So I Started Advertising on Facebook…
June 23, 2012 Posted by Tyler CruzIn an added effort to try to hit my goal of generating $100,000/month (gross), I decided to give Facebook another try.
Actually, the real spark was due to talking to my friend several weeks back. I hadn’t spoken to him in a while, and so I was quite surprised when he told me that he is now spending around $20,000 – $40,000 a day on Facebook. I had known he was doing very well on it, but didn’t know he was continuing to grow at such a feverish pace. I mean, $20K – $40K a day? Come on… I will be publishing an interview with him in the next 2-3 days so keep an eye out for that.
I had tried advertising on Facebook before, running numerous campaigns, but every single one of them were huge flops. They simply didn’t convert for me. But my friend’s success had inspired me to give Facebook another try, as it was obviously working out awesome for him.
And so, 2 weeks ago now, I created my first campaign on Facebook for the first time in years (apart from a brief attempt about 8 months back which went pretty bad).
My First Campaign
I decided to set up my first campaign with an offer that my affiliate manager said was doing “okay” on Facebook. I had run this offer before on other traffic sources, but only broke even at best.
I managed to import ebay listings to facebook and get a nice bump before even sending any traffic to it as my affiliate manager knows that I have the capability of sending in volume, so that gave me a helpful boost right off the bat.
I was lucky enough to start profiting right out of the gate with this campaign, which definitely surprised me. I’ve since spent a fair bit of time split testing images, demographics, targets, etc. in order to maximize profit as well as to scale simultaneously. I also made sure that I am knowledgeable about the icons on messenger to run the campaign successfully.
I still have a ton of optimizing and testing to do though, especially since I’m still a Facebook rookie.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve spent a total of $2,265 on this campaign, which led to $2,910 in return, resulting in a net profit of $645.
That works out to a 28.5% ROI, which is a pretty healthy number as far as ROI goes. Also, keep in mind that this includes all of the “testing” costs in trying to optimize and scale the campaign.
$645 profit spread over 13 days works out to an average of $50/day. Assuming I just left this campaign “as is” and it continued to run at that rate, that works out to $1,500/month or $18,250 a year.
My point is that you guys should really be giving affiliate marketing a try if you haven’t already. And If you’ve tried it before but failed, then don’t give up. Keep trying.
While I’ve been having a fantastic year in affiliate marketing so far, I never got anything on Facebook to profit before, but decided to give it another try. And look what happened.
Beginner’s Luck
While my first campaign has been doing well, and has a lot of potential to grow, my luck so far with Facebook seems to have stopped there for now.
After my first campaign started to profit, I set up around 5 more campaigns for different offers. Unfortunately, they haven’t been doing too well, and aren’t profiting.
I’m not giving up on them yet though – there’s still a lot to test and optimize, but things aren’t looking that great.
I can only hope that my first campaign won’t die out (and will hopefully grow), and that I’ll be able to duplicate the success of my first campaign again.
So Much to Learn
I’ve already learned a lot about Facebook during the past 2 weeks, but there’s still so much left to learn.
For example, there are bidding strategies out there that I still haven’t got the hang of, and Facebook has a lot of little… ‘personality quirks’ that I’m beginning to learn and become aware of. I also learned that I could buy Facebook followers for cheap at socialzinger.
Nice Account
I think I have a nice account going for me. From what I’ve read, Facebook accounts come in all shapes, sizes, and histories.
So far, mine is quite nice. I’ve submitted a total of around 60ish ads so far, and every single one of them has been approved.
In addition, about 85% of my ads are approved instantly (literally within 0-2 minutes), with the remaining 15% usually being approved within 24 hours.
The 100% ad approval and fast turnarounds definitely help me when it comes to split-testing and optimizing.
Rising Facebook Budget
If you didn’t already know, Facebook throttles advertising accounts with a maximum daily spend limit.
New accounts start with a maximum daily spend limit of $50. If you successfully reach $50 for a few days straight (and pay it off in time), the system will automatically bump you to the next tier of $150 per day. This continues up to $1,000.
I forget all the exact tiers, but I believe they go: $50, $150, $250, $350, $500, $750, $1,000. Then, once you hit $1,000 per day (and successfully hit that for a few days straight and pay each time), you can manually request an increase up to $5,000/day. There are also ways to get past the $5,000/day limit as well (up to a maximum of $15,000/day I believe).
I managed to max out my daily spend limit every single day I’ve used Facebook so far. Today I was just bumped to the $500/day limit, so I’m looking forward to seeing the results of increased volume tomorrow.
Below is a screenshot of my billing history on Facebook since I started on June 11th, 2012:
It’s hard to believe that I just started using Facebook again 2 weeks ago, yet am already on pace to spend $15,000 in July.
Stay Tuned
I’ll keep you posted on how my Facebook campaigns continue to fare.
I’m really hoping I can improve my first campaign and get at least 1 more profitable campaign going on Facebook. It’s always nice adding a new profitable traffic source to your arsenal.
Give Facebook a try guys! Just test, test, test!
That’s awesome!
Facebook is definitely hard to break into but there’s still a ton of money to be made there.
Looking forward to the interview with your friend, should be interesting.
My one criticism of your posts would be that you tell us too much of the results and none of the ‘hows’. How do you advertise? Are you making landing pages? Are you simply writing ad copy?
There are countless resources out there that explain the basics of affiliate marketing, so I don’t want to repeat that on my blog.
And my previous post is a “how-to” type post. It underscores the importance of split-testing ad images to improve CTR.
From my own experience so far, there haven’t been any “secret” tips or techniques that have got my campaigns profitable. It’s all just the very basic stuff that everyone does… you just need to keep testing left and right until you find something that works. Maybe others have secrets, but I haven’t found any yet. It’s just a lot of testing.
As mentioned numerous times before (although mostly in comments and on Twitter to be fair), I’m just direct linking. So, really I’m just taking offers from affiliate networks, finding traffic sources like Facebook, then throwing up an image, ad title, and ad copy and then split testing and analyzing things like mad. I’m not doing anything special… just sticking with it and split testing.
Hope that helps…
Would be insightful to know.
How long did it take your friend to get up to that point? is it different verticals? does he use custom software and outsourced help?
Are you direct linking or using your own landers and url for facebook?
Thanks for sharing your early experiences of advertising on Facebook. I have been contemplating doing the same myself for a while now. I hope there aren’t too many tricks to find and more about trial and error to succeed at it as that is what I am better at!
-Jean
Did they change the budget increase tiers recently?
Normally it goes, $50, $250, $1000 Then you ask for manual increase.
Never heard of it being raised in such small amounts. I would suggest you fill out a spend limit increase form. Based on your spending history you should be able to easily get it up to $2,000. (I’ve had mine raised to $2,000 with as little as $700 spent).
It must have changed as that is indeed what my account tiers are at. It’s a bit of an annoyance, but nothing too major as I _am_ moving up the tiers gradually.
I don’t want to fill out a daily spend limit request yet as I’m afraid it might somehow “cry wolf” before I actually need it at the $1K cap. Probably a foundless fear, but…
“Are you direct linking or using your own landers and url for facebook?”
@Danny, Tyler already mentioned this in his previous post. Please try reading before posting; he’s direct linking. I think FB is not keen on direct linking (to affiliate offers), so it may be an idea to split test landers.
Yeah, I _hate_ repeating myself… 🙁
However, Facebook has no problem with direct linking to affiliate offers… it just depends on the particular offer…
When you say direct link, are you doing a redirect or actually just landing on the campaign landing page?
Both… depends on the situation, but on Facebook right now I’m just doing a pure direct link to the offer. It’s faster. Faster load time = better CR.
Great to hear what you are actually doing here. I was thinking of doing direct linking as well because that is less clicks for the viewer and hopefully will keep more conversions in tactic. Shall be an interesting experiment.
Guess I need to read thoroughly through the TOS for Facebook so I don’t get my account closed. Wouldn’t want that happen when trying to ramp up some PPC campaigns.
“affiliate marketing” is NOT ONLY something you pay for. I have been doing “affiliate marketing” for six years and never paid a dime.
Hi Tyler,
Great posts, I’ve been learning a ton from you and have just signed up with peerfly and have started with some offers. Could you do a post sometime covering your testing/optimization process (what tools you use, etc).
Thanks and keep the great posts coming!:)
Sam
Hmmm… okay I’ll try to come up with something I can do without revealing all my sensitive campaign info…
That’s great. Can’t wait to see your next post on testing/optimization process! Learning lots from you!
By the way, anyone interested to get free web hosting? Come check out a giveaway on my website. 🙂
That’d be awesome if you could go in a little more detail.
At least you made some money. 😉
Interesting, I was doing like 300/day profit with facebook, but the ROI shrank everyday..till my campaigns were not profitable. It’s seems like that with all my campaigns they make money… for a week, then dry up.
Do you find that is happening with you? or is it just me?
Wow, $300/day profit – nice!
Was your target audience really small? If so, then I can see burn out happening. Especially if your angle is event-based.
I can’t really tell you if it’s just you though, as I’ve only been using Facebook for 2 weeks now. So far, I saw a bit of a decline in ROI, but not a lot.
That being said, I’m purposely only running stuff that I believe can run “forever”… that means running a lot of stuff with no targets (111 million audience)
healthy ROI indeed. Haven’t started marketing yet but I will keep this in mind, thanks.
Awesome stats dude. I am also doing facebook advertising and it is the easiest way to make money online.
Wow. You scaled your budget so quickly
I do not think Facebook is for ads, it’s a social media where most people just harping with their friends and are not the least bit interested in the advertising and do not click on them. I hope it goes well for you on Facebook, but I’m skeptical.
Hi Tyler, have you ever considered (of course you have) selling your own stuff via your marketing efforts? I’m great at creating products but never had any luck with PPC etc. Create an info product and I bet you can smash your ROI.
I’m not really interested in doing that… sounds good, but it’s extra work. I find affiliate marketing in and of itself already to take a crapload of time (you’re never done testing…)
Are your face books ads geographically targeted?
I’ve read this post only after your newst post about your FB ads campaign.
You’ve inspired me to try affiliate marketing, even with different channels and not only FB
Any idea how to raise limit past $5,000? Been looking everywhere and cant find anything. I have hit $5,000 about 10 days straight now.
Congrats! Been a while since I used Facebook, but have you tried contacting them?