How Matt Marcin Almost Won Nickycakes’ Xbox
Posted on April 28th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Facebook
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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:
April 28th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Awesome post. Thanks Matt and Nickycakes for another sweet read. I need to start making big bucks with Advaliant so I can join you guys in COD4
I got Geoff for my AM too so maybe he can give me some pointers…
Peace.
April 28th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Nice, hadn’t seen that site before
& congrats on coming 2nd place, too
April 28th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Nice work, you definitely peaked my interest in socialmedia and congrats on getting your xbox. When you get live, add me.
April 28th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Good article. I’ll have to look into that tracking202 thing you guys keep talking about.
April 28th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
My Xbox Live name is zeetooo if you want to add me. I’ll be playing GTA4 and COD4.
April 28th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Omg Lol the hair hahaah!
April 28th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
nice!
April 28th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Ima check out SocialMedia.com now. :]
April 29th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Matt,
Nice Guest Post. I know for a fact you’ve been hitting the xbox hard since you won it - didn’t you say you hurt your hand even! LOL. You must be just about ready to skool Cakes on COD4, eh?
April 29th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Can I ask how much you actually spent to earn that 1k?
April 29th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Mubin: ~$700-800
After I won, I optimized the campaign and am turning a great ROI on it now.
April 29th, 2008 at 9:29 am
“Can I ask how much you actually spent to earn that 1k?”
My thoughts exactly, I mean even I could dump $5 grand into a campaign to make $1k in 24 hours.
I’m not saying that’s what he did, but the impression this contest gives is that he made $1k profit in 24 hours, which isn’t the case.
April 29th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Hey Matt,
A general question - how does facebook decide the bid price for the ad? Does it use text in the ad and compare it against the competition to come up with a price?
In your “optimizing”, are you lowering the price of the ads, or split testing? I’ve love to hear the details, as I’ve ventured into facebook ads and had some success until I targeting the wrong age group, thus costing me a good chunk of change.
Anyway, would love to hear from you. (Just subscribeed to your feed!)
-Gurpreet
April 29th, 2008 at 11:24 am
@fatjerk I have no idea where you’d even come up with the idea that it meant profit. How the hell would I even be able to determine how much of someone elses earnings were profit? Moron.
April 29th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Ouch. My bad, I guess you’d have no way to know, you don’t have to be a fat jerk about it.
April 29th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
@fatjerk
I mentioned right above your reply how much I actually spent.
@gurpreet
I’m working on a post about how I optimized my campaigns. Generally I play with my ad copy to get a higher CTR so I can lower my bid. I also work with the LP to increase my conversion.
April 29th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
DONT CUT YOUR HAIR DUDE, IT LOOKS GREAT!
April 29th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Does SocialMedia list their ad guidelines anywhere? I guess I found some on their TOS page, but I’m hoping there’s a better list than this.
April 29th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Great post.
April 29th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
They are no where near as strict as Facebook.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
k, I asked them the same question and haven’t heard back yet. Already got my first ad disproved with the message of “This ad copy needs alternate targeting.”. I was targeting Facebook, so I’m assuming means that they mean to select another social network?
April 30th, 2008 at 1:15 am
@Eric B
It’s possible you needed country targeting? Not sure. I’d e-mail support. I’ve never seen that error.
April 30th, 2008 at 7:21 am
Good stuff Matt. If you could pull this off for an Xbox, I could only imagine what you could do if the prize was a shiny new bong.
April 30th, 2008 at 9:42 am
I was targeting four countries. US, UK, Canada, and Australia.
I’ll send them another email today.
May 1st, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Haha, Matt look abit like me, oh my name Borat, I come from kajaksdan