I was just going over my logs for traffic from Facebook Ads. Looking closely I noticed double clicks from multiple IP addresses! Some are even triple clicks. The number of clicks in my log exactly matches the ones Facebook is charging me for!  That means Facebook is charging me for muliple clicks on the same ad by the same user in a very short time frame - like within seconds of each other. Rip off!  They will definately be hearing from me about this.

Any information I find out regarding this issue will be posted here in the comments.

Focus On Facebook

Ok, after about a week after dipping my pinky toe into Facebook Ads one HUGE annoyance keeps coming up in my mind over and over again. It's the lack of good reporting tools. The reports Facebook Ads offers in its interface suck! They give only very basic information like # of impressions, CTR, ad spend, etc. What they could give advertisers is detailed reporting that shows demographic information about who is clicking my ads.

For example, take a look at how I can tightly focus an ad campaign on a particular demographic with Facebook:

I can specifically target "...women between 18 and 25 years old who are interested in men and are single in Nebraska who are freshmen at UNL majoring in Business and like Partying."  This is what makes Facebook so bad-ass for certain offers. But here is the catch: It takes a ton of testing before I can safely target a particular group of Facebook users this tightly.

To start out, I need to target the widest audience I can, then weed out the demographics that are clicking, but not buying - so I can optimize ad spend. The shitty part is that there is NO WAY to do this with Facebook, unless I create hundreds of different ads, targeting each criteria. With multiple ads and multiple criteria, I could easily get into the tens of thousands of ads in order to acquire stats related to specific demographics.

Facebook obviously knows the demographic information for people that are clicking my ads, so why won't they tell me!? It can't be privacy related - because no names are involved. And, in my mind, they will make more money by sharing this information with advertisers, so we can create better, more relevant ads for their users - which will increase clicks and increase their revenue!!!

WFT Facebook? Fix this now!!

Focus On Facebook

I plan to keep posting about my progress on Facebook, whether it exposes my super stupid affiliate techniques or not.  Right now I am pretty much breaking even overall with the offer I chose to learn Facebook Ads with. I've spent about $60 and have made back nearly that much in commissions.  I'm pretty frickin' happy with this! I'm running a new offer in a new niche,  on a new ad platform and breaking even, so I'm 100% confident that I'll be able to continue making adjustments until I'm profitable.

Actually, over the past two days, since I started using my pseudo- ad scheduling technique, and writing new ads,  my campaign has been profitable! So, now that I have a system in place that I know works, and is making me money, I'll increase my budget. I'm not going to increase my CPC bid though. Instead I'll increase the overall campaign budget.

If I were using someone else's money (ie. credit cards) like so many affiliate do, I'd max out the budget and start rocking it. But, I hate credit cards and have sworn to never use them again (and haven't in at least 4 years), so I have to stick to a budget that I can afford to spend out-of-pocket right now.  This simply means it's going to take me more time (and a shit-load of patience) to turn over my profits, and increase my volume than someone borrowing money from a credit card.

Once I get a good feel for Facebook traffic with this campaign, I'll have a solid foundation for launching new campaigns there too.

Focus On Facebook

Here's a quick update for those following my progress on Facebook Ads. So far, nothing exciting has happened. I lowered my daily budget back down to $10 while I figure this thing out.  Here are some quick stats:

• 270,000 impressions
• 92 Clicks
• EPC: 28 cents

Not very impressive as far as EPC and CTR, but as we all know, it's conversions that count!

One thing I really wanted to have with this offer from Facebook was Ad Scheduling (as it's called in Google Adwords). For those who don't know, this just allows ads to be run only during the time of day I want. Unfortunately, Facebook has none such a feature (unless they have something in an API, which I haven't yet explored), but I did find a way to psuedo-schedule my ads. 

All you have to do is adjust your CPC Bid down when you don't want your ads to show, then jack them back up when you are ready to roll. Facebook doesn't seem to look down upon frequent bid changes (like Google, YSM, and sometimes MSN seem to) which is great. The downside is that this has to be done manually in the Facebook Ads interface, and for each and every ad. That kind of sucks, but at least I have some way to schedule ads.

I just started using this psuedo-ad scheduling technique with Facebook tonight, so I'll give an update on it's effectiveness in my next Focus on Facebook post.

Focus On Facebook

wOOt!! I just got back from my boy's tennis lessons and checked my stats. As predicted in my last post, my first conversion came this morning.   That puts my first Facebook campaign in a brand new niche at 100% ROI!!  I'm effectively doubling my money with my first Facebook campaign! It's all thanks to Facebook's targeted traffic and the merchants killer LP.  I'm super excited and can't wait to dig deeper into Facebook Ads.  My EPC for today is at an outstanding $3.65 .

I have a brand new focus on lead-gen PPC with Facebook, and I'm really going to tear it up with this offer. If you are interested in following my progression into all-out success with Facebook subscribe to my feed, and I will keep you updated.

Focus On Facebook woot

Over the coming weeks I'll be focusing all my online efforts on Facebook Ads. I launched a new campaign last night in the default "My Ads" campaign. I wrote 2 ads last night, (that is all I had time for) and by mid-morning today 1 ad was approved and running.  The campaign I set up targeted about 725,000 Facebook users so I wasn't sure how many impressions I might get.  Here are my latest stats:

As you can see, I set up a $10 budget per day. So far I have spent $7.25 and have gotten 46k impressions. Not bad! I wasn't sure what kind of volume I could get with a 3 keyword campaign on Facebook, but it's looking pretty good so far.

Obviously I really need to work on my CTR. I had a little bit of time to add one more ad this morning (the bottom most ad listed above). The only  thing I changed was the title of the ad, and as you can see, it's CTR is a bit better. I'll continue to optimize my ad copy to increase CTR, and will be cranking out several more ads as soon as I am done writing this post.

I also recalculated the math on the offer I am promoting, and decided to increase my budget to $25/day, which apparently won't kick in until tomorrow. It's going to take at least that much volume before I'll know if the campaign has a chance to succeed and I'm not patient enough to wait 3 days.

I really like the easy interface for setting up highly targeted ads and the ability to place an image with my ads.  It's a brand new niche and a new advertising platform  for me so it should be interesting! I expect to see some conversions by morning considering the targeted traffic and the merchants kick-ass landing page. I plan on sharing more about the progress of this campaign here on my blog so check back for updates!

Focus On Facebook