Facebook is and probably always will be my favorite advertising network to simply “drop a couple ads.” It’s quick and easy to set up, the targeting options are first rate, and the ROI can be through the roof. I’ve had a few campaigns hit 500% ROI (on $xxx+ ad spend). But what I see, day in and day out, are more and more affiliate marketers struggling to make Facebook work. They drop $100 without knowing the basics behind the bidding and impressions system, then say “This sucks. Screw you guys. I’m outta here.”

So I’m going to give you a little heads up on what makes affiliate marketing campaigns tick on Facebook ads. And remember when going into Facebook, that even a little loss is a good learning experience. Take what you learn from your first campaigns and apply them to later campaigns. You are investing in data and personal experience. Use it.

Step one to even thinking about starting up on Facebook is to understand bidding. Now, unless you have a very high CTR ad, never bid CPM. Facebook straight out came and said that CPM is better for branders that don’t need clicks. Yeah – made me say WTF, too. The traffic quality is generally less than what you’ll get on CPC, and performance of clicks is also lower than what you’ll get from CPC.

CTR is directly responsible for your ads CPC. You want a good CPC? You need a great CTR. What is the main influence of CTR when running all your affiliate marketing ads on Facebook? Images. You will be testing lots of images to get this good CTR. A good CTR for me is anything of .2% and higher, although I’m usually okay with .15% and up. It’s not impossible to break a profit with a CTR below this if you write great ad copy (which is the main influence of conversions when direct linking), but you’ll be hard pressed to do it.

Want some tips on how you can increase your ad CTR? Check out this post I made on PoF/Facebook Ad colors.

And lets talk about niches. Everyone talks about dating and gaming. Why? Well – they work. Dating and gaming are two niches that take very little effort to start profiting on.

• Dating: Pick a country, rotate through a couple offers, test a few hundred ads and you should come up with the right combination of ads that makes you at least some sort of profit.
• Gaming: Pick a niche of games, target all the other niche games you can in Facebook, get some bright and colorful images, rotate through a couple offers and you should end up with profit.

It’s a little more detailed than that – and a little less throwing shit at the wall – but these two niches are stepping stones into bigger and better niches like education and health. I wouldn’t break into any other niche until you can get a few campaigns profitable in these niches. You need a bank roll before you can start rolling in the bank.

And, again, don’t let yourself get frustrated by Facebook’s silly antics. They aren’t the most helpful groups of guys when it comes to us affiliates, but no where else will you find a traffic source that gives you nearly the same amount of data!

Facebook’s ad system is a doozy of non-logical ad rotation, and I’ve heard and experienced way too many stories of wasted money spent due to the way it prioritizes ad spend. Basically, if you set up one campaign with a large amount of ads (25+) in a CPC campaign, and one of your ads gets an early click, the Facebook Ad’s system will prioritize impressions only to that ad and basically say “Screw you other ads. This is the obvious winner.” As a marketer, we obviously want to test all the angles, ad copies and images that we can, but this system can make it fairly difficult. Let’s talk about how we can get past this.

First step – Increase your CPC bids. Hurr durr, Justin. I know. But, in many cases this just isn’t enough. You’ll have to keep bumping the CPC, sometimes over $1 your original bid before you start getting any impressions. In some case, it doesn’t work at all. This isn’t a reliable method of sharing impressions across all your ads.

Another thing we can do – switch to CPM. CPM has its downfalls. Actually, that seems to be all CPM has going for itself. Facebook has even said “run CPM if you don’t want clicks on your ads.” CPM clicks generally cost more CPC-wise, and have a very low CTR. The quality of those that do click is also a fair bit lower than its CPC bidding clickers. What it is good for is getting a general idea of what is working, though. The ads will share a greater portion of views across more ads, however we still aren’t perfect. In many cases, you might find only 5 – 10 ads get any impressions and we fall into the same problem you had before.

Another idea is to resubmit ads not getting impressions. Simple remake the ad, stick it in the same campaign and delete the original. I think Facebook gives a little priority to new ads to give them a small test. If you remake all 50 ads though, you’ll run into the same problem, but this shows us something. Less ads in one campaign gives a fairer share of impressions.

So a more true solution is to break up your many ads into multiple campaigns. 3 – 10 ads per campaign will ensure a better share ratio. 1 ad per campaign almost insures you will get impressions on the ad. It’s a lot of extra work to set that up, but if you have a large variety of ads that need testing, this might be the only solution left for you if all others fail to perform.

If you have any questions on Facebook marketing, drop them in the comments below. I might turn it into a post on the blog!

I’ve been in Thailand around 5 years now. I started out as an exchange student and now I’m a full blown entrepreneur. I’ve learned my fair share about this place and how it is positively and negatively affecting my business. Enjoy the post, and the eye candy.

1. Things aren’t always what they seem to be

There are a lot of people pretending to be what they really aren’t. Thailand is full of women that aren’t just that. In order to get through all the BS and fake crap spit out, you need to know what to look for. In Thailand, that means looking for big feet, an Adam’s apple, or just going for a “ball-check” if you’re up for it. As an internet/affiliate marketer you should know what to look for in an affiliate offer, traffic source or CPA network before you start dealing with any of them.

2. Knowing the local lingo gets you places

Living in Thailand without knowing some basic conversation isn’t impossible, but you are going to be stuck in the main tourist destinations, without much bargaining power, and you might have some difficulty ordering food or talking to the locals in some areas. As an internet marketer, you should know the lingo before you jump into things. Tracking, CPA, EPC, CPM, CPC, PPV, FB – these are all just some of the abbreviations and keywords you should be familiar with. It’ll help give you a jump start and give you more power over making decisions in your marketing business.

3. Sex sells

The sex tourism industry, as much as I hate to say it, is huge in Thailand. This is a simple idea. Sex sells everywhere around the word. When building landing pages and advertising banners don’t forget this. It can have a large impact on CTR to CVR (see step 2 if you don’t understand that).

4. Keep your infrastructure and traffic clean

This is a problem Thailand could use a lesson on. There is always a traffic jam somewhere in Bangkok, 24/7. Sidewalks are used as motorcycle lanes, emergency shoulders are for passing, internet connections are slow and unreliable, and the government is corrupt and sloppy. Keep your statistics well organized and on hand, have a server capable of holding extra traffic in case you need it (I recommend WiredTree), and do your research before you build out a 10,000 target PPV campaign (easy to do with the likes of AffPortal)

5. Avoid Being Lazy

I love Thai people. I love my Thai employees (they’re extremely talented), but its more of a culture thing that being on time, finishing projects on schedule and that doing things now when you have the free time is hardly ever an option. It can rub off on you. Avoid this situation at all costs. If you think you have nothing else to do today, and can slack off and play games, sit back down and think hard. In my business, there is always something I can do, whether it be research, campaign optimization, client work, coaching, phone calls with CPA managers, split testing ads, data mining, new offers to launch and oodles of more things. Get into the habit of doing more before you get lazy with the culture surrounding you.

Thailand really is a great place, but its got its own pros and cons when it comes to business. There are lots of distractions which you’ll need to learn to avoid (see the above image), the Internet can be slow and shoddy (3g is just picking up speed in Bangkok, DSL is the main connection type while broadband was just made available in limited areas), and if you want to do local business you’ll be hard pressed to find good employees, as well as trying to deal with local Thai clients. Even with all the cons, I love the place and think that everyone should come here and try it at least once in their lifetime.

Here’s a pretty common question that was asked over in my Ask Questions, Get Answers post. If you’ve got any affiliate marketing questions for me, drop a question in the comments of this post.

So, how many Facebook impressions is enough? How much should you spend on an ad before you decide to pause it or let it run. I’ll give you guys a little practical theory on how I run my Facebook Ads.

I am not interested in how many clicks an ad gets. I’m interested in pure conversion numbers. Sure, a high CTR grants me a low CPC, but that doesn’t always mean I’ll have a high EPC. That’s what I’m really looking for. When I look at my ads, I track completely so I know whether or not an ad will perform and create conversions, because at the end of the day its not about how high your CTR is or how low you individual clicks cost. It’s all about whether the offer is going to convert and generate a EPC higher than your CPC.

When I test ads, I’ll usually let the campaign run through 3-10 times the offer payout depending on how much it is paying me. At a bare minimum, I’ll spend $50 per day over a couple days to see whether or not a certain offer will convert, and convert consistently. I’m not focused on CPC or CTR here at all. All I want are clicks, and to see if the offer actually converts.

If it converts, obviously my next step would be to optimize ads and split test the hell out of them. Hundreds of combinations go up. Now that I know I’ve got an offer that converts, all I have to do is make sure I’m spending less than my EPC. As a general rule of thumb, any ad below 0.08% CTR won’t make the cut on your standard dating offers because click costs are just to high unless you can manage to squeeze some conversions on a CPS offer. Again, I’m not worried about CTR here. If I can get an ad running at 0.01% CTR over 100,000 impressions, and it converts consistently or higher than the other ads (while still making me a positive return), I’ll let it run.

So, I say to you guys – Stop focusing on your CTR rates. They aren’t the most important thing off the bat. Start looking at offer EPC and do what you can to optimize your ads CPC below that EPC in the end.

Every now and then I like to dedicate a post to other bloggers. Gotta give love to get it, right? I think I’ll be dedicating Saturdays for this purpose.

Anyways, what’s happening around the web?

ProfitAddiction gives away yet another campaign – I swear this kid doesn’t want to make any money for himself. A nice PPV campaign made up of a ton of email submits, one target, and a few landing pages. Some good ideas in here for new marketers. *cough* When you gonna do a guest post on my blog? *cough*

Inside Affiliate drops some news about the new Tracking202 loadout. Offer rotation, faster redirects and yet to be named improvements are coming. Read the post and join in on the beta.

Ian Fernando on outsourcing. If you are looking to get yourself replaced, or just lighten the workload a bit, Ian has some great tips and links to share to help you do all that faster.

Finch drops another knowledge bomb. Finch talks about how you are losing money on your websites be not geographically targeting, and hands out some solutions to fix that problem.

Riley Pool confirms CPC bidding outdoes CPM bidding on Facebook. Something you should have already known, but Riley still writes up a great case study that proves it. Great read for FB advertisers.

Bevo Media Updates – Not wanting to be outdone by Tracking202, Ryan Buke announces some updates to their tracking platform, as well.

Feel free to drop more links (or your own) in the comments below!

In part 1, I talked about the basics of Facebook Ads and why its such a great platform to advertise on. In Part 2, I’ll be covering every little word you should know before you even start thinking about dropping money on an ad. Many of these words aren’t only important for Facebook advertising, but for any sort of internet marketing whatsoever. A lot of this is basic knowledge that any seasoned affiliate marketer should know, but for those that are thinking about dropping there first ad anywhere on the net, this should be considered a need to read and very important bit of information.

I want to start off by covering terms that you will see on the Facebook Ad Platform itself.

Campaign – A group of individual ads, usually all promoting the same offer/service/product. On other ad platforms, this might be known as an Ad Group.

Ad Status – Whether an ad is running, paused, deleted or disapproved. On Facebook, this can be applied to ads on an individual basis or at a campaign level.

Budget – Your daily allowed spend on each campaign. Does not necessarily mean you will actually reach your budgeted spend.

Impressions – The number of views each ad or ad campaign an ad accumulated. Does not actually imply that a user interacted or saw an ad, but that the ad was put on a page that Facebook served to a user.

Social Percent (%) – A fairly new term and statistic added to the Facebook platform. Basically, it tells the percent of people who saw the ad after it was liked by a friend of theirs.

Clicks – Number of people who interacted with and clicked an ad.

CTR - Click through rate. The percentage of people who clicked the ad after viewing the ad. (1 click after 1000 impressions would be 0.1%) The average CTR rate for most ads on Facebook is around 0.1 – 0.15%.

CPC – Cost Per Click.

CPM – Cost Per Mille (1000 impressions).

Avg. CPC – Average cost per click. This is the total amount spent on each ad/ad campaign divided by the total number of clicks.

Avg. CPM – Average cost per mille. This is the total amount spent on each ad/campaign divided by the total amount of 1000 impressions.

Spent – Total amount spent on each ad/campaign over a set period of time, or the lifetime of the ad/campaign (user-defined).

Bid – The maximum amount you are willing to pay on each ad on a per click or per 1000 impressions basis. Does not necessarily mean you will pay that much.

CPC Bid Type – Choosing to bid on each click you get.

CPM Bid Type – Choosing to bid on every 1000 impressions you get.

Destination URL – The set URL you direct your ad to after a user clicks it.

Geographical Targeting – Targeting that allows you to specify your ads to only be shown to certain geographical regions of the world (country, city, state, etc).

Demographic Targeting – The set of targeting options that allow you to target your ads at users based on who they actually are (Sex, age, relationship status, languages, education, etc)

Psychographic Targeting – Targeting users by what they like (Likes and Interests, Interested In, etc).

Landing Page – A page you direct users that click your ads to. A landing page is usually a pre-selling page that helps convert the user once they hit whatever offer page you are marketing to.

CVR – Conversion rate. The percentage of people that convert on your offer versus the amount that click it. (10 people click your ad and view your offer, 1 person converts = 10% CVR)

Tracking – A common term used by internet marketers that refers to statistical click tracking software. Can allow you to track ad clicks, keywords, rotate ads and has several other important features. See Tracking202.

This list will be updated as I think of new terms that need to be added. If you see any terms you think should be included, comment below.

Facebook Ad Guide

Part 1 – A Basic Introduction to Facebook Ads

Part 2 – Key Terminology To Know

Join the forums for real Facebook and PPV case studies, on top of hundreds of exclusive ad banner, landing pages, tools, and image downloads. Click here for more info!

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

• Facebook Ads Manager
• Plenty of Fish Ad Uploader

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

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.

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!