Just so everybody knows, PPV isn’t the easiest thing in the world to master.  I recently read a thread on WickedFire that made me realize something.  If you bid on anything on TrafficVance your minimum bid is $10 CPM.  This is because the minimum bid is $0.01 x 1000 = $10.

I also tested out a number of campaigns and failed miserably and lost hundreds of dollars.  So if you’re worried about losign a few hundred testing, this is not something you should try.

What I’m giving away here was my first profitable campaign on PPV.  I’m going to let everybody know just how I did it.

First thing I did was sign up on TrafficVance.  When you first sign up you will need at least $1,000 to get started.  So if you’re not able to blow some money, don’t try out PPV.

Next, you will want to go and download Laser URL.  If you don’t know how to use this program go here for Laser URL Tutorial Videos.  You will want to search a very closely related term to your offer using Laser URL.  I always let it search 10 pages deep on all three search engines.  This gives me a number of URL’s to prune and use for testing purposes.  Once you get these URLs, export them to a spreadsheet and then I suggest researching each URL to see if they even relate to your offer.  If they relate, it’ll be one of your targets.

I ran the Mobile IQ Quiz – QuizYou over at EWA.  I used Laser URL to search for the term iq quiz.  I of course pruned my targets and threw the list into TrafficVance.

My first time through I made sure I was the highest bidder on all the URL’s I targetted because I wanted some good test data.  I let it run for a couple days and came back to optimize it.  Make sure you’re tracking where your traffic comes from using the %%$KEYWORD%% variable that TrafficVance uses.  This way you can see which targets are converting and what the EPC for that target is so you can adjust your bids according.

After some time I was able to drop all the low traffic and non-converting targets down to about 10 targets.  The only bad thing about this was that I had to monitor these things day and night because I would get into daily bidding wars on URL’s, especially my best converting URL.  This got tiresome, I finally just got fed up with it and was okay with being in the 3rd spot.  I noticed more and more competition coming in on my targets and I was eventually being out bid on all my target URL’s.  The headache to keep up with these bids eventually became so much that I quit running the offer because of the increased competition and higher bids led to a dismal ROI that was no longer worthy of my time.

I came back a couple months later and noticed all the bids were much lower than they once were so I turned the campaign on and let it run for a couple days.  For whatever reason the offer was no longer converting on these URL’s so I paused the offer and haven’t ran it since.

My gross revenue for this offer was $7,144.00 and my total spend for this campaign was $4,867.27.  That equates to a $2,277 profit and a 46.7% ROI.

P.S. – If you’re going to run a PPV campaign, I suggest that your Prosper202 install be on a dedicated server.  I always suggest LiquidWeb for any server you may need.

My good buddy Shawn Smith of Optimal Web Works will if you help me vote for him in this contest and they win.  They also have a Facebook Fan Page for wedding ideas.  So, become a fan and suggest any great ideas you may have.

Here’s a quick video he’s made to help persuade you to vote.

When it comes to online marketing this is one of my best buddies. I always make it a point to talk to him and Sam, his business partner and another great friend, pretty often and exchange ideas.

Here’s a little background information on Shawn and Nikki.

Our love story.

People will tell you winning the lottery is impossible, but we’ve won it thousands of times -- in each of life’s small twists that led to our unlikely meeting. Never expecting romance, Nikki left Thailand for America, where she won the green card lottery and found a job in D.C. Meanwhile, I started working in a city I never expected to live. My new Ann Arbor roommate, who was her former co-worker, introduced us. Soon, we traded weekend flights until I convinced her I was worth her moving across the country -- and finally, settling halfway around the world.

Three important details about our Ultimate Wedding.

Because Nikki’s family lives in Thailand and many of our friends are scattered throughout the U.S, getting everyone together is important to us. We’d also like to add some Thai culture -- in particular, the Thai wedding parade. I’d lead the parade on an elephant. As food lovers, the menu is also important. We want to serve food from various cultures. Lastly, we want a bright, outdoor setting. We’d love to be married at Mt. Vernon or a similar location. If we can add a micro-brew or micro-wine tasting, that would be the icing on the cake.

Our everyday dream day.

We share a drive to travel, experience other cultures and share our lives with others. Our perfect everyday has us tasting new flavors, hugging new and old friends and learning together. If we’re at home, we’d enjoy cooking, hosting others and sharing our adventures. Any time we can be together and enrich our lives and those around us we’re happy.

We all knew it was coming.  I, for one, will not be using this.  They say it’s in beta now so I’m not sure how many others have access to it.   They even tell me to click the Tracking link in the left navigation menu and guess what… There’s no link.  Great job, Facebook!

I’ve attached a .pdf file for you guys to read over.  Download Facebook’s Conversion Tracking Guide.

I’ve included a few excerpts below.

• Your tracking tag is specific to your Facebook advertising account. To generate a new tag, simply go to your Ads Manager and click on the “Tracking” link in the left hand navigation. That will take you to the Tag Management page. From here, you can create a new tracking tag. Before your tag is generated, you have an opportunity to name the tag, choose the type of conversion event that you’ll track on your website and specify a value associated with the conversion. After you hit the “Save” button, you’ll be able to copy and paste the tag into your website code.
• Implementing your Facebook tracking tag is as simple as copying and pasting your tag into your website code. Facebook will record a conversion every time a tracking tag is loaded. A tag is loaded when a person initiates the conversion event as defined by you and where you put the code on your site. There are a number of different places you could insert your tag(s) depending on the action on your website that you would like to track.
• By generating a conversion tracking tag on Facebook and copying and pasting it into the appropriate code on your website, you can track things like individual page views, purchases, registrations or downloads. You could even track a series of page views to determine the path someone takes to these conversion events.

Have you always wondered how guys on Facebook get those pictures of half-naked girls approved on their ads?  So have I!  The only hypothesis I’ve come up with after submitting tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of ads is that they hide it in a submission of ads.

I’ve found that if I lead off with some scantily clad women all the ads will be disapproved, regardless of what the ads look like.  If the first picture the Facebook Ad Reviewer sees is a really provocative picture, you can kiss the rest of your submissions goodbye.  They will all be disapproved.

One method I like to use is to throw up 10 images at a time.  What I suggest is take 50 decent pictures, throw those ads up first and make sure they’re good to go.  Then for your last 2 or 3 images throw up some that wouldn’t normally get approved.  I’ve seen this work a number of times for myself.  You might also want to mix these 2 or 3 in the middle of these 50 ads.

Try it out and let me know if you have any luck!

This is a follow-up to Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1 and Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 2.

After having 2 sets of images have their CTR die out on me I got lazy and tested out another another ad copy and saw my conversions tank by 54% so I figure the ad copy had to be misleading.   So I decided I wanted to try out 5 completely different sets of ad copy and see the difference between their conversion rates.  I tried to relate each ad title with the description.  I used the same images as my first go around so I know they can perform decently and since I haven’t ran them in awhile their CTR should at least be respectable now.

Here are the stats for the last 7 days according to Prosper.

• Ad Copy 1 (Original): 8280 Clicks, 438 Conversions, 5.29% Conversion Ratio
• Ad Copy 2: 12612 Clicks, 498 Conversions, 3.95% Conversation Ratio
• Ad Copy 3: 441 Clicks, 9 Conversions, 2.04% Conversion Ratio
• Ad Copy 4: 323 Clicks, 10 Conversions, 3.1% Conversion Ratio
• Ad Copy 5: 721 Clicks, 34 Conversions, 4.72% Conversion Ratio

I found it pretty crazy that my original ad copy converted best for me after the split testing I did.

So here’s concrete proof that split testing makes a huge difference!  If you’ve never split tested your ad copy, DO IT NOW! I’ve never done much split testing of ad copy until I ran this campaign and have finally came to an amazing revelation, even though I should’ve known it.

On Facebook your CTR depends on the image you use in your ad copy.  Your conversion ratio depends on the text in your ad copy!  It is imperative to split test both!

Background story: So here I was a few days after ASW checking out some offers at my favorite network, PKM.  I ran an offer I’ve done well with before and sent like 300 clicks to the offer and nothing converted.  I know this offer converts because I’ve ran it before.  I watched the tracking links and noticed it ran through Revenue Ads.  I figure I would go straight to them to and run the offers.  So I go ahead and signup with Revenue Ads and wait for their call.  They called me the next day and I missed it.  I saw I had a missed call from the (405) area code and I was wondering who was calling me from Oklahoma City.  I called it back and low and behold it was an affiliate network based out of Oklahoma.  I thought I was one of maybe 3 or 4 affilates in Oklahoma.  Looks like I was wrong.  We not only have more affiliates than I thought because the Tracking202 team let me know how many people have joined the Oklahoma City and Tulsa groups on their Tracking202 profiles.

So I’ve been wanting to do a Meetup202 in Oklahoma for awhile and didn’t think it would be worth the trouble since I only thought a few affiliates existed in Oklahoma.  I ran the idea by Dylan over at Revenue Ads and he thought it was an excellent idea and that we could do the meetup at their offices.  After talking to him a few times we decided on Friday, March 19th, 2010.  This also happens to be the same time the 2010 NCAA March Madness Tournament is happening and Oklahoma City is hosting the 1st and 2nd round games.  We’re gonna try to catch some the games on Saturday.

If you’re an affiliate and are from Oklahoma check out this Meetup event that I’ve helped put together along with Revenue Ads, NDustry Clix and NDemand Affiliates.  These networks will be hosting this Meetup and it should be a blast.

Ian Fernando and Murray Newlands will also be attendance.  If you want to come, just RSVP here.

Edit: Just incase anybody takes it the wrong way I wasn’t trying to take shots at PKM.  The offer didn’t convert at Revenue Ads either so either my ad copy plain sucks or the offer sucks.  Either way PKM is still my favorite network.

This is a follow-up to Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1.

Okay so the CTR began to die out on the images I found in Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1.  I was still making some pretty good money off this campaign and decided I needed to switch up the ad copy.  Me being pretty lazy I went to the merchant’s landing page and used some of the lines that caught my attention in my ad copy and mind you since I was lazy I only used one variation and scaled this out to every demographic.  After about 5 days of continually submitting ads I finally got my ads past the review team at Facebook.  I just knew I was going to kill it again for a few days and wasn’t sure what I was going to do after that, probably try a different ad copy.

So I threw up this one ad copy using those images I used in the first go round.  I figure they haven’t been shown in a couple weeks, they should have some juice left in them.  Plus with some new ad copy I should be sitting pretty.

I ran it for a couple days and lost a nice chunk of change, mainly because my conversion ratio had tanked by 54%.  I’ve included screenshots below.  And that amount of data was more than enough to be statistically relevant.  My first concern was since I haven’t ran this offer in a few days maybe the advertiser was up to no good so I hit up my affiliate manager and asked him if the conversion rate for the network as a whole changed and he said nope.  So I was thinking since the only thing that had changed was the ad copy, maybe the ad copy was now a bit misleading because it did include that the user could win money.

Part 3 I will be split testing 5 different sets of ad copy to determine how it affects my conversion ratio.

Sorry for taking so long everybody.  I still haven’t seen any videos from the Neverblue/NickyCakes/PPC.bz party at the Palms during Affiliate Summit West 2010.  Luckily I took a number of videos and have posted all of them below for your viewing pleasure.  All I gotta say is YTCracker is fucking awesome.  Rob Hustle and Mic Davice both ripped the mic up.  The Paper Clique is legit!  I’ve included all the videos from my ASW2010 visit.  The video at the bottom is from some nut that  AdHustler, Nick Mattern, Russell Parr and I ran into on Fremont in downtown Vegas.

I’ve uploaded all these videos to YouTube, but obviously the video quality has diminished.  The title of each video is a direct link to the original .mov file.  They’re currently uploading right this very second so it might be a couple hours until they’re all hosted.  These videos are on an old HostGator account with unlimited everything, of course.  Let’s see if we crash it.

P.S. -- Don’t ask why I was turning the camera around in some of these videos.  I was drunk and obviously thought it was a great idea.

100_0090.MOV -- Rob Hustle on the mic -- 11.2mb

100_0092.MOV -- Rob Hustle on the mic -- 12.8mb

100_0093.MOV -- YTCracker on the mic -- 45.4mb

100_0094.MOV -- YTCracker on the mic -- 44.4mb

100_0106.MOV -- Mic Davice & Rob Hustle on the mic -- 20.2mb

100_0107.MOV -- Mic Davice & Rob Hustle on the mic -- 122mb

100_0108.MOV -- Mic Davice & Rob Hustle on the mic -- 155mb

100_0132.MOV -- Mic Davice & Rob Hustle on the mic -- 280mb

100_0136MOV -- Mic Davice & Rob Hustle on the mic -- 29.3mb

100_0137.MOV -- Mic Davice & Rob Hustle on the mic -- 96.2mb

100_0138.MOV -- Mic Davice & Rob Hustle on the mic -- 65.0mb

100_0141.MOV -- YTCracker on the mic -- 143mb

100_0142.MOV -- YTCracker on the mic -- 59.7mb

100_0155.MOV -- YTCracker on the mic -- 147mb

100_0156.MOV -- YTCracker on the mic -- 87.7mb

100_0158.MOV -- YTCracker on the mic -- 67.9mb

IMG_0137.MOV -- Not sure if serious? -- 2.10mb

So here I was dominating this niche on Facebook so I scaled it out to different demographics and was doing great with this offer.  I was effing pumped and got kinda lazy for a few days and I knew my CTR would die out eventually.  I thought no problem, I’ll find some more images that are similar to the ones I’m using now and just make a few more ads and keep banking on this offer.

I finally figured out something I could search for that would bring up similar images on Google image search and I found a couple I thought were going to kill it so I saved them.  I was talking to a friend about needing some more images and he told me to use Bing’s image search.  I checked it out and oh my god!  Bing’s image search is killer!  Try it out sometime if you haven’t already.

So I found 88 images I thought might work well and I used the same exact ad copy.  The only thing I did was change the picture.  I knew to be profitable in this particular demographic for this offer I would need a 0.10% CTR or higher with the amount I was bidding, so that’s what I was looking for.  If you’ll look at the screenshots below you’ll see I found a handful of keepers.

On the next part of this case study I’ll switch up the ad copy and see how well the ads perform.

While at Affiliate Summit West 2010 I happened to pickup a little Facebook flash drive.  It was a nifty little sucker that I figure I could show off to all my friends at home who love Facebook so much.  What I wasn’t expecting was tips from Facebook to be preloaded on this flash drive.  I’ve went through this stuff and it’s pretty basic, but I figure I might as well share it with you guys if you didn’t already know the basics.

I’ve included links to all the files below.

1. Affiliates on Facebook – Best Practices
2. Disapproval Destination
3. Disapproval Subscription
4. Facebook Ad Tips
5. Facebook Reporting Guide
6. Top 10 Ad Creative Tips

Like I said, this is pretty basic stuff if you’ve been advertising on Facebook.  If you’re new, it should teach you a couple handy things.