Gaming Facebook Ads - Part 1

Posted on November 17th, 2007 in Affiliate Marketing, Facebook

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Last week, Facebook dropped their Facebook Fliers advertising platform and launched Facebook Ads. With this self-serve ad system, anybody with a FB account and a credit card can design an ad and have it seen by millions of fb users every day. What does this mean? If you do it right, it means thousands upon thousands of cheap clicks from a targeted audience. And targeted traffic means money.

In the early days of the old facebook flier system, people would game facebook by creating hundreds of accounts to spam fliers. New fliers are always given a few thousand impressions by the ad system to see how well they preform click-wise. If the ad sucks (nobody clicks on it = no money for them) then they automatically stop running it unless you bid a retarded high amount per click. Anyway, they got smart and started banning people for macroing account creation shortly before releasing this new system.

The new system changes a lot of stuff, adds a snazzy new interface, and makes it much easier to submit ads. They changed how the image uploads work and now they are resizing images instead of all fliers having a 120×220 banner. Also no annoying “Facebook Flier” text over your ads any longer. Here’s how the to flavors stack up, old and new:

So you want to start cashing in just like everyone else has been for the past week, and make no mistake, they have been. The first step is finding an offer you want to promote. What do college kids want? If you have never done affiliate marketing, you will want to sign up with a network or two and see if they have any offers you think might do well. Nickycakes uses NeverblueAds but there are plenty of other good networks out there apparently. Make sure you take a look at the Facebook Ad Guidlines first too. They’ve gotten smart on stuff like zip submits, email submits, ringtones, scammy online colleges, adult dating, “free” stuff, etc. There are plenty of good things to advertise that aren’t zip submits.

Once you’ve picked something to advertise, you gotta make an ad for it. This example will use Silvertag Reverse Auctions. This may not be the very best offer in the world, but the idea is rad and who doesn’t want to win an iPod for $3. When you make the ad, you don’t want to use the ugly affiliate link, so you will want to set up a redirect. Take a domain you own, add a subdomain, and redirect that subdomain to your offer. Here’s a good way to do it. In the root directory of your subdomain, make an index.php with the following:

 <?

Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );

Header( "Location: http://affiliate.link/blahblah" );

?>

Facebook seems to manually review every direct linked offer from major affiliate networks, so in addition to making the link the users will see less ugly, you will be slipping under the radar when it comes to ad approval time.

When you are asked for targetting information, just think of who will be most likely to click on your ad, and then complete the offer you are promoting. With dating, for example, you can pretty much rule out the female population entirely. Girls don’t need to use the internet to get laid, and rarely do. Use your head, but don’t make your target too specific or you’ll never get people seeing your ad. For the silvertag ad, males ages 18-25 will be targetted. It doesn’t seem like too many girls are going to be interested in a cool online auction site compared to younger guys.

Next you need a title, picture, and ad text. This is the MOST important part. You need, NEEEED, a good ad or you will never make money. The goal is an ad that tons of people will click on, but doesn’t violate facebook’s terms. The picture MUST be eye-catching. Here’s the silvertag example in action:

The next step is setting up the daily budget and bid per click. Keep in mind the daily budget updates once per day, so if you hit the limit, you will either have to make a new campaign group, or wait till the next day. For starters you should set it at $5 so you don’t blow all your money on a crap offer that doesn’t convert. Set your max click bid at something like $.15 for starters.

Now the fun part. Launch your ad and see what happens. Your goal is a high CTR. If nobody clicks on your ad, facebook will stop showing it because if nobody clicks, then they can’t charge you any money. Consequently, if your ad has a great CTR, then you can lower your bid and get tons of clicks at 5 cents or less. If your ad has certain words in it, such as “free”, if it’s direct linking to an affiliate url, or if it’s targetted at any under 18 users, a dev will manually review your ad before it is shown to the public. If you are using a redirect like suggested above, you can check your traffic logs and find out when someone referred from a dev.facebook.com url hits your ad, at which point you know it’s been manually reviewed. It seems ALL ads get manually reviewed at some point, just some have to be reviewed before going live.

This may seem like rather basic info, but it’s important to get a firm understanding of how the system works so you can start using it to your advantage (abusing it). Part 2 will talk mainly about how to abuse facebook ads to make tons of money. So how much is Cakes making with this so far? Here’s stats for one ad:

Not bad for a day’s work right? Ok well, not a day, more like 15 minutes of actual work, but you get the idea. You will notice the # of clicks is about 1k more in the affiliate stats side. This seems to be from people double clicking the ads like most idiots who don’t know how to use the internet do. Luckily facebook doesn’t charge if the same user clicks an ad twice.

Keep it real.