Okay people, I managed to put together yet another post for Facebook Ads. Now you will learn about testing campaigns and how to tell whether or not you should increase your budget and let your ads loose. The most important factor in this lesson will be how much you are paid for each lead / sale for the item or w/e it is you are promoting.

The first step is to go ahead find your offers, get some ads together, and set a budget to test with. I would say $10 or $15 should be enough for you to get your feet wet… This again will be determined by the offer you are promoting and here is why: Lets say you have an offer that converts at $2.50 a lead for migraine pills and another offer that converts at $22.00 a lead for baby diapers. You get your ads set up and within an hour your test budget has been used for both campaigns and you have some data to work with. If your CPC was an average $.28 cents per click we walk away with around 35 clicks. Lets say that in each campaign, only 2 clicks converted. Offer 1 only made us $5.00 so we ended up loosing $5 on that offer. On our second offer however, those two clicks converted into $44.00, a $34 profit from a $10 test. Not bad!

If you have not figured it out yet, Facebook traffic is very finicky. You can get 100+ clicks a day and only see 1 conversion for a $3.00 lead that cost you $25+ to generate. The big tip here is TEST, TEST, TEST! I have had much more success with offers that take more to complete than simple zip-submit offers. If anyone has questions or ideas for another “MMWF” post let me know!

About four weeks ago I decided to try running a diet offer on Facebook and it ended up working pretty dam good. I promoted the “Pure Acai Berry” offer from NeverBlueAds that converted at $30.00 a sale. Not to shabby.

For the first five or six days I was making upwards of $750 a day. When the second week rolled around it jumped up to around $900 a day and then started to decline very fast. By the end of the third week it dropped to about $200 a day. Average spending on Facebook was around $180 a day for this offer. I woke up Friday to find my ads deactivated and a stern warning from Facebook that these offers are not to be promoted again or risk my account being disabled. After doing some scouring on my other profiles, I noticed a large number of Acai related diet ads were gone… Are they nuking these offers regardless?

The thing is I was sending all the traffic (through my affiliate url cloak) directly to the landing page of the offer. I took an hour or two to get my own landing page and domain together and I now have ads running on Facebook again. They are converting about the same but holding better throughout the day. While I have not seen high spikes in conversions, it has also not gone below $300 since Friday.

I think Facebook is just very picky when it comes to the grey area that is being “deceptive.” Granted the default landing page was a little shady lookin’ but Facebook is just as picky if not more picky than your girlfriend. I recommend to anyone who has trouble getting ads through to invest some time in making your own landing pages.

Anyone else getting anything like this? I noticed there is still an amazingly large amount of diet ads going but I think Facebook might be cracking down after that Muffin Top b.s.

A lot of the time you may want to promote an offer such as a nice e-mail submit that requires some type of program fulfillment in order to receive a ‘free’ gift or whatever. Chances are Facebook will not let it through so how can you slip it by them? Well, why not create an ad that would work with two different offers and then switch the link? It turns out this is a very effective way of sticking it to Facebook.

So now I’m going to get into more of the possibly “Blackhat” techniques. Chances are you already have some type of method set up for masking / redirecting links to your affiliate URLs. The key for this technique to work is you must be able to change were the link is redirected to. So using a service that you cannot change the redirection location on will be of no help to you. Best bet is to use .htaccess or your own redirect scripts.

Once again I will give you an EXAMPLE THAT WORKED 100%. I was trying to promote a simple e-mail submit car insurance offer that Facebook would simply not allow through. So, after some thinking I wrote up an add for saving money on car insurace and set my masked link to redirect to Geico’s information page. As it turns out the ad I made coincidentally worked for an offer I had. First page e-mail submit for car insurance quotes. Facebook of course approved the straight up non affiliate link to Geico and then I quickly changed the redirect from Geico to my affiliate link for the other offer.

Simple enough huh? Once again the whole idea is quite simple. All you need to do is think outside the box people and the money will jump right into your pockets.

We hear it all the time, “Social media clicks are not worth dick…” and for the most part I would agree. When it comes to Facebook, you have to keep tight tabs on your CPC rates that you run across your ads. I have done much better slashing my CPC for less impressions, but better profits. Granted you will not see as many possible clicks because you loose impressions, but if your ads are converting well and your commission is not that high, why pay Facebook’s recommended $.60 > CPC? One of the biggest things you can experiment with is your CPC and finding the right cost per click seems to be a balancing act on Facebook.

I myself like to start high and work my way back down in price to a point were I am getting decent impressions, and a much lower CPC. Lets look at this example of some ads that I am testing. You can see that Ad One has a CPC of $.30 and got 24,048 impressions for a total cost of $4.32 for 18 clicks. Now by simply raising the CPC by six cents, I got 44,372 impressions (nearly double) and 59 clicks! Yeah the total cost is more ($17.56) but its irrelevant. For this particular offer I got a 10.00% conversion rate based off this small test. At $3.75 per lead, you do the math. This in my book was a successful test, the next step is to fine tune the CPC and expand my demographic (offer permitting.)

The Bottom Line
As you can see something as small as $.06 can make a big difference on your traffic and visibility. Don’t be afraid to jump in and shake things up. The whole point of having all of the statistics is so you can fine tune your ad performance. I also want to add that the recommended CPC for those ads was up in the $0.61 range. Facebook wants your money, be smart and test before going big, before you know it you will be rocking the $1,000 limit as well.

I really don’t understand why Facebook has this feature… Let me paint you a picture real quick.

So last night I am going through NeverBlueAds looking for some possible promos that would work well on Facebook. NeverBlueAds has some awesome offers so it did not take long. Within 20 minuets I had my campaign set up on Facebook with 10 ads running. About three hours later the ads are approved and running. I already had 56 clicks and after checking NBA I noticed that 21 of them had converted at $3.50. Not bad!

About an hour later I was up $200 bucks and then I started to noticed my clicks die down. A quick check of the ad board brought up countless ads for the exact same promo. Within 2 1/2 hours of being approved I got swiped.

I think if Facebook wants to keep people happy (and spending their money there) they need to get rid of this retarded ad board… Whats the use of spending $500 a day in clicks with 1,000,000 ads for the same thing running against you?

When used correctly, Stumbleupon can be a great weapon in your arsenal for Social Media Marketing. Not only can it bring substansial amounts of traffic over a period of time, it converts great as well. To really maximize your Stumbling success, you have to optimize what your users are seeing once they hit that Stumble button. Keep in mind that users will click Stumble and decide in just 2-3 seconds weather or not they will stay or Stumble on to another site. Using four simple methods of optimization, you can turn your site into a Stumble machine.

Is Your Site Aesthetically Pleasing?
Our first step boils down to design. The first thing your users are going to see is the sites design and layout. The web is becoming ever more “pretty” and users are known to skip right past anything that is not appealing to them. Keep in mind accessibility, readability, and visual pleasure. Balance these three pillars and you can’t go wrong.

Tales Of Title Woes.
Your headlines and titles are also going to be one of the first things that pop out to a user (or at least they should be.) Your headline does not always have to be linkbait. Think it over and make sure it really represents your content before publishing.

Above The Fold.
It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if a user does not see any content, they are not going to stick around. They’re pointer is right on that Stumble! button to continue on. Keep the content in view above the fold, don’t make people look to find it. They are going to quickly decide weather or not they want to invest time on your site. If you can clearly decipher content without having to scroll down your in good shape

Fish With Dynamite!
If you want a sure fire thumbs up, give the user something stimulating before the body content. Ask something thought provoking or make a statement that is sure to spark something in their minds. Master making this opening content and I can guarantee you that you will increase Stumbleupon traffic 10 fold.

It’s always been said that “Content is king,” if your page sucks and the articles are garbage you cant expect people to give it a good reaction. Take your time and make something people will want to invest their time in and you will see things change for the better.