Gaming Facebook Ads – Part 2
This is part 2. Part 1 can be found here. Nickycakes will never charge money for any of this. If you like it, please check out NeverblueAds. The Cakes makes mad cash from them, and you can too.
It’s time to get more dirty with facebook ads. Setting up an ad is easy, and by now you have hopefully been able to get a few ads with decent CTR. But how can you get facebook to let you advertise what you want to advertise instead of the crap that they approve of in their ad guidelines? How can you improve your CTR? How do you run your ad only at specific times of day? How can you get an account if you don’t have a credit card? What if your credit card gets banned? All easy answers.
Improving Your CTR
Use wide images, not tall. People accustomed to the old flyers system will be trying to use tall skyscraper style images for their ads. Don’t. Use something like 225w x 90h images for the ads. Use a dark background to make your ad stand out on the almost all white facebook page.
Run your ads at night. Any time around 8pm EST is good. You will see better CTR on your ads and better conversions in most cases. But facebook doesn’t allow advertisers to specify when their ads will be run! No problem. Just set your click bid at a penny until 8pm and bump it up a cent until you start seeing impressions and let it run.
Running Facebook Ads Without a Credit Card
Don’t have a visa, or did facebook ban the one you are using? No probs. Get a prepaid visa. This is for US only, but go here: https://www.allaccessgift.com/gift/index.m (not an affiliate link) and type in your zip code to find a gas station nearby where you can buy one, then just go online and fill it.
Cloaking Facebook Ads Links
So you wanna run that zip submit, but facebook isn’t approving your ad? Want to run adult friend finder or some porn affiliate program? No problem! Facebook devs do a manual review on all ads. For some ads they must review it before it goes live, and for some, they review it after it starts getting clicks. There are 2 ways to cloak it. Since you should be using a redirect to the url to begin with, you can wait till after the devs have reviewed your ad, and then switch it, OR just run my cloaking script:
<?php
$cloaked_url = "http://www.google.com"; // devs go here
$normal_url = "http://www.yahoo.com"; // everyone else goes here
$tracking_ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if(strpos($tracking_ref,"dev.facebook")){
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: " . $cloaked_url );
} else {
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: " . $normal_url );
}
?>
***Note: Make sure when using scripts that modify headers, to remove any whitespace outside the PHP tags or you will get an error.
Just put it in the directory of your choice, enter the url you want facebook employees to see and the url you want the people clicking your ads to see, and use it for your ad url. Good to go!
Hey Nickycakes, thanks for the article. However, I am having a problem. I set up a campaign and it was going great for about 30 minutes and then it reached the $10 mark. Now it has just hit a brick wall and isnt moving. I had set the daily budget to $50 earlier in the day, is there a time period that it takes before that takes affect?
Daily budgets don’t go into effect until the following day (12AM pst). Bad move on their part, in my opinion.
I think so as well, if nothing else they could update them every hour. Thanks for the help. I had been trying to get a facebook ad going and after getting shot down about 5-6 times I was going to give up until I saw your thread on wickedfire.
Hey,
Great Post, I gave up on FB after they were shutting every a/c down. I’ve just refired up a new account now with some offers. Just a quick question about cloaking the links. Would this work this the big G as well?
With some modifications, yes, you could use this method to fool anyone really.
Good ideea. I wonder how long until facebook staff will use a proxy
doesn’t matter when they start using a proxy because this isn’t ip-based cloaking. you could dig further with the script that nicky posted and add in an array of all the university prefixes to check before the header redirect. that way they have to come from one of the university pages in order to be shown the $normal_url. may be more of a pain and you might lose out on some clicks from non-university accounts, but you would for sure sidestep facebook in case they visited your url from anywhere other than dev.facebook.com
I really wouldn’t risk losing out on clicks. This is expensive shit we’re talking about. If you keep any kind of decent logs, you can add a check for the ip they’re coming from which doesn’t change =P
[...] on facebook is still profitable? Think? More like KNOW. Go read Gaming Facebook Ads Part 1, and Part 2. Pretty much everything in those articles still holds true and will make you money if you [...]
Thanks for the FB Guides. Very helpful. I just implemented your cloaking script so I hope it still works! Thanks again.
That is a little blackhat
Although I love black hat stuff, some things I have to stay away from. You can make good, really good, easy money off facebook. I wouldn’t want to take a risk by cloaking.
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thats because you’re a pussy
[...] Gaming Facebook Ads Pt. 2 [...]
Also don’t forget to include intern in strstr so it’d be like this
if(strpos($tracking_ref,”dev.facebook”) or strpos($tracking_ref,”intern”))
i found out there’s many url run by those interns, but including intern and dev in strstr is enough.
i have some questions:
neverblue accepts people from Europe?
can i use a free domain? i read your ads part 1 and part 2 and i wanna try it.. its very interesting
i heard about this kind of marketing and i search on google until i found your website.. what can you tell me? few steps for a beginner.. what i must to do first?
Hey I just signed up for Neverblueads and I am new to all this affiliate marketing is there a secret to getting approved? I have tried before with another affiliate network and they denied me.
Does this cloaking script work? I was about to try it but then i noticed its from 2007.
Thanks cakes
Straight ballin.
i'm trying to figure out how to do the php redirect using your script. i'm not much of a webmaster at all but i've searched high and low and i dont really know what i'm doing.
do i create a subdomain and put that script in it? if so how?
by the way great tips!
Is this facebook stuff still relevent I get mixed opinions and I am a super newb. Thanks for the info either way!
Hey, are the budget ($5/day 0.15/bid) still recomended? I have problems getting impressions with that, they recomend bids around $30.
Here's a good opportunity for some kind soul to give a complete newbie a friendly steer. I really like the sound of that cloaking script above, but have absolutely no idea how to use it, where to put it, or anything actually. I understand that using redirect is good because you can disguise your ugly affiliate link with it, but the cloaking bit is a total mystery. Could some please explain, and while you're doing it imagine that you're talking to a total moron. Cheers
Kookmeyer.
so hey im on the europian side, how can u advice me about ads on fb im trying to follow ue instructions, and also hey im new to this i dnt know but how can i put a payment link to my page for interested folks to buy my product.
thanks bro!