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.

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.

I’m sure some will argue this, but I don’t really care what they have to say.  This is what I’ve learned from my experiences.

Are you trying to attack a micro-niche?  Say a niche of less than 100,000 on Facebook?  You better have your best ad copy and images ready to go from the get go.

With these small target demographics it’s a littler tougher to get started and get impressions.  Once you have some ads with an established CTR Facebook will favor those ads over new ads that are made.  Here’s proof.  I threw up some ads in a 75k demo that I was already banging out.  I wanted to test new ad copy because my CTR was dropping like a rock.  I had the same exact demographic using the same exact bid and these ads couldn’t even get 1 impression from Facebook because my other ads (and others I’m sure) were already sucking up all the impressions.  So I would have to bid higher and higher just to receive impressions at all.  Check out the image below for evidence of that.

If it’s a new vertical for you and you’re not sure what type of ad copy and/or image will work well I suggest trying out no more than 5 images and 5 sets of ad copy to split test.  Throw up those 25 ads, see which does well.  Then throw up another set of 25 ads to see which ad copy and images do well that time.  Then I would take your 4 best images and 4 best ad copies and this is when you turn up the traffic.

If you’re already in the vertical, such as dating and know which images are going to do well, just use a set of 10 or so images using an ad copy that is proven.  When the CTR on those images start dying pause those ads and bust out another 10 images that perform well using a different ad copy.  Just rinse and repeat this anytime your CTR starts to die out.  It works like a charm for me.

Have you experienced the same thing?  Let me know!

While I was wandering around the Meet Market at Affiliate Summit I ran into the Sam, Shawn, Nikki and Amy from Optimal Web Works.  We’ve been discussing ideas about how we tackle Facebook Ads for the past year now and decided it was best to talk to Facebook as a group.  Needless to say we grilled Ben from Facebook for close to an hour and got some excellent information from him.  There are many tools in beta right now that will be released to the public, hopefully sooner rather than later.  I mentioned a few of these ideas in my Affiliate Summit West 2010 post.  I must say that Ben was great for letting us question him for so long.

Once we were done, I decided it would be best if I picked up a few coupons for people that are new to Facebook.  I’ve listed the coupons below.  I’m assuming these are for new accounts only.  The coupons expire March 31, 2010.

• W7R4-V6NX-86M8-JWTE
• 7843-RM0F-1NNC-4857
• T6P4-41N7-9Y3N-08NX
• E967-135H-MMWW-N9YN

Arrival, Pawn Stars & Downtown Las Vegas

As soon as I got to the airport in Tulsa I caught a flamer staring me down on the concourse and as I caught him he got up and left the concourse so I thought I was safe.  About 15 minutes passed and I wondered where he went so I looked around and this homo is directly behind me.  So I moved next to some random chick to strike up conversation with.  All was good.  On the flight from Dallas to Las Vegas I thought it was pretty cool that we passed over The Hoover Dam.  However, I was upset that I wasn’t able to visit there with AdHustler because I didn’t make it in time.

Then the guys and gals at Optimal Web Works, Jardini and SHOCK Marketer wanted to hit up the pawn shop that is featured on Pawn Stars on The History Channel.  We missed everybody by just a couple hours as they left for San Diego or just finished their shift.  From there we walked to downtown Las Vegas and hit up the old strip.  I’ve included some pictures below.

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Day 1: Meet Market, Yard House WickedFire Meetup and Neverblue/NickyCakes/PPC.BZ

Started the day out pretty early and had breakfast with SHOCK Marketer at the Sao Paulo Cafe.  Ran into the Tracking202 guys and a number of other people on the way there and Wes Mahler said he needed to get me on an interview so stay tuned for that.  Not sure when it will happen though.  Ended up making it to the Meet Market for about 2 hours with Ilya Lichtenstein.  Chatted it up with Jay Kim and Ilya for a little bit and Ads4Dough is great.  I’ve done very little revenue with them, but they were more than willing to give me the time of day.  I ran into my buddies over at Optimal Web Works and we’ve been tackling Facebook for a minute and discussing our strategies so we hit up the Facebook booth and grilled Ben for a good 45 minutes to an hour asking questions.  I came away with a couple ideas and can’t wait for some of their beta features to become publicly available.

There was a WickedFire meetup at The Yard House that was complete fail.  There were about 50 people on the RSVP list and there was at most 15 of us there.  I met a handful of new guys there and it was great meeting you all.

Then there was the EPIC Neverblue/NickyCakes/PPC.BZ part at one of the suites at The Palms.  YTCracker was the DJ and even did a few freestyle and songs.  I’ll have videos of this on YouTube shortly.  And how could we forget Rob Hustle and Mic Davice?  They killed the mic and I got plenty of videos of this too.  We ever had a couple guys jump in the pool including Josh Ziering and Khoa.

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Day 2: Exhibit Hall, Mailer Meetup, Party at The Hangover Suite & Las Vegas Boulevard

I forget what happened this morning.  I just know I finally made it to the Exhibit Hall for a couple hours and made my rounds.  Of course the first thing I did was run over to the C2M booth grab a beer from the keg and chat it up with Ruck, Mike Kerry, Steve Howe and Ryan Hurry.  Chatted it up with Jay Kim and let him know what I was running and what I kinds of offers I would like to see Ads4Dough get so I can get my revenue up with those guys.  Made a couple stops around the show and got a couple pieces of schwag.  I don’t really care for the Exhibit Hall.  Being labeled as an affiliate puts a target on you and it gets annoying when everybody wants to talk to you so I always turn my badge around.

Then I met up with the Optimal Web Works guys again and went to meet up with the mailers to find out what they’re doing and was given some information if I wanted to get into the mailing area.  They later had a party at The Hangover Suite.  I was hungry when I got there and they just happened to have some great chicken, wings and mini-burritos that I snacked on to hold me over for the night.  There was a couple mailers that were dropping knowledge on all of us there that were interested in becoming a mailer.  Ran into Bofu2u, Russell and BlueHatSEO and kicked it with them.

We later hit up the strip and Bofu2u almost got a pink Narwhal Henna tattoo on his nipple.  I was trying to get him drunk enough to make it happen so we hit the strip looking for a place to do the tattoo.  I thought they found one so I ran off to go piss and the guy I asked outside this club sent me upstairs to a gay club to piss and it was a maze to get outta there.  I came back down and found the group and the guy I asked all dying laughing at me.  Then I was told it was a gay club so I bitched out the guy asking what the fuck was wrong with him so he eventually let us get in his club for free and gave us some free to play beer pong.  Found some skanks that were pretty bootsy.

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Day 3:Exhibit Hall, Downtown Las Vegas (again), Gambling and Tender

Met up with Bofu2u, trigatch and Russell for breakfast at the Sao Paulo Cafe and laughed at the previous nights events.  Ran over to the Exhibit Hall again for a couple hours and immediately hit the C2M booth again for the keg.  Chatted up with those guys for a little bit and some other affiliates that were coming by for the same reason I was there.  Then Bofu2u, Russell, Julian, Nick Mattern and AdHustler for some In N Out Burger.  Made our way to downtown Las Vegas for some gambling and we all lost our asses out there, even at the cheap tables.  Then Nick Mattern, Russell and I decided to eat at Tender at The Luxor with heavyt, sgtryan, circa and a few other affiliates.  The food was excellent but most of the time we were there the damn alarm was going off and it got hella annoying.  By the time we finished eating it was around 10pm and I was tired as shit from the last few days and from drinking since 11am so I called it a night.

Departure

The departure was pretty uneventful.  Ran into my Optimal Web Works buddies in Terminal D and recapped what we were taking away from the conference.  I was tired as hell and happy to get home.

It was great seeing everybody at Affiliate Summit West 2010!  Can’t wait to make it happen again!