For many affiliates, Facebook now sounds like Google. A gigantic company that screws small affiliates over and over again, even when there’s no reason to do so. Let me tell you, from my experience, Facebook is unlike any other marketing platform out there. It’s very unique and therefore can be very difficult for affiliates to make money with it. On the other hand, for those lucky ones, it can be the best marketing friend.
When I started with Facebook, I blew it miserably. I lost all the money with the first test and no results. Even though I targeted my demographics and all that shit. I think the problem was I was selling paid product instead of CPL offer. Although now there are a bunch of affiliates doing CPS without problems. So you go figure.
One thing everyone talked about and which I immensely hate is approval process. Or denial process. Cause those assholes disapprove every single ad of yours no matter what. I noticed it happens much much more often in dating vertical. I think they’re so sick of affiliates in this niche that they tell their reps (or monkeys) to disapprove any ad no matter what.
If you decide to promote on Facebook suggested by your AM on CPA network, you most likely will try dating. This is large niche out there and very scalable. So you gonna have to deal with a lot of crap like this. You can obviously hire someone to do that for you if you can’t take 5 disapprovals in a row. But this is the mentality you need to have with Facebook. Brain-dead clicking those submit buttons until your ads are approved by some douche-bag out there who’s feeling lucky cuz he found a date on benaughty that day.
So patience my friend – this is a must if you want to get anywhere with this monster called Facebook.
Next is actually advertising something out there. Yes, you definitely do need to know your demographics. Quantcast is the place to go to figure this out. Just put your offer URL in and see what people visit the site. Then put 5 more competitor URL’s to make sure you kinda understand what demographics generally like this or that product.
Once you know that, prepare some images. GIMP is a free tool for that. Photoshop if you got money to invest. Or you could get a free version of that. It’s the easiest to put images from google and resize them the way you want. Plus, adding borders, some rating stars on images is a breeze. Make sure you get some good images. Image is like 70% to 90% importance of the ad. Headline and description are pretty much worthless, so as tests showed. But not sure with the new way FB displays ads. Either way, image is still king. So have a good one, or else you’re wasting your time.
On FB, just like Pulse360 CTR is everything. If you don’t get 0.07% – 0.1% CTR, you’re not going to make it. And contrasting image can help you a lot here. Of course getting such CTR with 200,000 users you’re targeting is not easy. You can target smaller, like 20,000 users at a time with interest and like attributes. Specific cities to get CTR up faster. This should work at first. But CTR plummets really fast on FB, you need to keep adding new images into rotation. And with disapprovals it can take few days. Sucks, but that’s how this game works.
Also, you need to bid decently to get impressions. I heard some moron said to bid as small as possible and get traffic this way on facebook. Couldn’t be further from the truth. You need to bid above the suggested minimum bid. Otherwise they’ll send you shitty traffic that doesn’t convert. I’ve experienced this. So bid high even though, you don’t want to. If they say $0.80 – $1.20, then bid $1.02 or something. This will get you quality traffic. and if your CTR is alright, your CPC’s will drop and you can start turning profit.
As fat as optimization goes, get the best image ads and make few copies of those testing new text. Leave image, but add new text. Make even exact same copies of the ad to get it shown more often. Play with Photoshop borders, buttons, text in image, to get CTR of the image even higher. But also keep searching and adding new images into the rotation. You need this to make FB work.
It can be hard as fuck submitting your ads and getting them disapproved for no reason. Adding simple image of a girl (with clothes on) and seeing image is inappropriate for FB. But don’t give up. Stick at it and you’ll get it working. That’s how everyone else got where they are. They just stubbornly kept submitting ads and testing everything. From cities that converted to hour and minute when conversion occurred. If you test like freak, you’ll find success. In the beginning, try researching what ads show up (with proxies if you check internationally). I mostly see games from direct advertisers. But if you spot affiliate, research on that bastard as much as you can and see what they’re doing.
Another tactic would be to try something new. It’s really hard to tell. Sometimes you enter when there’s too much competition and you can’t hold off. So smaller markets and innovative ideas are better. Sometimes, just go with the flow and you’ll get to the money. You know, I can’t tell which method is better, both can work well. But here’s the thing. If you want to make Facebook work, you need to devote some money there. You won’t see success with $30 budgets. You need more like $200 to $300 to get some data as CPC will be higher at first and you’ll lose money. So keep that in mind when doing FaceBook.
That’s all for the first post on facebook. I’m gonna have to write a guide like every other asshole blogger out there I guess for some cheap traffic lol. But this topic is huge and there are shitloads of small things to cover. Meanwhile, if you do FB, try breaking the CTR barrier I mentioned. $0.07 should be minimum for you. Good luck 🙂
