Gaming Facebook Ads - Part 2

Posted on November 20th, 2007 in Affiliate Marketing, Cloaking, Coding, Facebook

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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!