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Gaming FB campaign Launched January 31/2012 (26)

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Hi Everyone,

Tony here. I've been doing FB PPC on a daily basis for a period of 4-5 month seriously. I have yet to find a profitable campaign. Although have made $1000 plus commissions per month with negative ROI's. However I believe FB will and can be profitable and in fact FB is an animal that has to be domesticated in order to be able to milk it right

Jumping right into the matter,

One of the campaigns I am working on right now is a Gaming one. I have just launched it yesterday to test it and here are the Facts:

Gaming Campaign (Jan31/12) DAY 1

STATS

CPC: $0.41
Impressions: 152,000
Over all CTR: 0.079%
Clicks: 121
Payout: $1.30
Conversions: 5
Revenue: $6.50
Spent: $49.86
ROI: - 86 %
Income: (-$40.36)

* 50 Creatives/images, 1 text, 1 body. targeting USA, Males, 5 keywords related to the game, with images/title and body tightly targeted to my demographics.

Questions;

- One thing to mention, is that for the first time I am targeting my ads broad ( a whole country) to all U.S. and one thing I noticed was that if I don't pay attention FB will go thru my daily spend really quick, hence it took $50 in less than an hour and gave 121,000 impressions/111 clicks to one of my ads and about 1000 to all the other ones with barely a click or two. Should I create smaller campaigns (4ads each) even for my initial test? Any tips as to what consider when targeting broad? any cons and pros would be appreciated?

- Also was wondering if it is possible to profit from an offer that pays only $1.30 on FB? or should I be targeting more countries? I have a good amount of capital and can actually go big so money is not the issue I just don't want to lose it testing the wrong way.

Thanks,
I'll keep you updated,

Tony.

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1) Less creatives. Use 2-5 images at first with duplicates of each. Waaay too many adverts. Definitely break into smaller campaigns.

2) Split the demo into age groups. If targeting males make separate campaigns for e.g. 13-17, 18-23, 24-30, 35-65 etc depending on the demo sizes in each block.

3) Find more keywords related to the game. The lowest number of keywords I have ever hit for a game is probably around 15. There are always more.

4) With such a broad audience when one ad takes hold it can get over-delivered and clicked way faster than FB can respond to stay within your budget. That's why your ad dominated impressions/clicks and blew your budget. Splitting into smaller tighter groups helps minimise this - no one wants all the 14 year olds clicking and sapping budget away from the older demos!

5) Broad I think isn't about demo size but about the targeting. If you target people who like car racing games you are going broad. If you target people who like Gran Turismo and Need for Speed you are being targeted.

6) Narrow targeting pro = generally higher CTRs, lower CPCs, better and more stable conversion rates so you can evaluate the offer. Con = demo burns out quicker.
Broad targeting pro = bigger audience, more clicks, potentially longer running campaign, more data. Con = generally lower CTRs, more variable day to day conversion rates, often lower conversion rates, etc.

7) Profit doesn't depend on payout! That's just one number amongst half a dozen that affect ROI. I have profited on offers paying $0.20, $0.85, up to ones paying $3.00 or so.

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Well thanks for making these points. I assume the conclusion is targeting the whole country is ok but it should be better targeted with related keywords to the offer or other creative keywords that would keep ad copy/image/offer itself tightly narrow targeted.

- By the way how much should I test a 2-5 ad campaign for? Like $25?

- Also How do I know how much CPC I have to pay in order to get the kind of ROI I am looking for? I tried to use ROI TOOL at affexpert too but Didn't know what to put for CR. Should I just guess 1%?

Many thanks
Tony.

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I would never broadly target a whole country... I would always split it by gender and in to at least two age groups. That way you can tell which demos are profitable and which are not. What if all female age groups were profitable but older males were not converting? You would be mixing non-profitable and profitable targets together and making nothing.

I generally start out with $10 budgets on each demo split and scale from there depending on how things go. Keep the budget jumps small - don't go yay this demo is profitable and jump from $10/day to $200, especially if there are other ads that have not yet been clicked. Easy way to flood your campaign and waste a lot of money in a short burst.

ROI is all about your EPC being higher than CPC. You need to know what your EPCs are on your network end before you can consider this, and it's going to vary with gender and age. Conversion rate is somewhat inclusive in the EPC, don't guess the rates or assume anything - let the data tell you what they are. Once you have data and some general EPCs you can say hmmm I need <0.10 CPC to make that ad profitable, and in turn you can, based on the CPCs Facebook is giving you, get an idea of the CTR an ad will need to get below that. Keep your bids as they were as you're getting data, don't drop your bid to $0.08 the moment you figure that's the CPC you need - FB doesn't work like that, better to let a high CTR bring the CPC down than to try and force it down with bid. You will just lose most of your ad traffic.

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@zeno, how you increase your $10/day adspend if you found your profitable demo ?

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Small increments every 2 hours or so - I would say go $10 - $20 - $ 40 - $60 - $100 if I had multiple ads being tested. If you have 0 click ads you need to do it like this if you don't want to risk one crappy ad taking hold and eating all your profit. Assess stats before every jump, pause/kill any ads which pop in and have crappy stats.

If you had only established ads, e.g. 3 ads all with 20+ clicks and getting conversions, CPC established a bit better and such, I might do bigger jumps - e.g. $10 - $40 - $100 - $200. I would be really hesitant these days to jump right up to $1000/day or anything like that without first having a few days at a medium budget and having only established ads. Too easy to wake up and find what could've been $500 profit was $300 because of some gimp ad running at -300% ROI.

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Hi guys,

zeno, your posts are golden. It seems so logical now for me, thank you.
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but you basically have 1 campaign per demo, or at least, per age at the end of the day?
(assuming when you say "adgroup", it means in fact "campaign" in the FB Ads manager)

So if we target 30-50 yo, we would get 21 campaigns, correct?
You must have a loooooot of campaigns in your FB manager, how do you handle it?

tonyt2929 > good luck with your campaign

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@Zeno: Thanks a lot for the update.
@Julien: You don't actually need to make 21 campaigns. I mean you could if you really wanted to dig deep and see which exact age is making you profit. But I think what Zeno meant was groups of like 18-24,25-30, 31-35...see the pattern...5 to 6 ages at once. Anyways Thanks and good luck to you too!

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Yeah in age blocks, so one campaign for M 18-24, one for F 18-24, one for M 25-30, and so on. I wouldn't split down to single age unless I was doing some crazy ass broad campaign with 100'000's of people at each individual age. Even then I probably wouldn't go that narrow.

With managing them all, I use SAM by BrighterOption so I don't really have to worry about that. I just automatically split them into age blocks and can at the end of the day can optimise the demos individually, or look at all the adverts together and adjust bids/pause/kill based on their stats throughout the day. So takes me a fraction of the time it must take through the FB advertising centre, shiit. I'm not full time IM so I can't afford to spend that much time dealing with managing/stats.

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Ok thank you guys, I'll give it a try with my future campaigns

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STATS


Overall CPC: $0.51
Overall Impressions: 203,288
best performing ad's CTR: 0.285
Over all CTR: 0.069%
Clicks: 220
Payout: $1.30
Conversions: 13
Highest number of conv per ad: 2
Revenue: $16.90
Spent: $92.35
ROI: - 81 %
Income: (-$75.45)

Demos:


* 40 active Creatives, 10 paused, 1 text, 1 body, 50+ images targeting USA, Males, 15 keywords related to the game, with images/title and body tightly targeted to my demographics.

- Unfortunately I was not able to post anything hence I had my head buried in sand trying to figure out some conversion issues. However I will be posting daily about this campaign from now on.

- I am a bit concern that I won't be able to make this campaign profitable. The Payout is $1.30 and I need at least an 0.18 cents EPC to make any kind of profit. Is it really possible to be profitable with this offer on facebook???

Cheers.

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generally disagree those who try to broad target their FB campaign first even they don't have any profitable campaign in the past, your success rate of finding winning campaign is always proportional with your experience in affiliate marketing,

1. go for international traffic first
2. focus on one single niche
3. fire up your notepad or evernote or onenote, go through this forum, jot down a process flow how to reduce your CPC, increase CTR, create campaign, optimize campaign, choose winning demo, images
4. keep on fine tune your number 3 process, for sure you will find your winning campaign soon.

I was able to make a US campaign profitable at $1.35 before with narrow demo until the offer got pulled Take baby steps, learn from each defeat well, you will increase your sucesss rate a lot, remember the 10000 hour.

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FB is one of the places you can def make great money even with that payout because FB has VOLUME. I've built quite a few very profitable camps with tiny payouts, but one thing they all had in common was that they all produced a negative ROI at first.

Start breaking down what's working and focus on getting a higher CTR. Take the top 3 images that worked and don't be afraid to try some new headline copy.

You say you're targeting keywords related to the game, but how are those keywords related? This will make a big difference in CTR's. For example if it was a sci-fi game and you used the keywords "star wars" and "star trek" those might be loosely related, but the audiences are totally different. If your keyword list looks like that I would break it up into different camps and focus on one group at a time.

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for simplicity's sake, start with the ad that has the best overall CTR, and test that ad thoroughly with 25+ different srcs (1 campaign, 5 same ads, targeting 1 src, example, star trek, etc.) and so on.

Bid 80% of the cpc range, and set the test budgets to 20$ per campaign, you will probably see some that are profitable or close to profitable, after 1 day and atleast 30 clicks per camapign, lower the CPC (if CTR is .15+) to the mid range and do this once a day.

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- Thanks H2010 and Scotchsales

@ Blackberry:

* so you are saying to take the best CTR performing ads . Should I ignore the other ads that made 1 or 2 conversions and just go with the highest CTR ad?

* Also by testing the best CTR ad with 25+ sources you meant exe; grab the best CTR ad, make 5 copies of the same ad in one campaign, all of them targeting different kwds? should I not change the ad copy or anything else?

Thanks for the tips
Tony.

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well its hard to say, If you dont have enough data, take the ad with a decent CTR/conversion rate, otherwise you might choose an ad that has good ctr and crappy conversion rates.

I drew a little image in paint to help you understand it better...

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read this hear.. to explain what i am talking about

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ok-**UPDATED**

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What kind of cpc did you get down to? I tried my first offer which also had a payout of 1.30$, suggested bids are around $1 though. CTR got to about .06% at the best but didn't want to keep throwing money at that as I know it converts at best around 10% from previous testing and here wasn't converting at all.

The demo was female, over 40 and likes pets. I'd assume with US click prices you would need quite a narrow target to get CTR up. Mine seemed too broad so would need better angle if I tried again.

But just curious as to what's possible to aim for on US CPC costs.

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with offers that are around 1-3$ payouts you need CPCs to be .10-.30

Londonaff, sounds like your CTR is too low, try using "angles" and target more targeted sources, instead of broad sources..

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I add on what Scot and berry's saying, based on your stats, you definitely must know how to reduce raise your CTR, i mean testing images/ads/headline

Overall CPC: $0.51
Overall Impressions: 203,288
best performing ad's CTR: 0.285
Over all CTR: 0.069%
Clicks: 220
Payout: $1.30
Conversions: 13
Highest number of conv per ad: 2
Revenue: $16.90
Spent: $92.35
ROI: - 81 %
Income: (-$75.45)

you spend $92.35 for 10 leads ? i believe it is overspend, your campaign will able to show you some promising ads. about winning demo, think in your visitor shoes , not yours

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it is not too broad, just go for international market first, then tackle US market once you have more experience, affiliate marketing is like playing computer games, you can win mission 1 easily, at least you know what you're doing, but not the advance mission, it is suicide, its all about baby steps

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Cheers, I initially thought targeting pets would be enough but after reading here more on angles I realized that was pretty broad. I also realized I've sent about 30 clicks from FB now and no conversions. On POF I was getting almost 10% but on limited traffic test.

So CPC of .10 is doable then in US I assume, just need the CTR up.

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Going to try that next, been checking out estimated bid prices on international traffic and much lower so should be more margin to test out and learn FB with. This particular offer was US only so will find something else.

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STATS


Overall CPC: $0.69
Best CPC: 0.17 c (This ad had 73 clicks but only 1 conversion, I think it was misleading hence I tried to relate women=Golf)
Overall Impressions: 183,607
Over all CTR: 0.069%
best performing ad's CTR: 0.393
Best performing Age range: 65-any (80% convs)/40-44 (20% convs)
Clicks: 202
Payout: $1.30
Conversions: 12
Highest number of conv per ad: 6
Revenue: $15.60
Spent: $ 79.99
ROI: - 80 %
Income: (-$64.39)

Demos:


* 77 Creatives paused tonight for optimization, 2 texts, 1 body, 40 images targeting USA, CA, Males, 15 keywords related to the game, with images/title and body tightly targeted to my demographics.

- This game is related to Golf. After testing for a week now, I can see that the 65 and older demo is the one converting 80% of the time with an estimate CTR of 0.160 I was targeting this demographic with up close pictures of Tiger Wood.

- the 40-44 year olds were bringing in only 20% of the convs, however they had the highest CTR 0.393-0.4. Though this is probably due to the fact that I was using Pictures of sexy women playing golf lol and it might have been misleading (dating offer). (Now that I think of this, I should have thrown a dating offer instead). I sure would have made a killing. It's not too late to throw one anyways :-D

- Conclusion; So after having spent $222.20, with $32.50 conversions. I have been able to raise my CTR and bring down my CPC for the most part. However I have not seen an abundance in Conversions. I am not sure if I should change the angle yet or keep working on this same angle till I make it profitable or move on to another US city (CA is only targeting 17,000 males) or even another country for that matter.

Please feel free to leave your comments as any tips are appreciated :-)

thanks and Cheers,
T

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are you running world golf tour? if so, I really don't suggest it as i couldn't even make it work... also, if this is a game and you are targeting 65+ thats not good...

most games work best with males 18-40ish, also sounds like your Ctrs are low and you need to use angles to get them up...

read this man: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...p-Lowering-CPC!

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Campaign stopped. Wasn't yielding any profit with constant - ROI.

Total Spend: $350
Conversions:$70

I was using girls playing golf angle and there were only few that made it past the review team. They had .2 + CTR lots of traffic at .12 cpc but low volume conversion rates.

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