I tried doing a 28-Day Challenge in February and ended up being banned from Facebook in the middle of the month and I said I would try it again, so here it is…

Let’s say I’ve been really slacking the last two months and I haven’t had any motivation to work.  I’m trying to hold myself accountable by stating I would throw up 30 campaigns in 30 days and see what I can make happen.

My main traffic sources this time around will be PlentyofFish, SiteScout and TrafficVance.  I will mainly be doing direct linking, but I’ll have a few campaigns with landers.  I’ll try to keep you all updated weekly and let you know what transpires.

I know I did this last time and I had seen great success with a few campaigns and I’m hoping that’ll happen again this time.

If you have any offer suggestions, let me know in the comments below  If you do suggest an offer, I’ll provide detailed feedback on how I setup the campaign in my weekly updates.

First off, I must apologize to everybody for my post a couple months ago about dayparting on Facebook. I saw the new campaign lifetime feature on Facebook and mistook it for day parting. I hurriedly made a post and then realized my mistake. So, if you came to my blog hoping for dayparting, I’m sorry for leading everybody on. I just got super excited and wanted to be the first to blog about it.

I also must tell you I was quite pissed because I had done a lot of testing for this particular case study to see how CPC compared to CPM and right in the middle of my testing Facebook started displaying a fourth advertisement, so I had to throw that data away.

When I originally started advertising on Facebook all I did was bid CPC as there was less risk and bid prices were cheap. I stuck with that method for months and never tried CPM. Shortly after ASE 2009 I moved over to only CPM bidding and never looked back. Earlier this year I moved onto other traffic sources and quit paying attention to Facebook. Here recently I’ve gotten back into advertising on Facebook. I noticed the suggested bid prices for CPC and CPM were both outrageous. I did remember a big hoopla from Facebook earlier this year during my exodus about how you should bid CPC for better positions and all that. The last 4-6 weeks I’ve been noticing some people suggesting bidding CPC for best results. I never really saw any definitive information or statistics backing either side so I decided to turn this into a case study.

There are two main bidding types when advertising.  They are known as CPC or cost per click and CPM or cost per thousand impressions.  There are advantages and disadvantages to each type.  Below is a synopsis of both bidding types.  Choose what you feel is appropriate for your particular campaign or do a split test to see what does best for your needs.

Cost Per Click – CPC

When you choose the CPC bid type, you’ll be charged every time someone clicks on your ad.  This option is less risky, especially if you’re entering a new niche and aren’t sure how well your ads and especially images will perform.  I’ve found if you can get a high enough CTR, preferably below your EPC, you can bid this type and should be able to see some longevity with your campaign.

Cost Per Impressions – CPM

When you choose the CPM bid type, you’ll be charged for every one thousand impressions your ad receives.  This is an especially good option if you’re a branding advertiser. If you’ve been advertising in your niche and know what kind of ad copy and images work well, this may be your preferred bid type.  A general rule of thumb is if you can get a CTR above 0.10%, choose this bid type because your CPC will be cheaper this way.  You’ll want the highest possible CTR when bidding CPM.  The higher your CTR, the cheaper your CPC will be.  However, when bidding CPM, you will need to constantly monitor your ads to make sure your CPC is still below your EPC.

The stats for each campaign is below.  I’m not going to reveal the actual campaigns and exact targeting because these are two of my super stable campaigns that have done very well for me in the past and continue to do so.  However, I will tell you that that Campaigns 1-4 are a niche US dating offer and Campaign 5 is a broad dating offer in Canada. I ran the same set of ads in each campaign and I bid the highest CPC and CPM suggested by Facebook.

Conclusion
As you can see from the results, CPC was the way to go in each test except for one.  I’ve done countless other CPC versus CPM tests and 95% of the time CPC comes out on top.  I know the bids are extremely high, but just try it out.  With CPC, you’ll notice your CTR is way higher and conversions are typically better.  Bidding CPC will also be beneficial to you because your target demographic will be less prone to banner blindness. CPC bidding will add longevity to your campaigns, while you will need to continually monitor your CPM campaigns.  I’m not sure why conversions are better. I didn’t check my Prosper202 logs to see if most of my CPC traffic came from Facebook or if it was application traffic. Because of these results, I do believe that CPC ads are placed in the top 1 or 2 spots and that CPM traffic goes mostly to the bottom spots. There is a CTR apex where it will be more beneficial to run CPM instead of CPC, but I haven’t yet figured that out because you’ll need to also factor in CPC and EPC for each ad.

Recently I was flown out to Los Angeles by AKMG and was selected to give a presentation at Meetup202 LA.  The topic I chose was how to get started with buying banner inventory on websites.  If you read my recap you’ll know the story about how I was really nervous about it.  Smaxor being present didn’t help my nerves because I knew if I had any slipups, he would know.  But after it was all said and done, I handled it pretty well.  A lot of people came up to me after wards and gave me great information and let me know they gained some good information, which is was my objective in the first place.  So I considered it a success.

The purpose of this post is to let everybody know that my Guide to Buying Banner Inventory is now public information.  There’s a link in the menubar above, so you might have seen it before.  I just had it set to password protected to tease everybody for awhile.  I had a number of people contact me on AIM asking for the password so they could check it out.

I did let a handful of people check out the guide in rough fashion so they could check it out and provide feedback.  They pointed out a few things I’ve added to the guide, but for the most part it’s pretty much a direct copy of the presentation I made at Meetup202 LA.  A few of the people that have already seen it have used the tips I’ve given away to get some campaigns up and running.

For what it’s worth, I consulted with a few affiliates who I trust to get their feedback on whether I should turn this into an eBook and make some money, because this guide definitely gives out some great information that you can use to fatten your bank account.  However, I didn’t want to be labeled a guru or an eBook marketer so I decided to go the Nickycakes route and release it as a guide on my blog.

I’m sure there are some small parts I’ve missed, but I believe that I have covered pretty much what you need to know when it comes to buying banner inventory.  If you guys see anything that I should change in the guide, just make a comment on those pages and I’ll add it if necessary.

Without further ado, just click the link above in the menubar or click here for my Guide to Buying Banner Inventory.

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