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.