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!

Here’s a golden ticket for all you noobs that haven’t made any money online.

Have you always wanted to break into a profitable niche on Facebook?  Want to break into a really competitive niche that you can run forever and make some money?  There are guys that have been running dating campaigns for 2, 3 and 4 years and probably even longer than that.

You need a few things to get you started.

First, go signup at Neverblue under my referral link.  If you do this and are having problems with this campaign, IM me and I’ll help you personally.  You’ll want to run Christian Mingle as I’ve converted this exact offer between 18-20% over a months time using ad copy very similar to what I’m about to give away.

Next, go download the 700+ Facebook dating images Justin Dupre has provided.  There are some GEMS inside here.  You’ll have to figure out which ones by split testing.

Below are exact copies of my ad copy and stats for this one ad.  This was run awhile back while I was split testing True Christian Singles.  I actually recommend split testing these two offers to see which one performs best for you.  You can see I was running CPC here as it was before I because a huge advocate of only running CPM.  I suggest you run CPM only.  I’m working on a post for this that you should be expecting soon.

The key for targeted traffic here is keywords!  For this particular ad I was targeting the following keywords: christian, church, god, jesus or jesus christ.  You can expand on these keywords by targeting christian music, gospel music, christian books, christian artists, etc.  Don’t forget to use the suggested keywords.  If you don’t know what one of the names are that is suggested, Google it!  If it’s related to Christianity, include it!  At one point my keyword list was approaching 100 keywords.

Personally, I like to setup separate campaigns in Prosper for all the demo’s I split test by, including age and gender.  I also setup separate campaigns in Facebook so it’s easier to track my profit/loss by campaign and either pause or adjust my budget accordingly.

What else do you want from me?  Go make some monies!

Sorry to steal some of your thunder AdHustler, but this cannot be talked about enough.  You absolutely must control your destination URL.  Since I do most of my advetising on social media I’ve figured out a way to always control my destination URL.

You can do this by cloaking Facebook the right way as I talked about in my previous post.  If one of your offers ever goes down you can just switch out your tracking link to a new tracking link point to a different offer or the same offer on a different network.  This will help tremendously if you want to use establish ads with a good CTR to test out a new offer.

I’ve also done a little customization to the Facebook cloaking script to use it on MyAds and POF so that I can always control where my user ends up.