AFFILIATE NOOB

Yesterday I made the mistake of paying Facebook's suggested bid of $.60 per click for an offer that had recently expired. Needless to say I didn't get any conversions. I did however burn through my $10 daily limit in a matter of minutes.

Today I took the offer down and launched 2 more campaigns for a program I have been receiving steady payments for. I also adjusted my bid strategy. Rather then pay on the high side of what facebook suggested, I decided I would take the exact opposite route and pay extremely low. My two new campaigns targeted the same audience of roughly 22m viewers. They were also built around the same niche. This time I bid at $.05 per click.

Traffic came in much slower. It took about 6 hours for me to collect 10k impressions, and I only got about 5 clicks. I upped the bids slowly and saw slightly better performance. Increasing from $.05 to $.15 got me about 10 clicks in 2 hours. I upped the bids further to $.25, and suddenly got about 10 clicks in 20 minutes. This is interesting because the suggested bid for that campaign was $.40. Which means bidding at about half still brought in some good traffic.

As of right now I have about 60 clicks for the day, and still havn't earned a penny. Of those 60 only 8 went from my jump page to the merchant's offer. Obviously I should work on my page a little bit. Still, I would have expected atleast 1 of those 8 to sign up based on my experiences with Craigslist. If only I could direct link I might have actually turned a profit today, but this particular merchant doesn't allow that.


I'm starting to get an understanding of what works on Facebook and what doesn't. Due to the fact that you don't bid on keywords, it really doesn't matter what niche you promote. You are going to pay the same per click no matter what. If you want to pay less for clicks and still get traffic, you need to have an ad that people will click on. So promoting a dating site with a picture of an attractive woman will ALLWAYS out perform most other niches.

Also something wierd I noticed was that focusing my targetting to fewer people actually INCREASED the suggested bid! This makes absolutely no sense to me (yet). I could target every single facebook user in existence and pay $.40 for clicks, or I could choose to target only 5,000 facebook users and pay $.80. My understanding was that the whole purpose for targetting narrower groups of people is so you could more personally target them, thus increasing your CTR and lowering the bid needed to get your ads in prime position.

The only rational behind this would be that showing a webhosting ad to 22 million people would cause you to pay for clicks from people who have no interest in buying, but this should be off-set by the reduced overall interest in your ad. I would think that the increase in uninterested clicks would be negligible. Certiantly it shouldn't have enough impact to be worth paying DOUBLE to reduce exposure.



Update: Turns out I actually did make $3 from my new campaigns. 60 clicks became 8 visits to the merchant, which in turn became 3 leads. My jump page sucks. If I improve that I believe I can get 50/60 ratio from the ad to the merchant, which would have earned me about $17 instead of 3. My total payout for these 2 campaigns was $12.50, so if I would have profited $4.50 for the day.

Another issue is that both of these campaigns send traffic to the same merchant, they are just targetting two different groups of people. One of those groups is under age (16 - 17). They do qualify to sign up with my merchant, but they might have trouble finding offers suitable to them once they get there. Guessing that NONE of the clicks I got from this age group earned me anything, then cutting them out of the loop would have earned me $17 and I would have only spent $4.

I'll make the adjustments tonight, and hopfuly tomorrow I'll be reporting some profit!