This is a guest post by Matt Marcin, the dude who came in 2nd place in Nickycakes’ xbox 360 contest.
Hey guys, this is Matt from mattmarcin.com. I recently came in as #2 in Nickycake’s contest and only lost by about 2 minutes. The Cakes asked me to talk about how I came from behind to earn $1k in under 24 hours and nearly win the contest.
Let me start by saying that without Geoff over at Advaliant I would have never found a good offer to run with. I always start by looking at the offer list and determining what would work with my traffic sources. Offers that perform well on search might not perform on a media buy so you definitely need to keep that in mind. In this case, my main traffic source was socialmedia.com
SocialMedia lets you buy banner space on about 80% of the Facebook/Bebo/MySpace apps that exist. 200 clicks a minute isn’t uncommon once you have the campaign tweaked correctly. I tested out about 5 offers that I thought might convert and ended up finding a couple that didn’t fail miserably. Socialmedia’s main demographic is 13-25 year olds so make sure your offers fit in that demo. I’ve tried debt relief offers and let me tell you right now, they don’t work. The offers need to be applicable to the general population.
I picked one of the offers that was breaking even and built it out into a full campaign in about an hour. Nothing too fancy since we don’t care about quality score. Try playing with both direct linking and a landing page. Remember it is all about split testing. My aim with SocialMedia is to get at least a 10% ROI. If after playing with it I can’t get it that high then I trash it. My real goal is to hit at least 50% in the long term.
It’s pretty easy to scale a campaign on SocialMedia. I created 5 text ads for the offer which were all slightly different and I tracked their performance using tracking202.com. When I found a text ad that was losing me money, I threw it out and replaced it with a new one. Once running, I was getting about 50-100 clicks a minute and earning a solid profit. With all those clicks coming in it was just a matter of time before I hit $1k. Looking back on my stats it looks like I was running the campaign for about 6-8 hours to hit $1,000.
With all that said, Socialmedia is a difficult beast to tame. It can be very unforgiving and their interface doesn’t tell you how much you need to bid or even if your ad has been approved to run yet. Going into depth on using it isn’t something I have room to talk about today but I will be doing an article on my blog this week that goes more in depth.
I wanted to say thank you to both Nickycakes and Advaliant for running the contest and sending an Xbox 360 my way. Been way to addicted to COD4!
Thanks for the post Matt. PS. Cut your hair:
Published by nickycakes //
Nicky has spent a little time writing up a short internet marketing newbie guide to help new people to the industry and answer a lot of common questions. It’s going to be permanently linked right at the top of the page here, so feel free to flame any morons who post questions answered in that guide without reading it first. Please check it out and post in the comments here what you think, and if you have any suggestions on information that may have been left out:
Newbie Guide
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on March 1st, 2008 in Facebook
People ask almost every day, “Nicky, you still making money on Facebook?” Let’s put it this way, Nickycakes is still smokin these offers like jimmy dean.
The most common thing people are asking is “What kind of offers can I run on Facebook?” Dating was doing really well for a while, but now they’ve changed the rules on what ads they accept and it’s pretty much dead from oversaturation. So what can you promote?
Nickycakes had lunch with Jaeson at Neverblue at Affiliate Summit and talked about a new offer they got going starting today. It’s called Instant Action Games. They tested it internally on FB and it converted pretty well. The payout is $1.50 to start which seems a little low, zip submit low even, but if you take a look at the landing page, you’ll know why it converts so well. So the Cakes threw a little traffic at it today, and whaddya-know? Converted pretty damn well. Unfortunately Nicky’s daily budget is getting filled every day promoting a different offer so he can’t really invest in this one.
No need for any tricky cloaking, facebook mods seem to like this offer with almost any ad copy you come up with. If you’re still wondering exactly how to promote this, here’s a walkthrough for morons:
- If you’re not already signed up with Neverblue, do so by clicking here. If you are having a tough time getting approved, hit up nickycakes on IRC or MSN messenger and he’ll get you hooked up.
- Sign into Neverblue and find the Instant Action offer by going to the Campaigns -> Gaming section. Get your tracking link from the Search Creatives tab.
- Sign into Facebook, click Advertisers at the bottom, and get started making your ad. You’ll need a 110×80px image and some good ad copy. Here are some ad images Cakes made directly from the banner creatives on Neverblue. Feel free to use them:
For ad titles, here are a few examples that might work: “Beta Testers Needed”, “Beta Test”, “Reserve Your Username”, “Game of the Year 2008″, “Better Than HalfLife 2″.
For the ad description, just keep it simple.
- Set your demographic information…guys obviously, and remember that leads are accepted from Canada and UK too. Seems like they accept under 18 signups too, making this offer completely gold for facebook since under 18 and outside the US demographics are completely unsaturated and you can get a metric fuckton of cheap clicks.
- Profit.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
First, and foremost, if you’ve never read Nickycakes’ tutorial posts on getting into Facebook Ads, please take a moment to read them. Part 1, Part 2. The info in those posts can, and will make you good money with Facebook Advertising if you follow the information presented. Nickycakes gets asked about once a week if it’s still possible to make money with Facebook Ads, and the answer every time is YES. It’s still an awesome system, easy for new people to get into it, and extremely profitable. The potential is there to make hundreds of dollars a day, without a doubt. It’s been quite a while since this site has had a facebook ad post, and it’s long past due, so here goes.
- Spy on Other People’s Ads
Many people’s biggest problem is finding something good to promote on facebook. Seriously, every few days in the nickycakes irc channel, someone is scratching their head in bewilderment because they’re running an ad for car loans and nobody on facebook is clicking on it. If it’s too tough to figure out what to promote to college kids on your own, the idiots at facebook have created an adboard which lets you view everyone else’s ads. The Cakes has absolutely no clue why someone would do something so stupid, but they did. Just refresh your normal facebook profile page until you see a facebook ad come up, and click the “More Ads” button. There you go, a page full of ideas that are probably making other people money.
Keep in mind, however, that you will only be shown ads targeted to your demographic, so you may want to create a few fake facebook accounts for different demographics to see what’s being promoted to females/males/old people/young people/single people/married people, etc.
- Make Multiple Ads
Many times, you will make a facebook ad that is getting decent traffic, but you’re not coming close to filling your daily budget because you’re not getting enough impressions. There are two good options for getting over this hurdle. First, you could do the obvious thing and raise your bid, which will in turn make facebook give you more impressions per day and end up filling your daily budget. Second, and probably smarter, is keep your bid the same, and make a few more nearly identical ads. Assuming your CTR is nearly the same on all the ads, you should be able to fill up your budget with 5 almost identical ads if your original ad was using 1/5th of your budget to begin with.
- Use a Good Picture
The picture you use for your ad will literally make or break you. You NEED to find a good one for your ad to preform well. When making the picture for your ad, always save it in 110×80px with as high resolution possible (Nickycakes uses 24bit .png). Pick something eye-catching. Something that definately does not blend in with the facebook site. Using mostly black works well. Anything with hot girls is good as long as it’s related to your ad, and targeted to guys. Stacks of money, optical illusions, and expensive cars have all preformed well. Again, refer to tip #1 if you’re struggling and check what other people are using to get ideas.
- Run Your Ads At Night
This one is pretty simple. Ads just do better at night. No idea why, but they do. If you can afford to not get any clicks for the first half of the day, set your bid at 1 cent and wait until around 5pm EST or so and put your bid back to normal and watch the clicks fly.
- Out of the Box Targeting
A big mistake that many people make when starting with facebook ads is targeting everyone in the US market. Facebook may not have as many targeting options as Nickycakes would like, but they have quite a few, and they’re pretty accurate. The US market has a ton of people advertising on it, so try targeting Canada. Most people don’t target by keyword, but doing so can convert to sales like crazy. If you’re promoting some sort of health supplement, try thinking of keywords for people who work out and target them, or maybe vegetarians or vegans. These targeting options, while they may give you a more narrow audience, and less traffic, will give you a great CTR which will make your clicks cost almost nothing, and will no doubt convert to sales much better.
The most important thing to remember when advertising on facebook is this: It costs $0 to create an ad. Make as many as you can until you find one that’s making you money.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on January 6th, 2008 in Facebook
If you have been doing facebook ads, you have probably noticed that every week, starting Sunday all impressions stop unless you bid a ridiculously high amount per click and then slowly during the week you have to bid less and less to get impressions. Nickycakes and many others have been baffled as well as frustrated by this phenomenon that started about a month ago.
After thinking about it for a while, the Cakes has come up with a pretty solid theory as to why this is happening. When you make facebook ads, you are competing for impressions with not only other self-serve advertisers, but with the big advertisers as well. Big businesses like target, bally fitness, mortgage companies, etc, pay thousands of dollars to facebook for CPM (pay per impression, not click) ads. They’re the normal banner ads that you see when you use facebook. These people are generally bidding higher to have their ad shown than normal advertisers.
Self serve facebook ads have a daily spend limit. When you reach this limit, your ad will stop being shown, giving other advertisers a better opportunity to have their ads shown at a lower cost, that’s why you’ll generally get more traffic at the end of the day than at the beginning, but why the weekly cycle? Nickycakes’ theory is this: The major CPM advertisers have a weekly budget, not a daily one. Once most of these budgets run out, toward the middle or end of the week, self serve facebook ads, by default, get more face time, and can bid lower for impressions. Mystery solved.
If you haven’t tried facebook ads yet, you can check out these 2 posts to get you started. Most all of the information is still solid:
Gaming Facebook Ads Part 1
Gaming Facebook Ads Part 2
Published by nickycakes //
