Facebook Advertising

The goal of this guide is to give a VERY BASIC and STRAIGHTFORWARD walk through for people who are starting from scratch and want to begin with Facebook advertising. Facebook is a very easy way to get started and is an invaluable learning experience for getting your feet wet in making money on the internet. Everything I write here is simply the most basic way to get started; once you get more advanced, you will need to adapt or you will fail to become profitable, and as always, if you find a better way to do something, do it!

Before We Begin

Things you will need:

Facebook account: Don’t use the one you have to contact your friends, keep business and pleasure separate. Facebook is the website we’ll be advertising on.
Affiliate Network account: Affiliate networks help merchants sell their offers, and we will linking to their products and getting paid commission. Sign up for some affiliate networks: More information here. Note: You cannot start your campaigns without having an affiliate network account so make this a priority. It usually takes several business days to be approved so plan for “downtime”

Things that are not necessary but I like to use:Maybe take a look through these tools once you want to move on to more complex campaigns.

AIM: Use this to keep in touch and network with other PPC marketers. Feel free to add me and ask me for tips! My aim is bluAffiliate
Notepad: A paper notepad to take notes on, I personally like this as another way to stay organized.

Now that you’ve gotten all of these, it is time begin setting up our first Facebook campaign.

The Campaign

Step 1:

Log into your affiliate network website and find an offer you wish to promote. For beginners I recommend email offers because they are easiest to understand and set up. All you will need to get paid is to have the consumer submit their email.
I also recommend that for now that you pick an offer that you are familiar with; for example, pick an iPhone offer, because you probably know what an iPhone is and know how to promote it. If you try to dive in to those gambling/vacation offers immediately you might experience too steep of a learning curve.
Copy paste your
affiliate link into a text file (I use Windows Notepad), so you have quick access to it.

If you’re not going to be tracking your offer, the direct link is all that will be required for now.

Step 3:

Copy paste your campaign
affiliate link Ad into Prosper202, if you’re going to be using tracking, and get your direct link, which we will call the
tracking link. Copy paste this into your text file.

Step 4:

Find 3 pictures that relate to your ad on the internet. A good source to find pictures may be from your Affiliate Network, as some networks provide graphics that you might be able to use. The easiest site to find pictures for offers is Google Images. Find pictures that look attractive, and stand out. For example, if you’re doing a dating offer, find pictures of cute girls. It usually understood that the better the picture is, the higher your click through rate (CTR) will be.

Step 5:

Think of text your ads will be using. You will need a title, and a quick blurb. Use your imagination, intuition, and creativity to think of great ad copy. For example, if you’re doing an iPod email submit offer, here’s what a sample ad copy will look like:

Title: Free iPhone Giveaway
Body: Get a free iPhone by entering your email here!
Here is how I set up my notepad file so I have easy access to everything:

Now that we have all of the “ingredients,” we can move on to creating our ads.

Creating Ads

Step 1

Log in to the ad manager and click create new ad. Open up your text file so you have your adcopy ready and your folder with the picture file.

Step 2

In this step we will be creating your ads.
In the Destination URL field, put either your tracking link or the affiliate link if you’re not using the tracker.
In the ad title field, put in the first title,
The text creative, put in your first ad creative,
In the image field, insert your first image.

The next block field is more complicated, but for beginners just focus on the ad location, age group, and sex. Advertise in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK if you’re just starting out. Other nations have cheaper clicks but offers are harder to find and the payouts are usually lower.

Use www.quantcast.com to figure out which age group you are going to target. Simply put your offer’s url in the top field Quantcast and it will spew out some data on the demographics of the website’s visitors.

For sex, first determine whether it would be relevant to target your ad based on sex. For example, if the offer is a dating offer, it would make sense to target the ad based on your picture (if your pic is of a girl, target males); if the offer is something like an iPod offer, sex might not be as relevant.

The next block field concerns your payment options. You will initially be using PPC (Pay Per Click) to run your ads, so you will be paying a specific amount per click. Facebook will give you the range of clicks that most people are paying for your targeting options,. I usually write in the PPC of the lowest number of the range (i.e if it says PPC is .25-.40), I’ll bid .25. The higher you bid, the more impressions you will get: the tradeoff between paying less for fewer clicks and more for more clicks. If your offer has a high payout then it might make sense to bid a little bit more to increase your revenue, but it wouldn’t make sense to bid high for an offer that pays out little.

Step 3:

Repeat the prior step with the rest of your adcopies and images. If you have 3 adcopies and 3 images, you will end up with 9 ads total.

An example if you’re running the dating niche:

The more ads you create, the better. You must figure our which ads are going to work and which ones aren’t, thus, the more ads you have created the greater variety you have to chose from.

Step 4:

Wait for approval. Ads usually take a day to get approved unless you submit your ads early in the morning. Read the Facebook advertising guidelines before you submit your ad so you don’t get rejected. Sometimes the Facebook employees will reject your ad for unknown reasons, so resubmit your ads until they get approved.

Some people have had success emailing affiliates@facebook.com instead of manually resubmitting ads: Send an email telling Facebook that your ads are within guidelines and you don’t know why they were rejected, and tell them you would like to have them reinstated.

Conclusion

Now what?

Wait for your ads to receive their impressions and watch the CTR (Click Through Rate). Facebook is a business and they want to make money: The more clicks your ads receive, the more times they show them (because you’re paying them per click). Some of your ads will invariably successful and others will not. If your CTR is above a .07, these are usually good ads and will be shown more often.

Keep tweaking your campaign, creating new ads, and such, until your campaign is successful and profitable.

Unfortunately, this guide only covers the basics of Facebook advertising, and if you want to know more you must forge your own path, do your own research, and make it happen.

There you go. If anyone has any questions leave a comment in this blog post and I’ll be glad to answer them!

CLICK HERE TO LEAVE A COMMENT OR QUESTION