With the latest backlash of articles coming up on TechCrunch about deceptive and scammy ways to make money on Facebook, I wanted to provide you with a full breakdown on how to create a successful CPA Facebook ads campaign. Step and step details on a campaign I had running months ago.
The best way to do this, is by looking over an old campaigns that I have on pause and aren’t running anymore. A lot of the offers I have on pause are still available, but I never went on to monetize them enough to bring in a higher ROI. This campaign in particular is just under a year old, but the offer is still running actively on ClickBank. The product is for an ebook on skateboarding tricks and easily gets passed through the FB Ads team. During this $300 test campaign, the ROI was around 10%, and that is with very little monetizing and real targeting. Yes, I know… 10% isn’t much of a margin, but this wasn’t monetized or split tested at all. Instead of continually tweaking this campaign, I moved onto others. Now it’s your turn to turn it into something better.
Setting Up the Ad Campaign
When I first setup this ad campaign, I’ll threw together a bunch of ad copies and spent a few hundred dollars to see what happens with it. Go ahead and use the ad images and text copies from my campaign and see what type of profit margins you can hit.
Here is the direct ad copy and targeting that was setup for the campaign. I go into more detail below. You can download the top four CTR ad images used here. (Ad1, Ad2, Ad3, Ad4). Recreate an exact copy of this campaign, or get creative with some new copy.
Campaign Stats
3,746 clicks
1,505,202 impressions
0.249% CTR
.08 average click
$301.14 spent
ClickBank Skateboard Stats: $330.21 Rev
Deep Targeting; Picking the Right Keywords:
No matter what type of campaign you are setting up, the key to success is in your “keyword targeting”. For this skateboarding campaign, I only targeted users interested in “skateboard” and “skateboarding“. Just off those two keywords, you are hitting 192,860 18+ users. I just went through and looked for new skateboarding terms and there are lot more to play around with. The list below contains a few keywords available on Facebook for targeting skateboarder.
FB Skateboarding Keywords: skateboard, skateboarding, skate, skateing, skateboardin, skater, skate park, skating, tony hawk, rob dyrdek, rob dyrdek skateboarder pro, rodney mullen, ryan sheckler
Getting a High Click Through Rate
If you are familiar with Facebook Ads, you already know that one of the biggest goals is to achieve a high click through rate. This is mainly a result of your ad copy text, ad image and your keyword targeting. The screenshot below shows my ad campaigns sorted with the top CTR% on top. Once you achieve CTRs in the .35%+ range, you can usually get clicks for pennies each. “Secrets of Skateboarding” was the best performing title. The top four CTR% ads below are a mix of the ad text shown at the top of the post, and the downloadable ad images.
Keep the Good Ads, Remove the Bad
If you prefer to setup your campaigns on a CPC basis, setup a ton of different ad copies and run them for a while. Once you have a good amount of data and impressions/clicks, pull out the best ads and moved them over to a CPM model. If you do this properly, you should end up getting clicks at a cheaper rate.
Finding the Right Offer:
The end offer I was promoting for this campaign was through ClickBank. If you go into the market place, type in “skateboard” and you will come across two ad campaigns. The campaign I was promoting, “Secrets of Skateboarding” was the better of the two… however you might be able to come across other skateboard training / affiliate programs elsewhere.
Secrets of Skateboarding pays out $14.33 per lead, and requires a credit card. This means you will need to get cheap clicks, as it was converting around 1 in 160 clicks for me.
view landing page
How to Improve Campaign Profitability:
As mentioned earlier, I just threw this one together real quick and wanted to see what numbers were produced. With new programs available like 4 Hour Affiliate, you could monetize the hell out of this campaign with age/gender sorting. I was targeting male/female 18+. Users under 21 are less likely to have a credit card, while users over 35+ are less likely to still be active skateboarders. Closing the gap and selecting an age range between 21-35 may bring much better results. Don’t forget to also sort by age. Another last peice of advice is to build your own landing page, before sending the user to the sales page.
I can’t promise you the same results, but this is the exact setup I had to obtain a small profit on the campaign. Take what I had running, and make the changes I recommended and it should work out for you. If I get some decent feedback on this post, I’ll do another campaign breakdown soon.
Pretty cool to see the break down of the stats, makes me want to go and try facebook out =D
Till then,
Jean
Great post once again Zac. The breakdown I shall admit was inspiring. The Facebook ads has indeed helped you make quite a number of sales. Inspiring stuff. Superb data.
Wow… Thanks alot Zac! There is great infos in this article. Im gonna use these tips to work on my own Facebook campagin.
Oh Zac I failed time after time with Facebook advertising.
I read your post really closely, even though I still believe that Adsense is the best way to go. I'm going to give it another go, the problem is I'm doing advertising for a forum and all I get is more spam.
slowly i am becoming a fan of your blog… its very nice to know the way to increase the Click rate on Campaign… very nice.
Shitty campaign and even worse logic.
Pretty cool to see the break down of the stats, makes me want to go and try facebook out
I never had much luck with Facebook, you get a lot of clicks and pay a lot of money but none of the clicks convert.
Great Post Zac…I wil check out facebook ads
Thanks,
Jorge
Facebook ads are pretty cool. We can reach upto more than 300 Million Users via facebook ads.
I need to follow up with Facebook ads now. Of course, still need to do the homework on if the clicks will generate the $$. Thx Zac for the detailed info.
Pretty cool to see the break down of the stats, makes me want to go and try facebook out
Zac, 2 quick questions after reading tons of your posts:
1. Are you driving paid traffic primarily to your affiliate offers?
2. I guess you have no employees (most of my friends who are in PPC have no employees and make tons of money, I guess it's the big leverage of technology that allows them that).
hey guys i got a couple 100$ voucher codes for facebook. i got about 15 of them from creating websites for people. i have no use for them so hit me up with an offer. you can only use 1 per account apparently
I am glad to visit your blog, because it is always updated and there are always new. information, or simply offer online success stories, many of which I could learn, the recommendation quality equipment, communicate with many people never even see
zac, you should more write about facebook ads
Great stuff. I recently tried a couple of campaigns on Facebook…could get clickthroughs and even a decent CTR for Facebook (.587%) but couldn't get conversions. Was direct linking though.
Funny thing is now I see people copying my ads. Good luck with that I guess.
Conversions are ROI are real important here when you are using margins that close it would be easy to go over budget. You have to watch your campaigns carefully Targeting the right users is defiantly the way to go.
Hi Zac,
I decided to start a facebook campaign after reading this post. I am running 5 ads for one campaign, but facebook has shown 4 of the ads very minimally (all have under 1000 impressions with no clicks) and my 5th ad has 10,321 impressions with 34 clicks. How does someone split test ads if facebook chooses which ads to display? I cannot find any rotate ads button anywhere. Thanks for your help.
Now, that was a meaningful article.I have never really tried Facebook to market my campaigns. Its better to give it a shot
Hey Zac, how did you achieved to get $0.08 average CPC with FB on a US targetted campaign? Really easy for other INTL traffic, but for US…gimme the trick
I think the most important thing about FB ads is the split testing. This is key, if you don't make a mix of your ads (changing images/texts) you won't know which converts better…
Good covering of this topic btw
I will be taking this campaign and having a go , I hope I am not too late.
I will hopefuly learn something or two.
Are there 250,000 people living in this area? With FB ads can you target them to a certain demographic of people who would eat at The Deanery?
A huge pro about facebook ads is that you can target your potential customer far more accurately, by gender, age, interests and other social factors, in addition by geographical location as well.
I noticed that if your landing page is a facebook fan page or group, you will get a much lower CPC.
I'm confused to choose promotion campaign via Facebook or Adwords. Facebook cost is cheaper but its conversion rate is low. I think Adwords is still better options to succeed my affiliate program
Mighty fine post, bookmarked, cheers Zac
i have tried some campaign but no sales at all. I still search profitable affiliate, especially for clickbank, do we need our review blog plus domain name ? or just use their hope link ?
Very wonderful! I also have my own campaign and didn't work quite well for me. Profit is not on my side yet. But with constant learning like this wonderful article from Zac, It'll be better soon.
nice info for the end user
Excellent info.
I have been using FB ads for a while but really only playing around. I'm going to take some of your suggestions and really run with it.
thanks
Awesome advice, i have been thinking about using facebook for adds myself for a while to promote my new ebook. Thanks for sheading some light on the subject!
Awesome advice, haven't read anything like this before.
I tried out a few Facebook ad campaigns which were quite fun to test. I mainly used it to start a following for my blog, just testing a theory really.
I think I may try out FB ads again but aren't they more strict now? Would you have to use a php redirect script on your landing page or should you point toward your own website?
I particularly like the point about using the right keywords for your ad.
Indeed a great info.I never try FB ads before.Might try it in future.Hope it works
Good stuff, thanks for the post! Maybe you should do a follow up post about this?
Facebook ads guide
Another day, and another great post! Woot woot! Seriously, great post. Keep it up!
This is bad ass. Thanks for sharing fully. This gives a full potential for the power of FaceBook advertising in today's marketplace.
BBBeautiful stuff!!
I am going to give this campaign a try.
Very often though, our perception of what our customers might be could be skewed. Better, run some demographics analysis first.
After running a campaign in the learn to play guitar niche I realized that my most interesting prospects are aged from 35 to 54…which is great news because these people are WAY more likely to own a credit card.
Quick question…
Do pay par sale campaigns work for you on FB?
Thanks!
Rocking post!!!!
Thanks for sharing.
As what I have learned, Facebook is the #1 in number of visitors and clicks. I hope this is right because all the while it was Google. Facebook is such a powerful website for advertising and promoting your products and services to the people in your country or all over the world.
Great stats here, although his profit margins are probably razor thin if the site sells skateboard equipment. Skateboard products online is a very competitive industry. 8 cents a click isnt half bad though
Great tips, thank Zac
Interesting. This is something to consider as I am on FB 24/7. Will keep reading more of your posts.
The stats are overwhelmingly cool.
i think it really depends on how you present your ads.. people tend to be more curious when the ads looks good.. next month i will try to run ads.. and i hope i works. i am a newbie at site making but i want to learn. zac whats your secret?
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I kinda liked the FB ads when i tested to see if people will like my codefight page on the facebook. almost 90% people clicked on like button after clicking on the ad.
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This was a very good post zac. great information that was received. I have noticed that when you really focus on the age range that you are trying to focus on you could get better results with what you are trying to do. Thanks for the detailed information in your post.
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Hey Zac, I just wondered what the pop up software you are using on this site.
Really is nice
Good information. But can you post another one the same thing as this but focuses on its process. Even you could state to your next post the step by step procedure of how to do it on Facebook. Thank you man.
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