To recall the last post:
When I saw the reach was only doubled, I just targeted the whole country (I’m targeting a really small age group) which brought the total number to about 42.000.
And after a total of four days there are actually some results:
| Month | #Impr | #Clks | CTR | CPC | Leads | %CR | Cost | Rev | EPC | Profit |
| Jan | 88,087 | 26 | 0.029 | 0.48 | 1 | 3.85 | 12.45 | 5.25 | 0.20 | -7.20 |
A lead, if just one, is a great motivator since I was already planning a post called “Affiliate marketing sux, I’m quitting!” but fortunately now I don’t have to (at least not yet). It’s still a long way from what I need and I’m still at a loss but it’s a start.
Tracking202 is acting a little funny since it’s not actually tracking correctly (not to mention Facebook reviewers click on each ad and thus mess up the T202 stats). I’ll see if it’ll get any better in the next few days.
I’m also using a general daily Excel spreadsheet for tracking profit/loss. You can download it here.
What I need to do now is somehow get more impressions and at the same time start lowering the bid. If this won’t go through I’ll need to find another age group which might be more responsive.
Stay tuned.
So, after about one day I have some results. To recall from the last post:
I selected a bunch of cities and have targeted a total of 8700 people with 9 different ad variations.
After 1 day there was about 17.000 impressions and 5 clicks. Clearly not enough. So I went back to the Keybroker Social and added some more cities. When I saw the reach was only doubled, I just targeted the whole country (I’m targeting a really small age group) which brought the total number to about 42.000. Unfortunately you cannot edit the ads from KS, so I created everything anew (had to subscribe for the Basic paid plan to upload the new ads). And now I have to wait again for ad approval.
The lesson? Target at least 50.000 people in your campaigns.
That’s it for today.
I’ve only spent a minute on the Facebook Advertising page before thinking I need an ad manager. So I went to hunt for a Facebook Ads Manager. I could go with MarinSoftware’s solution with a minimum subscription of $5000 per month but then “settled” for KeybrokerSocial which has a limited free account (select you’re an Advertiser, not an Affiliate, otherwise they won’t accept you).
You can start with a free account which allows you to post 15 ads per week which should be enough for the first campaign. If it goes well, you’ll want to upgrade to a paid version. It starts at $29 per month for 25 ads per day so it’s very affordable.
The ad manager is really simple to use and they cover everything in their user guide so I won’t go into details here.
All you need to do is come up with some great ads and targeting. Try targeting cities, interests, age groups, etc. I’d suggest trying to go narrow first and test on a smaller number so that you don’t burn through your budget in a few hours.
I selected a bunch of cities and have targeted a total of 8700 people with 9 different ad variations. Now I’ve just submitted the ads to Facebook for review and hope for the best. I’m not really expecting any problems since the ads couldn’t be more FB friendly (which might be a totally new problem when nobody clicks on them).
We’ll see how it goes.
I covered organizing in the previous post, now I’ll go through the whole process of setting up the first campaign. This whole process can get very frustrating (believe me, I know) but you should be done in a 1 hour tops.
I’m using Prosper202 version 1.7.2 (there might be changes from previous/future versions).
I already went through steps #1-5 in yesterday’s post, so today we continue with #6.
Choose your category, campaign, method of promotion, landing page and click Generate Tracking Link. Paste the Javascript code above the </body> tag in your landing page file and create a PHP file for the redirect (i.e. goto.php) in the same folder as your landing pages.
Note: there might be other ways to do this, but I was told by our programmer this is the best one.
Since you’ll be using multiple landing pages and you don’t want a redirect file for each individual landing page, we’ll need to edit the redirect code so it can handle multiple redirects from one file. It will look something like this:
Download the php file (don’t forget to remove .txt extension).
This will now redirect based on from which landing page the visitor came from.
If you’d like to add new landing pages just copy this section:
case 002:
// Describe the Landing Page
$tracking202outbound = 'http://yourprosper.com/tracking202/redirect/lp.php?lpip=002&pci='.$_COOKIE['tracking202pci'];
break;
… and modify the ’002′ and the URL to your link (generated by Landing Page: Outbound PHP Redirect Code). This way you can link to goto.php from any landing page.
Now open all your landing page files and add this link for sending the visitor to your offer:
<a href="goto.php?lpid=002">Sign up!</a>
Or any other lpid (the above examples are ids 001 and 002).
Test out your links by clicking on them and if they work, continue with the next step.
Select Direct Link Setup, choose all your settings from the dropdowns, add your CPC (you can update it anytime) and any tracking IDs you want to track (i.e.: city, ads) and click Generate Tracking Link. Use this link in your ad.
Note: you don’t need separate links for landing pages when using a rotating script (when you use the same URL for multiple landing pages).
Once you setup and tested everything, you’ll probably want to clear the clicks data. Go to phpMyAdmin, click on your database and you should see this:
Click “Empty” on 202_clicks and 202_clicks_spy.
You should now be almost ready – only ad creation left. To be continued …
It’s week four and I should be making $5 per day but I’m not there yet. I should be searching for pictures of fucking men on iStock and Google. Not really fun work.
In any case, I watched Shoemoney’s ASW (hoping to get to it next year) keynote and it’s worth a watch. A bit of motivational stuff (yawn!).
Another problem I came across was how to organize and keep track of all the campaigns, ads and landing pages I’ll be using. As to not double the work I’ve looked at how the tracking software Tracking202 from the free self-hosted Prosper202 (1.7.2) toolbox does it. Luckily, it leaves just enough freedom in naming all elements so that I don’t need a separate organizer for campaigns.
Go to setup and there are 8 (I’ll cover just the first five in this post) steps listed:
To visualize, everything is organized like this:
To also keep things organized on your disk, it’s best to mirror the above setup. It might be a lot of folders and clicking but at least you’ll know where all your files for a campaign are.
I’ll cover setting up your first campaign in the next post.
A bit of an intermezzo from my CPA blog posts. As mentioned in the first post, we’ve been running a small website in the Internet Marketing niche. We’ve spent just a bit over 5 figures last year on advertising, most of it on AdWords.
While this is far from an PPC guide (if you’re looking for basics buy this ebook), I’ll mention a few things I learned from last year.
And let’s get one thing out of the way – I’m not even close to an expert. But I did spend some of my hard earned money on PPC and are doing everyday everything to get the most out of it.
I doubt there’s still somebody stupid enough to do Internet Marketing without full conversion tracking, but if you are go learn how to track goals or eCommerce in Google Analytics or Piwik (free open source alternative to Google Analytics). You don’t drive with your eyes closed as it would end badly, so don’t advertise like that either (it’ll end badly for your wallet).
You can track every kind of advertising (even offline by redirecting domains) by using Google’s URL builder.
If you’re still bidding on regular broad match, you’re probably losing a large percent of your budget. This is because Google is matching your ad with “related” keywords to those you added. While this may sound good in theory, in practice it means if you’re targeting “business plan”, you’ll also be advertising on “business school” etc. And I bet you don’t want that. So start your advertising with only phrase and exact matches.
Just a few weeks back I read there’s a “modified broad” match which should be more targeted but still be relevant enough. You can find the blog post here. Yes, I know the post is almost two years old. Don’t judge. I still haven’t got around to test it but when I do, I’ll report the results here.
Again – a must. No excuses, it takes 5 minutes. All you need to to in AdWords is add one additional ad and analyze it after a week or three to see which performs better. Then pause the loser, create a new one similar to the winner with a new element and repeat.
For landing pages use Google’s Website Optimizer. It’s easy and you can have a test running in 10 minutes. Just make sure you’re testing a significant change from the original, not just a few words here and there.
Go to your Campaigns, click Keywords and then in the menu in the middle click See Search Terms -> All. This will show you how the visitors actually found your ads. I found this button a few weeks back (don’t judge) and it has already made a significant impact on my campaign.
If you’re closing on 4 figure monthly spend, try one of the automated bidding softwares available. After some research I found that one of the best, and almost only with a reasonable price, is Clicksweeper. Give it a try.
That’s it for today.
