Facebook | Affiliate Marketing Tips from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson

Facebook Ads and Banner Blindness

This is a guest post by Jonathan Volk who runs an internet marketing blog where he teaches the techniques he has used to generate millions of dollars per year online.

How often do you see ads just like this one on your facebook? I know I see these ads over and over among others so often.

What is Banner Blindness?

Banner blindness on facebook ads is when an ad such as the one above is just ignored simply due to the fact that it has been seen so many times before by the same demographic.

Ads that once worked amazingly well (as I’m sure this ad did – although I never personally ran it) loses it’s effectiveness all together.

Banner blindness can set in rather fast on Facebook. I’ve seen ads move from profitable to unprofitable in a single day by not implementing the correct protocols (featured below). This happens especially fast when targeting smaller numbers of people.

Overcoming Banner Blindness

Overcoming this banner blindness is a huge struggle as a facebook advertiser, specially when you’re generating high volume ads.

To overcome Banner blindness, my team has tried numerous techniques. Here are a couple techniques that can help you to overcome this banner blindness and increase your facebook ads profitability.

Put a border around the image ad – In Photoshop you can easily add a red border around your currently high converting image to create a bit more attention to an ad losing it’s effectiveness.
Try changing the headline to something 100% different. Often, changing the headline to something completely different can have a good effect on your ad conversions.
Always run more than one ad variation. If you run more variations of ads, your ads lose effectiveness slower. Even if one ad is less profitable, it’s worth running to keep your higher profiting ad running for longer.
Of course, switch out the image. Easiest and simplest trick in the book, but it works.

By using some of these techniques, you should be able to overcome banner blindness to some extent.

For more information on creating successful facebook campaigns you can check out some of these articles:

23 December, 2009 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Facebook

$1000 in Facebook Ads Coupon Codes

Last week at AdTech, Facebook had a booth and they were giving away $50 free trial coupon codes. I swung by the booth and managed to pick up around 20 of their Facebook Ads Free Trial business cards. I went back to grab more later, but they didn’t have any more out.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to use them on my existing account, but I grabbed a bunch to give them away through the blog. You can see the actual card below, and yes, it is an active trial code, but only good for the first person who grabs it. These $50 free trials (x 20 codes =$1,000) are only available on new Facebook Ads accounts. See if you are the first to grab it!

Monday Code: 45CH-11RM-8CK3-HMEN, K2E6-0EYV-Y7R5-5YMT
Tuesday Code: 4XJ6-889T-Y5NC-1JF4, RKPJ-24E2-5YCF-CXKW
Wednesday Code: 9Y3P-YV16-YM8X-PJ26, YR7H-469W-F6PY-614N
Thursday Code: J7E4-164N-N8K1-5EJ0, H7D3-U9JK-7GD4-8H7F
Friday Code: 10 codes to be mailed out on Monday! (Codes already sent out)

I’ll be adding two new coupon codes daily for the rest of the week. For anyone else who wants a coupon code, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter and I will send out another set of 10 coupon codes this Friday Monday the 14th 16th of November. Make sure you signup on the list below to get the mailing.

Also, for anyone else starting our on Facebook Ads, or still struggling, here is a list of previous posts I’ve written on Facebook Ads.

- Breakdown of a Profitable Facebook Ads Campaign
- Setting Up Your First Facebook Ads Campaign
- Facebook Ads vs. Google Adwords (Guest post)
- The Future of Advertising on Facebook
- Tips for Making More Money with Facebook Ads
- Split Testing with Facebook Ads

The $1000 in Facebook Ad codes promotion may have come to a close, but you can still grab a $71.88 coupon code through this blog.

09 November, 2009 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Facebook

Breakdown of a Profitable Facebook Ads Campaign

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.

03 November, 2009 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Facebook, Featured

Tips for Designing a Winning Ad on Facebook

An article was just featured in Business Week magazine called “Design a Winning Ad on Facebook“, by Kasey Galang, Principal, Performance Marketing at Facebook. It may have been a good article for anyone who has never done any advertising on Facebook, but very little information for anyone who already has. I thought I would build upon this article and provide a few more tips and illustrations on how to setup winning Facebook Ad campaigns.

In the BW article, Kasey mentions the key points of 1.) Target the Right People, 2.) Ask People to Participate and 3.) Keep it Fresh. Below are three visual examples (fictional ads/offers) to help you better understand how to create a better ad campaign.

1.) Target the Right People
In my previous facebook ads article I showed you how easy it is to setup a new campaign and targeting. The fictional ad campaign below was created to show an example of effective targeting. The ad shows a middle aged couple, targets to single men, interested in woman and are over the age of 40. Depending on how you setup your ads, you can show a picture of a middle aged single female/male, then target to the opposite sex.

2.) Ask People to Participate
Since advertising on Facebook started, zip/email submits and surveys have always done well. Facebook moved away from allowing survey to be advertised, but they still approve zip/email submits. Here’s an example of setting up a zip/email ad campaign.

When you start asking people questions that are relevant to them, they actually get more interested and active. Here I setup a fictional ad campaign for a free $50 gift card to Olive Garden. The ad copy is clear enough and gets the viewers attention. I didn’t have to change much from the default targetting settings, but I did bump age up to 25 as the minimum, as the offers usually convert crappy for the advertiser, the lower the age you target. The best part of this ad campaign, is actually being able to target the people who eat at Olive Garden through the keywords section.

3.) Keep it Fresh
Depending on how many people you are targetting in your ad campaign, this concept might not matter too much. If you are targetting all of Facebook, it’s most likely not many of them will see your ad twice, however if you are using keywords and targetting a small group, they will see your ad more often. With that being said, I always setup multiple ad copies for my Facebook ads. Not only will it keep your ad fresh, but it will give you a better idea of whats working and bringing in better numbers. Here are just a few different ways to promote the same fictional campaign. Also, I’ve seen some great click through rates when using a variation of colors in ads, try it out..

I hope you found this article helpful and maybe a bit of inspiration for your next Facebook ads campaign. Remember to try a different variation of text and images on all ads. Remove the ones that have low CTRs. Don’t be lazy, and make sure you take the time to crop your images properly (110×80), so they don’t look like crap. Now go make some money on Facebook!

04 August, 2009 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Facebook

Setting Up Your First Facebook Ads Campaign

With Facebook now at over 250 million members, it’s never been a better time to take a stab at Facebook Advertising. I continually get requests through email on how to setup a Facebook Ads campaign, and what offers to work. Instead of writing back to everyone individually, it’s better to just write out a whole post. “Warning” – This is entry level stuff for Facebook Ads. If you’re already advertising on Facebook, you can probably skip this post… if not, learn something new and maybe make some money in the process.

For some reason, whenever you start talking to someone about Facebook Ads, you either get the response, “I just kept losing money, so I went away”, or “Facebook Ads is awesome! I love it!”. The truth is, Facebook Ads can make you money, just as easily as it can make you lose your shirt. It’s all about testing, setting your ads up correctly and managing your daily balance.

Let’s go forward with setting up a Facebook campaign. For this walkthrough, I’m going to use a “3G iPhone” email submit from Tatto Media, which pays $2 per submit. This will be a good example to use for when we go over targeting.

1.) Design Your Ad
- Destination URL: You can use your affiliate link, or a landing page. There are no quality scores, or full sites needed. In most cases, you can link directly to the affiliate url.
- Title: The title is what your user is going to see, and make them click. The better the title, the higher the click through rate.
- Body Text: This is usually the generic information that helps in deciding if Facebook will approve your ad. In this particular example, Facebook likes you to list the process needed for the viewer to take to receive their free iPhone. Again, the better the writing, the better the click through rate.
- Image: Usually more important than your title, is your image. Depending on the ad used, you can get creative with this. Draw attention to your ad by using a funny picture, or something out of the ordinary… but still relevant to the ad. Take some extra time to choose a high quality image and do any necessary cropping so it fits correctly.

2.) TARGETING
The ad copy is the face of your ad campaign, but the targeting is where you setup who should see your ad. There is no reason why a single guy in Florida should see an advertisement for “Married Women in New York“. Thanks for Facebook Ads targeting, this will never be a problem again.

Most of the targeting options are self explanatory. Just for demonstration, I checked off that I want to target only “Married” “Males” interested in “iPhone” and living within the “United States” to see this ad. You can then see that 56,540 Facebook users match this description.

Keywords: The keywords are what will make or break your ad campaign. If you don’t place any keyword specifications, your advertisement will be shown to over 66 million Facebook users in the US. This will result in not only a horrible click through rate, but can also deplete your account of funds in no time.

As you can see in the picture below, I selected “iPhone“, “iphones“, and “Apple Iphone 8gb“. This means only people with these listed interests will see my ad. In addition to the keywords I selected, Facebook listed a few “Suggested Keywords“.

3.) Campaigns & Pricing
Now that your ad campaign is created, you just need to set everything up for going live and setting your ad pricing. The most important setting in this whole step, is your “Daily Budget“. The thing with Facebook, is that their audience is so huge, you can go through a few hundred or even thousands of dollars in just minutes. When setting up a campaign, you will need to test what CPC amount is right for you to spend. While testing, I would set the daily budget in the $5-$20 range. As for the CPC rate, I usually put 30-50% of what their actual suggestion is. Once you have some traffic flowing through the campaign, you will have a better idea on how to manage you CPC and daily budget.

4.) Review Your Ad
The last step is to simply review everything you have just setup. Once you verify everything is correct, you simply need to click “Place Order” and you campaign will go into que for approval.

Important Notices for Facebook Advertising:
- Your daily spend limit will increase in increments til you meet $1000, then you can contact an ads manager to get boosted to $5k+ daily range.
- Facebook ad team will deny your ads all time. Keep submitting new ad copies and resubmit whenever they are denied.
- Take advantage of NON-US traffic. Facebook is BIG worldwide, and these markets are less saturated then US.
- Facebook Coupons: For new accounts, several networks and sites offer $50-$100 coupons for Facebook advertisers.
(Visa used to offer $100, looks like they don’t anymore. Search around for the latest coupons to go live.)
- Setup multiple offers and ad copies. Keep higher CTR converting offers, and close out the others.
- The higher the CTR, the lower you will have to pay per click.
- Once you master CPC, move over to CPM advertising for better ROI results.

Give Facebook Ads a try.