Yes, this is dogs. Follow Along Facebook. Skilllevel: beginner (23)

Hi everyone,

This is going to be my journal for the beginning of IM.I'm from germany and not a native speaker.

I noticed IM 2 years ago but at this time I startet going to College and set my focus on studying. But I set up everything you need to get started like getting a CC, installing prosper, read forums/articles, got a webspace and domain etc etc.

So half a year later (March /April 2011) I got approved to a network and started making campaigns.
I've done a couple of things in May last year on Facebook and had a gambling Campaign wich made me $2800 in profit. While I was waiting for the paycheck Facebook "asked" me to delete my ads. At this time IM wasn't anything I was serious about and I stopped doing it.

2012 Is gonna be my year, so because of the fact that college sucks I dropped it for a "while". To be honest: I've no ambitions to continue studying =). Therefore earning my living with IM is the goal for me in the next 2 Month. To add a number to it I'm trying to reach $40/d.

My traffic source is still Facebook and I've made a couple of things the last 2 weeks. So in order to introduce you to my foolish concepts of these campaigns I'll reveal it to you. Here we go:

1. Campaign

I started with bingo again because of the good experiences and my lazyness. I still had all the data and the blueprints with kws in my facebookuploader. I uploaded them and:


23.01.2012
They all got approved..."and i said to myself : what a wonderful world".
After setting the bid I started getting expressions clicks and conversions. The first two hours I was about $90 in profit so I kept them live. But the stats at the end of the day looked like that:


(1002-x ;x is in this case the key for a country)

I guess I left the campaings as they were but filtered out the ads with the highest CTR (can't look it up because i had to delete the campaigns). And I made another campaign (1003) with a different offer in an additional country.

24.01.2012
The campaign got approved! 1003-* is a rough agesplit of the same campaign. For the stats:



After this I changed the offer but had to upload it again because the Facebook system seems aware of lander change because my ads were paused after I changed the links in prosper (Am i right?!). And I splitted 1003 again.

25.01.2012

All ads were approved. Stats:



After that I wanted to stop 1004-1, 1004-2 and 1004-3 and let the others continue, but "luckily" I was forced to delete the ads, and facebook set their status to "dissaproved" ..."and I said to myself: MAN I HATE THIS CRAP" .

This was my "first round". After that I spend some time on my hobby and had to motivate myself to continue playing the game of facebook .

2. Campaign

For my secound campaign I have more detailed stats to deliver because I still have the Stats on Facebook.

Offer: Clickbank eBook with $12.21 payout.

What I've done: Collected about 20 pics. Brainstormed about title and Body -> picked the best ones imho. Set up one kw. Picked a country. Posted ads. Waited for approval.

What I haven't done: Set up tracking because I didnt Know how (I know now, will tell you about it later)

30.01.2012 and 31.01.2012

Let it run and waited for about 100 clicks. Stats:




I don't know if testing 20 pics simultaniously is the way to go...please comment this.

01.02.2012

Same offer, same ads but different country. Stats:




So after that I "agesplitted" the campaign took the winning pics set up tracking URLs by using this type of script:

<?php
$offer = array (

'xxx' => "http://xxxxx.clickbank.net/?tid=" . $_GET['ad'],  # campaign memo

);
header("Location: $offer[$oid]");
?>

http://domain.com/folder/script.php?oid=xxx&ad=iwanttotrackage40

Bingo?? is that still allowed? gotta be extra careful these days bro

It is not. Therefore I was forced to delete it. Maybe after some time is passed I'll give it another try, maybe not.

3. Campaign

Campaign is still live so I'm going to post what I've done already and wich stats I've gathered.

Offer: SOI Game, $1.5 Payout.

Targeting:

Using Keywords that aren't games but are related to the overall style of the game. Like TV shows comics etc. (From my point of view now: it were to less and maybe the wrong ones. We'll see)
Age: 13-16
Gender: Both, splitted
Pics: 25

So now to the stuff I've uploaded.

05.02.2012:

Female ads got approved. Increased the bid until impressions came in. Let it run for the budget of $15.

Stats:




Looked good. So I kept it live and added the Male campaign.

06.02.2012

Stats:

Female 1007-1:


Male 1007-2:




So loss at the girl side and profit on the boys.


What I've done now:
-Increased the keyword list.
-splitted it into 3 grps á 5 pictures, 2 ageranges (13-16, 17-19), gender

I've done this splitting because of more data. It seems to me that 20 pics at once cant be tested properly.


Data is coming soon...

They allowed Casino's recently again but bingo is not allowed? lol

-The content promoted in your ad or Sponsored Story violates Facebook's Advertising Guidelines. Please visit our Help Center for additional information and examples compliant with our Advertising Guidelines.

So maybe the ad text was the reason for their dissaproval?
The story line was like this:
-I uploaded a new campaign with the same ads, but added one Title
-all ads were approved but the ones with the new title they had the status pending
-I deleted those ads because of the fact that the campaign was already profitable
-an hour later I recieved this nice little email that said :
"We've noticed that you are currently running Facebook Ads that violate our Terms of Use or Advertising Guidelines, despite having been previously warned to stop running such ads.

We’ve found continual use of ads for products and services that violate our policies, even after clear instructions being sent out. You'll need to delete any ads that do not comply with our policies within 24 hours. Failure to do so will result in your accounts being permanently disabled and the termination of all account management services. "

and all ads went to "dissaproved"
- a few minutes later a recived an email wich said "blaa your ads with the new titles are dissaproved"

I was confused about that point and I don't want to risk my account so I don't upload them again. Maybe I should?!

casino and gambling is allowed only on a buy directly w/fb I think the number I heard was $25-50K.... I've managed to sneak in some casino ads (plenty actually) and got retro-disapproved 3 days later and got similar warning

got to be careful on FB..

08.02.2012

CVR was tracked for each ad but not metioned below just "Grp CVR," now for the stats...

For Adgroup1:

Just one ad clicked.



For Adgroup2:

Multiple Ads clicked but bad CTR.



For Adgroup3:

Mostly clicked by males but didn't convert.



Overall stats:




What I did then:

-Grp1: Had beed tested a day before in spite of the fact that the ROI was negative I still wanted to give it another try.

- Grp2: All ads stopped.

- Grp2: Stayed online for a couple of hours but were stopped later (<- obviously stupid =) )

09.02.2012

I didn't tweaked anything but to sort out the ads with a bad CTR.

Stats:

Ad from grp1. I don't know if I can get the CTR a little better.



Ad from grp3 (that were live a couple of hours)



Overall Stats:



So now I'm at the point where I'm a little confused about what I should do next.

Facts/Problems

-I still have just one title and one body.
-I guess I've found the best picture ( ?! ), of course there are always better ones
-I don't know how to scale it. I'm a little afraid of raising the daily spend limit because of expected performance loss..
-I don't know if you can call this campaign profitable...

What I did:

-Added one title txt
-Added one body txt
-Increased KW list

What I can think of:

- Create Ads that are related by text and picture to the keyword used.
E.g.: Pics of Superman when targeting people who like Superman comics. (just an example)

Would be nice if someone could help me out with that. Thanks.

10.02.2012

I added 5 ads took my winning pics and added one title and one body. This new campaign is called 1007-5. I lowered the daily spend limit for my other campaign (1007-3 adg1, which had 1 successful ad) to $1. Here comes the data:

1007-3


1007-5



Overall:



What I did when I saw the EPC and CPC turned in a way where it became profitable, I raised the daily spend limit for the campaign in steps of about $5-$10. I was very paranoid when I did this =) because of the fear of loosing my ad performance. But it worked and I had a slight success.

I've no idea what to do next.

-Going on for another campaign?
-Doing little tweaks to increase ROI?
-Coming up with this campaign at different age groupes? (had tested 17-19 before with no conv.)
-Run the same offer from a different angle?

Would be nice if anybody could help me out with this. Thanks.

this in indeed good follow up and you definitely got some sick ctr there. Just make sure the offer that you're pushing does convert. Subscribed to this thread!

i smell money, increase your campaign budget... FB is greedy... increase step by step..... keep updating this post....great post !!

11.02.2012

-I had at the beginning of the day 2 campaigns with one ad live.
-Spend limit was for both around $10.

->Figured out the winning ad (better CTR lower CPC, CVR was even).

The hole time was my EPC > CPC in my affiliate interface. But: 31 clicks which didn't reach the offer because of international georedirect made the difference between a EPC where the ROI is in the area of "acceptable" to "tiny profit". Is there a way to get rid of it?

-I raised the daily Spend limit after I figuried out which ad is performing the best. In steps of about $10-$15 and took a deep breath and hoped for not loosing my ad performance. I didn't.

So because of timezones I went to bed but woke up in the night and looked at the campaigns performance. I saw that the campaign is about to break even (was slightly in loss at this time) and raised the spend limit once again for about $15.

So what I got now as data in my p202 is the Leads, CVR, CLicks graph for 3 days. The only conclusion you can get from this data when the party starts but nevertheless I'll use this information today.

For the stats:

1007-3 at the beginng (~100 clicks) CTR was at 0.299%. So that's why I chose this one.


1007-5


Overall:




Meanwhile:

-I came up with 5 new ads, means new body new title new pics. Hugely increased the kw list audience went from 200k -> 470k (kw have the same topic as before, this research was way to easy so i should blame myself to not came up with it at the beginning)

-I created this campaign in a different country same targeting, ads are like the new ones and one more age group just to see if theres something to get.

Can anybody comment about this redirect shit.

12.02.2012

I ran only one ad. At first cpc was around $0.16 but stabalized later at $0.14. CVR was the same and EPC were around $0.18-0.19.So I expected profit. What I got was:

Ad performance:


Overall (stats from my aff.interface):


As you can see there is a difference of 59 clicks (11clicks didn't reach the offer because of georedirect) the other 48 clicks are lost. What I guess where they come from is: Server Error 500. Because a week or two ago I had that same Issue. And one day I noticed that error while trying to use my prosper.

I'll setup my server again.

So back to my campaign...

- Running new ads larger demo (more kw)
- additional country

And see what happens... Data coming soon =)

Is there anybody who had Server Error 500 and could solve this problem? Log doesn't saying anything about it...

13.02.2012


I've run a different country, a campaign with larger keywords and my old ad.

Stats:

Old ad (1007-3 adg1)


Larger KW list (1007-7)


Different Country


Overall:




Next thing I'll do is a keywordsplit.


And I'll have to reset my server what really sucks but I have to get rid of server errors for all times, even it's a small problem now it costs money, time and I suffer a lifequality loss :P. I probably just have to delete my SQL databases and reinstall prosper.


General in IM:

-I'll set myself now a spendlimit of $15 per day it will last until I've got a campaign with at least 50% ROI.

To be honest I'm getting depressed...guess it's part of a greater plan =).

14.02.2012

Different Game almost the same angle as my game before.
Payout: $1.5
Targeting:
- Male
- 13-24 (split to 13-16, 17-24)
- kws split into: 1. games (similar to the offer)
2. overall style of the game anime stuff etc.

1002-1


1002-2


Overall


more's coming...

15.02.2012

1000-1

KW split of my first gaming campaign. picked 2 major kw.



1000-2

Kw split of my first campaign. picked one tv show.



1007-3

This is my first version of the gaming campaign (the one I splitted above) with which I had a little success. I wanted to see how it will perform.



1002-1

This is also a gaming (different game) campaign but international. I tested one ad in english first to see what will happen. (lander was in correct language)



2000-1

Different game from a different network. But the affilate interface has some serious problems because clicks and probably conversions aren' displayed correct. I made a test conversion to see if everything works fine and it didn't. So I contacted my am they tweaked a litte in their system after that it showed up correctly so I started running this offer. But it's the same problem now. Have to talk to them again.

Payout: $1.33
Age: 13-16, 17-24
KW: similar games



2001-1

Same game as 2000-1 but different language and country. Same problem because of same network...

Payout: $1.75
Age: 13-16, 17-24
KW: similar games





Overall stats:




BIG loss... seemed every offer sucked. I don't know.

Haven't posted lately...shame on me.Anyways here comes a big report.

16.02.2012

Tested my 1002 gaming campaign still without translated ad but different angle.

Ad performance:


Result:


I decided to test this angle with translated ad teyt and different pictures. I used "onehourtranslation".

17.02.2012

Ad performance:


Result:


Sorted out bad CTR ads. Ran again.

19-20.02.2012


Ad performance:


Results:



Stopped this campaign here.

21.02.2012

The payout of my first gaming campaign changed from $1.5 to $2.05 so I gave it another try. same angle as before, slightly tweaked the ads.

The day started a bit in loss because of the first period where CPC is equal to your bid. Raised the spend limit after CTR stabilized.

Ad performance:


Campaign result:


Sorted out bad CTR ads lowered bid

22.02.2012

AD performance:


Results:


23.02.2012

tested one additional ad which hadn't any clicks on the days before. Raised spend limit.

Ad performance:


Result:


Ad had a slightly better ctr but worse CVR.

24.02.2012

just the "best" ad.

Ad performance:


Results:


I'm out and we'll see what happen today. I guess performance of the campaign will drop to break even or loss. Maybe I'll run my gaming ads just on Friday seems that there are most conversions made.

Kept the campaign as it was. Just posting the images of my CTR by day and stats for the days at the end.

25.02.2012



26.02.2012




Had to fund my credit card so I had to pause my campaign. Started again at...

29.02.2012




Stats of this period:






What I'll do now is:

- Enlarge the demographic (new age grp)
- Maybe I'll give it another try on my lager kw list (because of higher payout)
- Try new gender (male)

Hope this demo will not burn out too quick. Posting more frequently in the future though nobody posts in my follow along :P

Really enjoying this follow-along, keep at it! I wish I had some advice but I don't have much experience with FB.

01.03.2012


- ran my old campaign 1007-9
- new agegroup same ads 1007-10
- new gender 1011-1


1007-9


1007-10


1011-1


Stopped bad converting ads (high CTR but bad CVR). In every campaign. Stopped 1011 completly (I'll discuss this later on)


02.03.2012

Just lowered the bid in tiny steps.

1007-9


1007-10


03.03.2012

Didn't changed anything.

1007-9


1007-10


04.03.2012

1007-9


1007-10



Stats:



After studying the specific data from prosper facebook again it came to me that 1011 was given up to soon. I'll test the other ads again. I've ran this ad in every campaign with similar results: high CTR but low CVR.

Anyways I hope now the demo will not burn out too quick. And for now I'm not tweaking anything.

So I'm searching for an other offer and build up a new campaign. To be hones I'm not fully satisfied with my financial status though i make (tiny) profit I'm not feeling any change ;P. I erased my former loss and earned about $200 it's nice but I can't live from that. So Im looking forward to keep my income at least at this level and build on my success.

Thanks for all the post that helped me to come this far even though most of them were made in differend threads.

"Great" news. I just looked up my campaign stats for today and what I saw there made me feel a little upset...

I'll stop Facebook for now. Going for POF! Also with a Follow Along