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!

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.

Do you have a need to cloak the Facebook Ad Reviewers?  I know I need to often, especially when I advertise internationally.

To do this is pretty simple. I use this method and it works like a charm.  Download the Facebook Cloaking Script over at Affiliate Plex.  He has a pretty thorough how to from installation to utilization.

To get around the GeoIP redirects send the reviewers to Singlesnet, your landing page or domain that your offer is on.

[UPDATE]: To bypass any of the tracking that you or the merchant does and any GeoIP redirects that the reviewer may come across, cloak them to the url of the actual merchant lander.  This is especially helpful on Neverblue as any person’s IP that doesn’t come from the country that your offer is good for, goes directly to WebFetti.

I’m sure you can figure out ways to use this for a different purpose, but I neither condone these actions or use this script for that purpose.

Coupon Code: web04160950

I recently found out MySpace gave out this coupon during a webinar they had. I heard it sucked so I’m not too upset I missed out.

I logged into my account and couldn’t figure out where to enter this thing. So good luck with it.

I must be misunderstanding something here.  I was interested in running the eHarmony Australia offer and after reading their Terms & Conditions (below) we cannot direct link.

1. Publishers may not bid on any eharmony trademark term or any misspellings of eHarmony.
2. Publishers may not direct links to eHarmony.
3. Publishers may not use “eHarmony,” “eHarmony” misspellings/variations, or misleading information or derogatory information in any ad headline, description copy or display URL.
4. Publishers may not use “eHarmony” appended to any publisher URL (such as: www.publisherdatingsite.com/eharmony).
5. Direct linking or infringement upon the eHarmony trademark can lead to immediate expiration and reversal of commission
6. Use of coupon codes not presented exclusively to Neverblue Media is prohibited.
7. Publishers may not make use eHarmony’s internal promotional codes in their promotion and advertising.
8. Using email as a means to promote eHarmony is prohibited.
9. Using incentives or incentive marketing as a means to promote eHarmony is prohibited.
10. Engaging in lead generation activities: eHarmony does not permit hand-inputting or batching pre-collected leads into its form. All leads must be derived from natural traffic.
11. Avoid using triggered-event headlines such as “Get a date tonight” or other such “promises.”

Promoting eHarmony on a network without first contacting and informing a member of the eHarmony affiliate team is prohibited.

1. Sites displaying Advertising Material may not include content containing or relating to.Gambling or casinos
2. Sales or promotion of weapons or ammunition (e.g., firearms, fighting knives, stun guns)
3. Sales or promotion of beer or hard alcohol
4. Sales or promotion of tobacco or tobacco-related products
5. Sales or promotion of prescription drugs
6. Sales or promotion of products that are replicas or imitations of designer goods
7. Sales or distribution of term papers or student essays
8. Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity, or infringes on the legal rights of others
9. Publishers may not use any banners that are not approved by eHarmony

Why wouldn’t they allow us to direct link to their offer. I must be misunderstanding something. Do they not want a ton of sign-ups? Isn’t that why they have an offer on the affiliate network?

Can someone please explain this to me?

The other day I was browsing WickedFire and I stumbled upon a few landing pages that were being given out for free.  I figured I might as well post them up for people to use.  Feel free to use these wherever you feel like it.

• Credit-Review
• Dating
• Green-Tea