Evan Hood.com

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are another PPC venue worth attempting. Facebook sees more than 30 million unique visitors per month, which means a lot of impressions and a lot of clicks. Facebook works a lot similar to the other search engines except for a few things.

Facebook Ads vs. Other Search Engines

• Ability to include a picture in the ad
• No quality score (…..sort of)
• Audience of mainly highschool/college students
• Poor ad management interface
• No keywords (….sort of)

Facebook has a fairly targeted demographic already. Most of its users are young to middle age high school or college students (but that demographic is changing as the college students on Facebook graduate and continue to keep in touch via this social medium). If you can find offers that would interest this crowd (iPods, video games, partying, other social offers) you might have a winner. Facebook also has no real quality score to speak of. However, just like other search engines, they’re there to turn a profit. If your CTR sucks, Facebook makes no money so they crank up your minimum bid. Facebook also lets you include a picture in your ad which brings a whole different element to marketing (think distinct colors, hot girls, cars, pictures of money). You can target certain “interest” words in viewers profiles (only show my ad to people who list “cigarettes” in their interests), much like keywords but you don’t want to limit your audience so I often leave this out. Lastly, their ad management interface sucks. Once you create an ad you can’t change much about it. You can’t change the destination URL, the picture, or even which ad group it’s in. So to tweak anything you have to create a whole new ad and wait the 24 some odd hours before the ad starts running.

First Attempt

At first I picked out a few ads that I thought might convert. Just about every ad I see while I’m on Facebook is a dating site. So, rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll go along with the crowd. Also, I was recently a college student, and I love coffee. I also love cheap stuff. So I grabbed a Gevalia coffee offer ($3 for 3 bags of “premium” coffee and a travel mug. I’d do it) as well. So I set up 2 ads for each offer and then created the same 2 offers for about 2-3 different age and sex demographics. I put in a bid at the low end of the range and let it go. Results? You guessed it.

Gevalia Coffee: 0 conversions
Singles Dating Site: 3 conversions
Net Loss: About $50

Learning Time

What went wrong here? Conversions were low, possibly because the coffee offer isn’t relevant to our target audience and the dating site probably failed because of market saturation. My click through rates were abysmally low so Facebook made my minimum bid so high that it wasn’t worth it. Also having “free” in my ads is worth looking into. Seems to trigger a lot of other search engines’ alarms.

Tweaking For Second Attempt:

• More targeted ads to Facebook demographic
• Better ads (Call to Action?)
• Remove word “Free” from ad
• Ask affiliate manager for suggestion on ad to run

Tags: PPC, Facebook, Fail

Absolute Beginner’s Guide to PPC

Pay Per Click advertising, or PPC, is a quick way to generate a ton of traffic for your site. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN all have marketing programs that allow advertising to put up ads above and to the right of normal, or “organic”, search results.

The difference between the highlighted “sponsored links” and normal search results is that advertisers pay the search engines to have their ads listed on sponsored links while organic search results are not paid for. Advertisers generally pay on a “per click” (whenever a viewer clicks on their ad) basis rather than a “per impression” basis (an advertiser would pay every time his ad came up on the page).

Generally, companies pay these search engine companies to list their own website or product. But what if you’re not a marketer for a company or have no product of your own to offer? Enter the world of Affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing allows independent internet marketers to promote other companies’ products for a cut of the sale or lead.

How Does It Work?

You can apply directly to companies to promote their products but that takes quite a while to track down enough companies willing to let you sell their products and it requires you to monitor each campaign individually. Solution? Affiliate Networks. Affiliate networks such as Neverblue Ads, Advaliant and Pepperjam find companies that want affiliate marketers to promote their products for a percentage of the sale or lead. The affiliate network then puts up a list of these campaigns and offers a tracking system to show which affiliate marketers are making which sales. Do these networks do this out of the kindness of their internet-loving hearts? No, of course not. The network, and especially your affiliate manager, takes a cut of the sale as well. What does this mean? It means you would probably get a higher payout per sale/lead if you worked directly with the company (cut out the middleman). However, Affiliate networks offer a valuable service in tracking down companies and keeping companies honest in their payouts. A good affiliate manager is easily worth the percentage he takes per sale.

Ok, Now What?

Now we’ve got the two halves of general PPC Affiliate Marketing: Search engine pay per click advertising, and affiliate networks. You pay the search engine companies and the affiliate networks pay you. As long as your Earnings Per Click (EPC) is greater than your Cost Per Click (CPC) you make money (EPC > CPC). We’ll go over EPC, CPC and a few other terms you’ll need to know in the next post.

A Reminder: There are many other ways to promote affiliate offers or your own products besides PPC, but these guides will primarily focus on promoting Affiliate offers through search engine marketing.

Recommended Affiliate Networks I work with: Neverblue Ads, Pepperjam, Advaliant.

My First Crack at PPC

So after setting up accounts with Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing Solutions and Microsoft Adcenter I chose a dating offer from Neverblue Ads. I also registered a relevant domain name with my hosting company, HostMonster. After being approved for the campaign, I simply set up a 301 redirect on my registered domain to point to my affiliate link.

To do this, go into your file manager and edit the code of your index.php. Erase all of the code there and put in your 301 php redirect.

<?php
header(”Location: http://www.YOUR-AFFILIATE-LINK-HERE.com/”);
?>

For the slow, you replace that URL with your affiliate link. After that, I used Google’s keyword tool to come up with about 150-200 related keywords and used the dynamic keyword insertion tool. What is a dynamic keyword insertion? It is a command that allows you to place whatever keyword the user searched for in your ad with a default keyword if the title is too long. The syntax is:

{KEYWORD: DEFAULT}
Where DEFAULT is the default keyword you wish to use. So say, for example, you want your ad to read “Low Cost KEYWORD” where KEYWORD is whatever they searched for. You would enter “Low Cost {KEYWORD: Stuff} and if their keyword is too long for the ad it would simply display “Low Cost Stuff”.

Then I made 1 adgroup, put in moderate bids, made 2 ads for split testing and hit GO! ………………The results?

Let’s see the specifics. The middle campaign is the campaign we’ll be discussing.

The campaign cost me $82.55 and brought in a whopping $19.80 for 6 conversions and a net loss of $62.75. What went wrong? A lot of things. After pausing my campaign (stop the bleeding! please!), I went back to reading forums, blogs and garbage ebooks and came up with a few answers.

Reasons My Campaign Failed

• Adgroups not targeted to Keywords
• CPC too high
• Quality Score too low

Stay tuned for my explanation, tweaking, and subsequent results.

Tags: PPC, Affiliate Marketing, Fail