EXACTLY What I did to start earning PROFITS off of my first Facebook campaign - Read Here!

So, since this community has given me so much, I figured I would attempt at giving back by laying out a step-by-step process of what I did for my first ever PPC campaign via Facebook.

I think I got a little lucky, because I had some pretty nice CTR's on my first couple of ads. I think paired with the luck, was my knowledge of what's going on in pop-culture. That is the angle I took on this campaign.

SETUP

I found an offer. I figured that trends are a great way to make quick cash on Facebook. The fact is, people aren't on Facebook to buy things. They're there to leisurely browse their friends pictures, and other things of interest. They are not in a buying state of mind.

The offer I found was a Twilight Quiz offer by Qwik Media. The offer gives a $0.70 payout for a completion of the quiz. Although it was a low payout, it doesn't take much for people to answer a few questions about something they are interested in. So, consequently, the conversion rate was very high. On average 40% of the leads were converting.

Then, I started creating my ads. I split tested 10 pictures and 2 age groups. To be honest, there was only one age group I could ever imagine this converting on, and that was 20-30 year old females. Keep in mind, I made sure that the girls were at least 20. Reason being, traffic quality. There are tons of middle school/high school kids on Facebook that claim they are 18 just so they can have an account. I wanted to make sure the leads were at least 20 years old, that way the traffic was of better quality and wouldn't get scrubbed as hard.

To find the pictures, I went to Google Images and kept on searching different keywords and would sift through pages to look for images that popped out at me. Chances are, if they don't pop out at you, they are most definitely not going to pop out for anyone else. If they're not eye catching images, don't bother. I used keywords like twilight sexy, twilight funny, twilight crazy, etc. Those searches were able to turn up not-so-ordinary pictures that have a much better chance of grabbing the viewer's attention.

I put all of these pictures I collected into a folder, and labeled them Twilight1,2,3,4 etc. It was my way of staying organized.

The Title and Description of the ad isn't very important. Some people will say it is, but I say it's not. I wrote:

Do You Love Twilight?
Click Here to see just
how much you love it!

I set a direct link to the offer, which was redirected through my tracked link. I tracked using Prosper202. After getting approved for all ads (this takes a while, sometimes just submitting for reapproval is all you need to do) I was able to get started on focusing on bids.

BIDDING

This part is definitely super important. You have to make sure you're not spending too much for traffic, then at the same time you are not too cheap where there is no traffic sent your way. What I would do is look at the recommended bid for my demographics. My demographics consisted of 20-30 year old women living in the USA. Their interests included ANY Twilight related keyword I could think of. I did, twilight books, twilight fans, new moon, team edward, edward cullen, twilight vampires etc. My reach ended up being about 2 million.

The low-end suggested bid was about $1.00 per click. So, what I did was find 70% of that (which is obviously $0.70) and set my campaign funds to $40. I did this for each of the advertiesments.

And it begins...

I pressed the play button on all the ads, and waited. I came back to the computer around an hour after I started the campaigns. I spent my $40 budget in that time, and saw an average of about $0.30 CPC and 20-30 clicks on each ad. HOWEVER, some of the ads were complete duds. Anything with a CTR lower than 0.1% I immediately ditched. That left me with 4-5 ads. I added a bit more money to get all of the well performing ads (the ads with a CTR over 0.1%) to ~100 clicks each. While doing this, I kept track of my Prosper202 and my Qwik Media account to see how my conversions were doing. It seemed like I was doing pretty decent overall, making a bit of money back on my campaign. (~$20 or so).

RESULTS

I then came back later on that night (I started this campaign around 4pm EST - THIS IS IMPORTANT. People aren't on facebook at 7am on a Monday. Start your new campaigns during peak browsing times i.e. after work) and I saw 2 ads over a .2% CTR. I kept those and ditched the rest. I then ran both of those ads for 5 days, spending $50 a day on each (because of my low personal budget). My ROI gave me about $20 a day in profits. I was getting an EPC of about $0.28, and a CPC of about $0.13. THIS IS WHAT I LOOKED AT MOST. If your EPC is averaging at least 10 cents over your CPC, the ad most definitely has potential if you scale up.

CONCLUSION

Above is what is MOST IMPORTANT (in my opinion). You are trying to get your CPC as low as possible. This is done by getting a high CTR, which boils back down to your split testing and picking the right images. That is most defintely square one and the hardest part of finding a good campaign. If you don't do enough split testing, you won't make the big buxxxx.

DISCLAIMER:

This was my first ever campaign. I think it was pretty good considering my low budget and the fact that I was brand new to the area of marketing. However, what I have said is what I have read in many many forums and WSO's that are the bare basics of successful PPC campaigns. So, you can take this with a grain of salt, but know that I used strategies that are tried and true.

WHAT I WOULD DO IF I DID IT OVER:

Before I go, I just want to give you guys a quick list of what I didn't do, but I would have done if I knew when I first started PPC.

-Put NEON borders around some images. Neon catches your eye. Neon works in many cases. Give it a try and see what happens.

-Tested more images. I would have done at least another 20 images at LEAST. The more images you test, the better chance you have of landing that killer CTR that you are looking for to make the big bucks.

-Split tested age groups more. I would have tried divying up the age groups into thirds. This will give you the ability to pinpoint exactly where the clicks are coming from. That will increase your CTR, lower your CPC, and make your EPC much more of a profitable number.




Good luck!

:: Matt P