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!