Category Archives: Facebook Advertising

February goals review and updates on campaigns

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It looks like my goals for February were really optimistic at $30 per day.

Whole of February I was still losing money on all campaigns but local1 (all dating closed but dating2) though there were some conversions which show that I’m not doing everything wrong.

Dating2 Campaign Update

These are the latest stats:

I’m very close to breaking even. The problem is that even when I do, I don’t have much room to scale the campaign.

The other problem is just when I got the landing pages’ CTR to between 35-50% and an offer with a good conversion rate, my ad CTR started dropping and is now so bad that I can’t get clicks below $0.45. Which makes it even harder to profit. And I’ve tried several ads with different text, image etc. and it doesn’t really make a lot of difference. I’ll have to find a completely new batch of photos.

This is way harder than Finch shows in his Premium posts. The main problem being Facebook advertising, specifically getting a high enough CTR on ads so that the CPC doesn’t break your wallet.

On the other hand, experience with Facebook advertising is worth a lot more than those few $10 dollars. Especially since my secret project will be ready in a week’s time …

New Campaign

And no, I’m still not giving up. After all, I only created 3 or 4 whole campaigns till now. I should get at least to 10-15 before completely giving up (some say … 70% failure rate with campaigns is normal for newbies – though I’m not a complete newbie).

So, today I started a new campaign and it’s a based on a CPS offer, not CPA. I found a solid affiliate network where they publish average EPCs for all offers. Found one that has $1+ EPC and created a LP, send it to translation and will publish it today. We’ll see how it goes.

Dating2 Facebook campaign results

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Got some results and they suck. Again.

I don’t know what the fck is wrong with my campaign that it doesn’t convert for final visitors at more than 5% (the above number is on FB visitors’ CR, not offer LP visitors). I have a nice, consistent CTR to offer at 30% but an insignificant number of conversions.

The only reason, that comes to mind, why conversions suck so bad is that the dating website(s) might already be a known brand and people are already registered or know they don’t want to register.

I’ll be doing a final push with another LP then pronounce it dead.

Local1 campaign running smoothly

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The partners are slowly meeting with the contacts and we’ve just updated the daily limit from $20 to $30 and already got quite a few more leads.

Unfortunately I just can’t get the conversion rate above 4-5% which really annoys me since I’m losing so much money. I mean 95% of people don’t want to leave their contact data. I really need to find something to get the conversion up.

Dating2 campaign gaining traction

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There were quite a few clicks yesterday on my dating2 campaign. Unfortunately there were only 2 conversions which brought the ROI way into the red zone (-50%). But, the whole picture is not so gloomy (from T202):

One LP actually made a positive ROI. And if you look at my previous, dating1, campaign you’ll see also a big difference in landing page CTR. Second LP CTR is actually close to what I was expecting and planning: 50%. Though the main problem, I think, is the offer which converts really shitty. So, I went to the CPA network and looked for alternatives. And found only one, but fortunately looking a lot better, LPs way more appropriate for my audience and not to mention a way better lead payout.

Now I need to update the LP a bit to mirror the new offer, and update the links. I won’t touch the ads for now since I don’t want to get FB to disapprove them again for no reason. But if the results get any better, I have a lot of space to optimize the ads and targeting.

In the meantime Facebook disapproved my best performing ad (0.11% CTR compared to others at around 0.07%), again citing their Dating rules. It has the same text as other three ads, just a prettier picture. I’d really like to hear their reasoning. But maybe I should just be happy they didn’t disapprove all my ads, even after they were already approved yesterday.

Dating2 campaign

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Continuing with the dating2 test. Yesterday I submitted 4 ads and they were disapproved because …

Your ad or Sponsored Story violates the dating requirements of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines. Before resubmitting it, please visit our Help Center for additional information and examples compliant with our Advertising Guidelines.

This is not the images disapproval so that means they don’t like my text. Bummer.

The weird thing is it looks like they were OK with the ads in the beginning:

Changing the text and resubmitting (these disapprovals are really frustrating) …

Local1 campaign update – very nice!

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Well, this is very pleasant surprise. Once I got some ads approved on Facebook, the results were great.

This is for the last (not full) three days (from my tracking spreadsheet):

There are quite a few things I didn’t expect to happen:

  • A fantastic CTR – 0,296% is great on Facebook.
  • A great CPC – it’s currently at $0,13.
  • An enormous amount of clicks – 483 clicks in less than three days.
  • The volume – 483 clicks and I’m hitting my daily spend limit at $20.
  • The completely disappointing conversion rate at only 4,35% for a 5-field form.

I really think I have a winning campaign and business model here. Now I just need to work hard on optimizing the landing page and get the conversion rate into the two figures.

Local campaign1 Facebook campaign

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I’ve finally published the first ads for the local1 campaign. The problem again, is of course, the reach. I need to be very local because of the actual meetings taking place which means again only about 100k people. Plus while Qwaya allows you to create hundreds of ads very easily, it’s not recommended to go above 15 in general, and in my case anything above 2-3 is risky.

Here’s the excerpt from Qwaya’s page explaining this:

Facebook runs a algorithm to decide the quality score between your own campaigns. You could say that Facebook runs an optimization process for you. When you launch a campaign with many ads, Facebook give all of them the same exposure in order to identify the CTR of every individual ad. Once Facebook realizes which adds generate a higher CTR – or have a higher quality score – these get more impressions compared to the less converting ones. Over time, Facebook will stop showing ads with a lower CTR completely.

Facebook does this quick optimization work for you automatically, which can be great for conversion rates and something you can leverage a lot, especially if you have many versions of your ads targeting different demographics inside one campaign. However, in some cases it might work against your optimization work. Facebook tend to make their decisions very quickly and sometimes you might want to give your ads more time before they’re shut down by the algorithm.

In that case, create more campaigns with fewer ads inside each campaign. This will essentially force Facebook to show all the ads during a longer period before giving them a quality score and lower/increase the exposure of the ads.

 

So, ads sent to Facebook, nothing else to do but wait. I already made the landing page and described the fckup I had with saving leads in my previous post.

Now I just need to cross my fingers and hope that I get any clicks/leads at all. Stay tuned!

Local lead generation campaign

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While I’m waiting for the advertiser to approve my dating2 landing page text (waiting three fcking days already for 100 words), I’m starting a new local lead generation campaign. It has a fantastic twist to it which will make it easy to copy it to practically any country in the world. And if the merchant(s) are competent, the customer lifetime value (CLV) could go into the hundreds, leaving me with a very nice lead price.

In the beginning though we need to assess that CLV, so the first month I’ll be running an experimental campaign in my own country which has average CPC. In that month, the first two trustworthy merchants will take my leads and try to convert as many as possible. After that month we’ll see how much money each lead is worth to them. After a few more months we’ll have an even better estimate of CLV which could then be used for the basis of the lead price for all other merchants in this and all other countries.

The calculation:


(offer CR is 100% is because it’s lead gen, not affiliate sale)

And this numbers are not that off. Ad CPC could go down, payout could go way up and LP CR is possible around 50% because it’s just a form fill. But it will definitely put my sales skills to the test …

This should go a bit faster – no translations for any of the texts. I already found a landing page I’ll be testing for this campaign on Zac Johnson’s blog. And it that one fails I’ll take the simple squeeze page from TrafficPlusConversion.com.

Can’t wait to get some results.

Pausing dating1 campaign

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Yesterday I increased the CPC of the dating1 campaign just to see what’ll happen. And yes, the reach increased to almost 15.000 people (still a third of all available), and yes, there were actually quite a few clicks. Unfortunately only 1 conversion.

I tested 4 landing pages and two of them had a decent CTR, while two had a really low one. The main problem though is the offer conversion:

It might be my fault by not “warming” the leads enough though I think the offer should convert way better than it did even on cold traffic (it’s just a registration form). But it might also be that a lot of people are already registered on the website.

In any case, I’m pausing the campaign and moving on to the next one (dating2). I’ve spent about $60 on testing this one and since I got back only one fifth of that (with the latest EPC at $0.08 and CPC over $0.80), I can conclude this is a failed campaign.

Moving on.