Category Archives: The Steps

Report on 7Search cf keywords

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These are the results from a few weeks back of testing on 7Search cf (“ClickFree”) keywords (which could also be called “ConversionFree”):

Day 1

Day 2

 

Was testing everything from Clickbank products (though honestly didn’t have any expectations for them from the beginning) to zip and email submits. Nothing converted. At all. Not one conversion on any of the campaigns and with over 1100 clicks. Even with all crap offers you could expect at least a 0.1% conversion rate on free stuff. Nope.

I’ll keep away from 7Search from now on.

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 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) …

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.

Campaign dating1 Facebook CPC increase

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Note: So that it’ll be easier to follow, I’m numbering the campaigns – dating1 is the first campaign I started, and dating2 is the campaign I’m working on now (still WIP).

I’ve had very little traction with my dating1 campaign on FB, getting way too little impressions and clicks. This is probably because I’m also reaching just a fifth of my target audience:

So I asked for advice from one of the members of our newly-founded work group (more on that another day) and he said I should try increasing the bid to double the suggested. While that sounds like a really awful idea at first, it might help me get more pageviews, more clicks and some data on offer conversion.

I’ll need to keep an eye on the costs but this is the last resort before scraping the whole campaign.

New campaign, new landing pages, new ads

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I resumed my first campaign but since it’s getting little traction, I decided to go into a more red ocean. What that means in dating I probably don’t need to explain.

So, using my state-of-the-art calculations (xls spreadsheet), I calculated my predicted ROI when targeting lower-payout audience:

Not looking good. And that’s with pretty optimistic LP CTR and offer CR. I should get the clicks down to $0.15 just to expect a 10% ROI!

OK, scrap that. So an audience with a better payout:

That looks better. Unfortunately the audience is a third of the above. But at least there’s a chance to get profitable. And if I get that click down to $0.25 CPC, I’ll be seing 110% ROI which would be really, really nice.

So, I found me some nice pics from Fiverr, a basic landing page, edited the colors a bit (to reflect Facebook and offer page), wrote some basic copy and put a big nice picture beside it.

Now I still need to write some ad copy and send the texts for translation.

Stay tuned.

Optimizing the campaign after 5 days

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I know my colleague who’s a big numbers man would kick my ass if he knew I’m going to start making assumptions based on just a few numbers, but there are a few things that are already pretty clear.

Ad CTR: 0,017% – 0,043% (after almost 100.000 impressions)

While not that bad (at least the latter), there’s still a lot of room for improvement. Getting the CTR over 0,1% would make a great impact on clicks and CPC so I’ll be finding new images to get the clickability up.

Landing Page CTR: 14,29%-15,79% (after 40 clicks)

I must be doing something seriously wrong as this should be at least twice that (Finch says to aim for ~30%). Will have to add a new LP and test a different approach.

While waiting on the Facebook advertising account, I’ll be searching for and creating new images and finding a new concept for the LP. I might also start preparing for a new age group campaign.

Facebook advertising after 4 days

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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.

Facebook advertising after 1 day

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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.

Creating Facebook ads for your CPA Campaign

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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.