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