Justin Dupre » cpc

Plenty of Fish vs. Facebook Traffic

Justin Dupre — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 21:15:43 +0000

Here is a quick list of differences between Facebook and Plenty of Fish I wanted to put together.

Targeting Options

Facebook allows you to target demographically, geographically, marital status, by workplace and university, etc. They also allow you to target using keywords based on interests.
PoF doesn’t allow you to target by interests directly, however they have a demographic tool to find those interested in specific keywords. They also have more targeting options like race, hair color and more.

Ad Styles

Facebook allows you to use images 110 x 80 pixels with a header and ad body text.
Plenty of Fish uses the same layout as Facebook, however they also allow the use of standard size ad banners over a portion of their traffic, as well.

Ad Approvals

Facebook has become very strict recently, making it very difficult for affiliate marketers to get many niche ads approved.
Plenty of Fish, however, is still very lax about using even rebill offers.

Traffic Bidding

Facebook allows you to bid CPM or CPC, however, CPM bidding is lower quality or traffic that isn’t known to click on ads.
PoF only allows CPM bidding
Facebook traffic can cost upwards of $0.80 for a single USA, middle-aged demographic click.
Plenty of Fish traffic for the same demographic will be around $0.50+ CPM, but ussually with a much higher CTR making it much cheaper overall.

Traffic Amount

Facebook is the 2nd most viewed website in the US. About 300 billion page views are served per month.
Plenty of Fish gets around 2 billion page views a month.

Banner Blindness (Based on Personal Experience)

Facebook – 1 week to 4 weeks.
Plenty of Fish – 2 – 3 days.

Scalability

Plenty of Fish isn’t very scalable due to the small user base. Campaigns die very fast.
Facebook is much easier to scale with different targeting options like geographical, workplace and university targeting. The sheer amount of users make this possible.

Ad Tools

If you’ve got something to add to my list post it in the comments or talk about it in my private forums!

Is Zuckerburg Off His Rocker?

Justin Dupre — Sun, 02 May 2010 07:01:57 +0000

Short answer: Yes. Some of you may received this email from Facebook -

Upcoming system change:

As you know, we continuously work to make our ads system more accurate in order to further improve the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. Among other ongoing improvements, we are refining our ads delivery system to better reflect the goals of our advertisers. This change will take place over the next few weeks and, assuming current bids remain unchanged, will mean that:

CPC advertisers (advertisers who have chosen to bid “cost-per-click”) may receive more clicks.
CPM advertisers (advertisers who have chosen to bid “cost per thousand impressions”) will continue to receive impressions but may receive less clicks.

Do I need to do anything?

As a CPM advertiser, you are indicating to our system that it’s more important that your ad is seen by your audience rather than clicked i.e. you have chosen to pay for impressions, not clicks. If your main objective is to increase awareness of your business with an ad impression, there is no need for action. However, if your most important objective is to drive clicks on your ads, you should change your bids from CPM to CPC.

Yeah… I kinda did a O.o face when I read this to. This is Facebook’s idea of using their ad system to generate more revenue with lesser cost. They’re hoping to bring in big brand names with this move; those with huge advertising budgets and little care to whether or not a user interacts with the ad, just sees it. It works on the subconscious level. A Facebook user sees the brands logo or product, doesn’t really think about it, but the next time they go shopping and see that product, they’re gonna want it.

But how the hell does Facebook split up traffic that clicks and traffic that doesn’t click? And why? Well, I’m not too sure, but I’m guessing it might have something to do with traffic that comes from apps and those they come from user profiles. Traffic from apps always sucked in most of my Facebook ads experience. I’d have a 1% conversion rate from app traffic and 13% from profile traffic. Most of the clicks were probably accidental. My other theories are that any ads set up as CPM that get a CTR of above a set percent well be retroactively disabled and only work on CPC settings. Extreme, but its just an idea.We’ll see in the next few days/weeks what is to come of this.

Why would Facebook do this? More money, obviously. Every experienced affiliate marketer knows CPC mode is more expensive. And now with everyone having to switch over, you can bet it will get a hefty amount more pricey per click. Facebook is ruining a lot of business models for its own gain. Those who switch with it will be the ones on top, but it’s still a poor decision by Facebook, I think.

This was a funny statement, though:

“As a CPM advertiser, you are indicating to our system that it’s more important that your ad is seen by your audience rather than clicked i.e. you have chosen to pay for impressions, not clicks. If your main objective is to increase awareness of your business with an ad impression, there is no need for action.”

This would be fine… if you don’t mind summing up your business in 100 or so words and a tiny image. I think my business is a little more valuable than that and honestly, when’s the last time you saw an ad from a big brand that didn’t have a call to action on it? Click here for more info, see where you can get a test drive, see why we’re the best, etc.

Tight Advertising on Facebook

Justin Dupre — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:52:49 +0000

This was emailed to me in response to my Ask Away! post. Feel free to ask me any questions about affiliate marketing there or contact me via email.

When targetting groups of people at a tight level [on Facebook] (City+single age+Keywords+Gender), how many individuals would you consider as being ‘too low’?

I’ve found that when I try and target groups that are too small I don’t get any impressions.

Or do you create multiple highly targeted ads tailored for each group?

I know this is pretty broad but do you have any sort of rule of thumb?

There are few decent questions there that deserve answering.

As far as how many people is too few to target, when I ran campaigns like this, I would target 100-200 people some times. I’d run it at CPC because I knew CPM would burn through them too fast. I’d be getting about ~1% CTRs making my click cost only a cent or two. Of course, either way, I’d burn through that demographic really fast. It usually only took me 1 minute to set up the ad for them, and I’d make 1000 – 2000% ROI on my investment, so it was completely worth the time. It wasn’t a campaign that was sustainable for a long time. I could normally run it a few days every month and make conversions from it, then pause it for a month and open it again.

Also, I’d take a large demographic and just break it up into highly targeted ads. Custom images, ad title and ad body were included in this. It would drop my average CPC on these ads by about 20-30 cents on some campaigns.

I’m not too sure whats wrong with Facebook impressions. Rather than give impressions to the highest bidders, they like to split up impressions instead. So if 100 more advertisers enter the same demographic on the same day, you’re up against them. It’s a wonky (shitty) system that needs improvement. Some days you’ll get millions of impressions, the next day you’ll be like “Facebook doesn’t want my online monies today or what?”

As for a rule of thumb, Hey! As long as its making you a decent amount of money, and its worth the amount of work you put in to it, go for it. Some days I’d work on campaigns all day that would make me 4 figures a day, some days I would build small Facebook campaigns that took 10 minutes to set up and make me 20 bucks a day on each ad.

Money is money, and how you make that is completely up to you!

Realistic Profits After Your 1st Month of Affiliate Marketing

Justin Dupre — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:01:06 +0000

People are always asking this question: “What kind of profit can I expect to see after my first month of affiliate marketing?”

It’s a tough question to answer because affiliate marketing is constantly evolving. One day you could be losing 100s of dollars a day, the next, you might be tracking hundreds of leads and thousands in revenue from your latest efforts. The main factors you’ll be dealing with are your research skills, financing, and most importantly, the amount of effort you are willing to put in.

Research is essential to setting up a campaign right. Knowing what niches are in now and using logic to figure what niches will be hot are key to keeping you on top. There are tools available all over the net to help you track keywords, ads, demographics, all of which can help you create a successful campaign. There are forums available where thousands of affiliates come together and talk about slingin’ dat acai all day (Wickedfire). Affiliate marketing blogs talk about how they made 10k a day and what niches are blowin’ it out of the water. The more research you put into your first campaign, the more prepared you’ll be, and the more likely you will be to profit off of that campaign.

If you are setting up a cpc, cpm, ppv or any other type of pay for traffic campaign, you’ve got to be prepared to have money. Of course you can start out with $0 using pure SEO and manual link building tactics, but honestly, if you take this route, you’ll most likely be losing money (because time = money and SEO = a lot of time). You can take other free routes though – Answers, classifieds, spam tactics – however, not all CPA networks like this. If you’ve got money in the bank or a credit card with a high limit, you’ll be pretty free on how you can choose to promote, and if you find something profitable you’ll be able to scale it all for more monies. If you’ve got that extra cash in the bank, you’ll have something to fall on as well if things go sour. Generally, the more money you got, the more potential you will have to make more money.

The biggest factor in how well you’ll bank is the effort you put in. If you put in a couple hours a day, you could be up to $100 profit a day in a week. However, if you start strong and kick your ass into gear with 15 hour days, you could reach that goal and even higher in half the time. The harder you work, the better the payoff, generally. Research, campaign building and link farming all day long means you might miss a few nights out with the boys, but if you are able to see past what you could be doing now, you’ll be able to see what is to come with more time on your work.

Of course all this doesn’t promise profit, but it will increase your chances. I started out with $250, broke even my first day, and was able to use my data to profit my second day. From there I went up, down, all around, plateaued, did a few flips, and its all crazy,� but its fun and I like what I do which drives me to seek out new profitable campaigns and blow money on things that I think will work but don’t always do.

Tatto Media Contest Update: A Super Easy Profitable Facebook Campaign!

Justin Dupre — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:22:39 +0000

If you aren’t informed about the contest, yet, go here to check out the contest rules and prizes you can win!

For those of you that are signed up with Tatto Media already (all 16 of you)… What the hell are you doing!? The contest is ending pretty soon, and I’ve got a grand total of $0.19 in my referral commissions area. That means you guys have made $19 total. I know you can do better than that! It’s easy. Let’s blow through the easiest fricken’ niche to run on Facebook: Dating.

I’m liking two offers on Tatto for dating. Fling and Mate1 both have strong track records, and can be solid converters. They are very easy to promote and generate leads for on Facebook. However, quality is key here which is something Facebook leads aren’t known for. Here is how you should be running these on Facebook.

Write up a simple ad headline like: “Want a Date?” Always try and use a question mark as it grabs more attention. The ad body could look like: “Want a date tonight? Meet GIRLS like her on Mate1 and take her out on a date. Join today for FREE!” Capital letters are allowed like the way I’ve written it here. This is just very general, and you may notice different ad copies provide better conversion rates. Mark this off on your ad link sub-ids.

Pictures can be 110 px by 80 px in height. Use all the space you can. It isn’t rocket science to figure out that the more busty, and more skin the image is showing, the higher your CTR will be. Higher CTR relates to cheaper CPC. Less money, more clicks, hopefully, more conversions. You could steal images from photobucket, imageshack, your neighbor’s Myspace, whatever, but that isn’t legal. Ask for permission if you really want to. Or don’t… it could get you in trouble, but I’ve yet to hear any stories about someone suing over using their image in a FB ad.

Targetting isn’t too hard to catch onto either. For dating ads, you must always select one sex and choose the marital status as single. Target 18 year-olds and up. However, the younger the lead, the less likely he/she is to convert. 25 years and up ussually will give you good quality. If not, either advertiser may lower your payout or cut you off completely. If you want to target 18 year olds and up, I suggest you leverage this with a higher quality traffic source, as well. You’ll lose money on search traffic, most likely, but the leads will be higher quality most likely generating sales for the advertiser. You’ll be able to keep racking in low quality, easier converting leads, leveraging it with the higher quality leads from search. This should help you keep your profits and payouts up.

Bid CPM. CPC costs on dating are crazy! Facebook categorizes Facebook ads, and dating ads always get flagged with a higher click cost. CPM bids for this demographic are usually around 25-30 cents. Watch your ads carefully, and if they aren’t getting atleast a .08 CTR, delete or pause them.

Keep submitting, over and over again. Until some ads get up. If you want to promote Fling, you must cloak, as Facebook doesn’t like the landing page of Fling. It is too “adult”. Get yourself this cloaking sytem at AffiliatePlex if you don’t already have it. I use my own custom cloaking built into my tracking system which I highly recommend you get done, as well. It saves me hours of time! In your ad, you will have to say some other dating site, redirect to that site for all internal FB reviews, but for users, they will be taken to Fling.

Facebook will disapprove a lot… a lot a lot a lot, but the ones still profitting with dating are the ones that stick with it and resubmit all day long. You can do this manually, outsource it (hire Indians to do it 24/7 at $3 p/hour), or get a tool programmed up for you. 4HourAffiliate also has a tool you can buy, but it is out-dated (some features still work).

And that is about all there is to dating on Facebook. Create, prune, rinse and repeat. It’s a profit canyon, and while very crowded, there is still a little money there (not as much as their used to be, though).

So sign up with Tatto Media and try out these offers. If I don’t see $500 in revenue by the end of this month from my referrals, I’m extending this contest, dammit!

Facebook Cares About Click Quality. Really?

Justin Dupre — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:55:05 +0000

For some of you that have been using Facebook Ads to market for the past month or so, if you check your logs and where your clicks are coming from, you might have noticed a shit ton of clicks coming with a) no referrer and/or b) clicks from the same IP. It’s not hard to tell that these clicks are most likely generated by ad scrapers and what not. These are creating higher costs for advertisers using CPC bidding (which is why I recommend CPM bidding).

Also, it seems Facebook is over-counting clicks by about 10 – 15%. Many affiliates have been complaining and just getting a canned response as to why they’re might be some discrepencies in click counts. However, talk is that this email is here to fix that. This is what I had in my email account this morning.

Dear Advertiser,
If you have already responded to this survey, thank you and please disregard this email. If not, please take approx. 5 mins to complete this survey regarding your experience with Account Management at Facebook. Also, please note that you will be receiving the Facebook bi-annual Advertiser Satisfaction Survey in the next 2-3 weeks. Please do take a few minutes to complete that survey when you receive it.

Please visit https://affiliates.questionpro.com to take our survey. As always, your information will be used for research purposes only. We will not share your personally identifiable information with anyone outside of Facebook as stated in our privacy policy: http://www.facebook.com/policy.php

Your candid feedback is greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

The Facebook Research Team

So, if you haven’t gotten this email yet, be sure you check the links above and tell them how bad everything is doing, their click costs are over-priced, they STILL don’t have an API or any tools to make ad building faster, and how much money they’ve probably ripped from you in the past year, yet they still aren’t willing to do so much as lift a finger to help us out.

You’ve Got a Little Profit! Now What?

Justin Dupre — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:01:57 +0000

I got an email from another new affiliate marketer. We just had a friendly conversation through email about how I found him on Twitter, and from there I took a look at his blog. In his first month of affiliate marketing and the help of PPC-Coach (an excellent program that will make it difficult not to profit with PPC marketing tactics) he made over 80 dollars on a $35 budget. Not bad ROI.

He then told me that he is thinking about getting into web design and development because he finds that with internet marketing, its hard to find new niches.

What?

I couldn’t help but tell him that he had already done the hard part already. His niche is there, he’s got profit, but he isn’t going to continue marketing? There isn’t much I could really say, but to say this:

“Scale, scale, scale.”

He’s got his profitable niche, the hardest thing to hit when marketing. The only thing this marketer doesn’t have is enough volume to make big wads of twenties.

To scale a campaign, you can do several things. The most obvious choice would be to test more and more keywords with higher volumes. Low volume come from long-tail keyword selection, which in turn decreases traffic costs. However, while high volume keywords will give you more traffic, they can be more expensive. I say, even if these clicks cost you more, if they provide you with a EPC that is equal to 1 cent or greater than your CPC for that keyword, why not run it? Profit is profit. You may take a cut to your overall ROI, but look at it like this – Would you rather spend 100 dollars and make $300 revenue? Or spend $1000 and make $1500 revenue.

Another choice to take is to transfer campaigns to other search platforms, social media, and content networks. If you want to transfer keyword campaigns, there are many free tools that allow you to turn a Google campaign compatible for upload to MSN or Yahoo‘s search platforms. There are also several other large, 3rd-tier search engines you can bid for clicks on. Other traffic sources can include media buying, PPV or email marketing.

So don’t give it up just because you don’t have that volume yet! Get out a high limit credit card and find that traffic to make your bank love you!

CPM vs. CPC Bidding on Facebook

Justin Dupre — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:26:14 +0000

Just put up a pretty lengthy write up about bidding strategies in Facebook that could save you a little money. It’s over at Deeboo.com. I know I should post it here but I’m trying to get some decent content up over there. Google seems to really like the blog and it gets a lot of search traffic. Must feed Google… must feed Google.

Add me on Twitter!