

Try adding a lander... if you're using an angle with your targeting, using a lander will help bridge that gap and make a more solid connection to the app... I know it seems counter-intuitive to take them away from facebook and then back again, but there are some case studies showing it works (Thanks Groomez)

Other options would be to switch the offer, rotate the offer with different networks, or change the copy/title of your ad to help sell the AYI app.

Yeah I think a lander is a good idea. I'll set that up today

So I added a landing page. Still not converting, but I'll let it run today, and hopefully it will. I got it from Stackman in one of his threads, and it's exactly the angle I've been doing.

Getting some really great advice. Going to start testing the right way tomorrow. No stupid mistakes.

Don't know if your aware, but FB changed the way the apps work aka request permission and CVR's have been down as a result.

Oh...you think things will even out again, or do you think the cvr for apps is just screwed?

Tom check this post out...

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ighlight=drops

Haven't updated this in a while

I've been doing intl dating, latin america specifically. I figured, I'm losing money learning, so I might as well lose less money (or at least get way more stats for the price). So far I've got one offer going...not making any money, but its the most promising campaign I've had so far. The conversion rate really sucks. I've got a couple of .16-.2 CTR creatives up (tested about 20 creatives so far), just started split testing titles, got a landing page up etc, the thing just doesn't want to convert. I think the landing page needs work...direct linked I had ~4% CVR, and with the lander (~45% LP CTR) it's still a 4% CVR.

I'm going to give it another couple of days, I'll keep testing, I'll make another landing page, and then start looking for other latam dating offers if it still doesn't work.