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!

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

If you’re advertising internationally and would like to improve your CTR dramatically, USE LANGUAGE TARGETING!

Some countries such as Belgium speak like a 60/40 mix of Dutch/French, respectively.  You don’t want your Dutch ad showing to to people who speak French.  And you definitely don’t want your French ad showing to more than half the country who might not even be able to read it.  I’ve also found staggering differences in CTR and conversion rates for each language.  Same goes for Switzerland, 60% of them speak German and 20% speak French.  If you need to figure out which language(s) the country your advertising in speaks, just head over to Wikipedia, they always have the languages in the demographics section.

You will even want to use Facebook to determine the number of people you’re advertising to in that country that speaks that particular language.  Even though 60% of a country speaks Dutch and 40% speaks French, the Frenchies might account for 80% of the Facebook traffic.  It happens.  Just watch the target demographic size when you’re creating your ad in Facebook.

This tip is even good to use in Canada and even the United States.

Try it out and let me know how much your CTR improves!

Here’s a Christas present for the noobs.

Are you getting tired of submitting ads over and over again hoping Facebook finally approves them this time around? If so, read on.

You must ask yourself, do my ads meet all of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines? If they meet all the criteria and they get disapproved simply email affiliates@facebook.com an email asking why. I’ve included a sample email below.

Why were the ads in CampaignName disapproved? I believe they meet all your advertising guidelines. And if they don’t, please let me know what I need to change to get them approved. Thanks!

You’ll be amazed at how often they will reply to you and say they were mistakenly disapproved, they were re-reviewed and approved. Or if they believe they don’t meet the advertising guidelines they usually will tell you specifically why they were disapproved and what you can do to get them approved next time they’re submitted.

Go ahead and try it!