I do a lot of internet marketing on Facebook. When I say a lot, I mean I’m submitting several hundred ads per day over each of my accounts. I got several Indians collecting pictures for me, just so I can constantly split test new images. I got a script that auto-submits ads for me, and I plan on getting a custom one written up for me that does even more. That’s not too say Facebook is easy to play with. Honestly, they’re a pain in the ass. Sometimes you have to wonder just how incompetent their ad review team is when they deny your relevant, within the guideline ads. That is why I’ve got to have these three things on my side to be a winnder on Facebook.
Persistence
You are going to have to submit, submit, submit, and submit over and over again until you are able to get your ads up. It might take 1 shot, or it might take 20 resubmissions on the same ad, but if your ad is within the guidelines (or you make it appear to be within the guidelines), you’ll eventually be able to get that ad to stick. Picking your offers as well, will cause a little stress for you. Facebook users hate a lot of CPA offers. So until you find the right demographics to target, the best keywords and areas that the users will convert from, you will just have to keep trying and forever tweaking.
Imagination
You’ve got to have a good imagination. Your creatives have to catch the eyes of the Facebook users you are targeting. The lowest I’ll run most ads is at a 0.1% CTR, but I look for 0.3%+ for most targetted ads. To achieve this, not only do you need tight targeting, but you need the creativity to come up with an eye catching 110×80 image for the ad. You’ll also need some unique text for the header and ad body. Without these, you’ll be stuck with high click prices just wasting all your money when you could be increasing your CTR and ROI while decreasing your click costs.
Cloaking
I recently had a friend write up a cloaking script specifically built for Facebook. Basically, this will send out all Facebook users to my landing page or offer I want them to go to. However, it will redirect all Facebook internal referrers and IPs to another page which I specify when creating a new link. Ideally, the Facebook ad review team will never, ever set eyes on my landing page unless they click on my ad from outside of their backend. This has made it infinitely easier to get ads up.
Also, if you haven’t heard, Facebook now has ad reviews being done from Irish and UK IPs. This means if you are direct linking and that link has a redirect script for IPs outside of the offers accepted traffic range, they will be redirected to something else. This is why so many ads are getting disapproved for direct linkers. With my script, this is fixed. Here is a basic script you can install and use on your server.
With these three keys, and a little trial and error, you should be able to pull at least some profit from Facebook.
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john n
another great post. that is AWESOME that you have a team of outsourcers just getting the images. i love it.
That is the most fun part for me though searching for images of females to put up. Kind of makes it not like work
Do you have any breakdown on what CTR you shoot for based on the size of the demographic?
What is mean is, say your demo of 100k users, would you then only run 0.2% or better? and if its larger demo you will go for the 0.10% or better?
I still let my 0.07’s or better run as long as they are producing ROI but it is mainly because its so hard to get some approved that i don’t have enough backup ads that perform better.
Anyway, great post and I wish i had the time to scale it like you have. Still glad that i can hand pick ads and manually and get good CTR though. It is a pretty level playing field in my opinion regardless of if you spend $200 a day or $30k a day.
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Justin Dupre Reply:
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:06 pm
When I’m targeting broad, .1% is what I want, but am okay with .07% and up.
If it was only 100k users, I’d want about .2 – .3%.
However, I’d much rather spend 30k and make 10% ROI than only be able to spend 1k and make 100%.
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Reverse Cell Phone Lookup
Great script. I think the punishment is pretty severe if they catch you cloaking? Can’t there be profitable niches that do not need cloaking to make money?
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shawns
That script looks great, but I have a question. Why use cloaking scripts if using prosper202? doesn’t prosper cloak links?
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Justin Dupre Reply:
June 4th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
P202 just scrubs the referrer so it isn’t passed to the affiliate network or affiliate offer owners. It’s there to make sure they aren’t snooping your traffic sources. It doesn’t redirect, though, like what I need it to do, based on IPs and the site referrer.
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