Affiliate Marketing With FaceBook - How Not To

I decided to splash back into the world of affiliate marketing by having a go with FaceBook. I was dreaming of thousands of targeted leads for next to no money, the reality, as with just about all my experiences with paid affiliate marketing turned out to be a little less than I was expecting!

My Offer

FaceBooks widest targeting parameter is the country, seeing as how I’d just got back from holiday and I’d been amazed at just how much credit information advertising there was on TV whilst I was there I thought I’d give that a go. The bulk of FaceBooks users are American so that gave me a huge audience, the financial crisis was hitting hard so the offer seemed appropriate as well. Something I hear time and time again from top affiliates is that you shouldn’t be afraid to step into a busy marketplace, if other people are making money from it then so can you. I went for this offer from NeverBlueAds which pays $15 per lead on a second page submission. Because it was a 2 pager I decided to drop leads directly onto their site rather than come up with a landing page. The offer shows great network earnings and an average of around $0.92 return per click (roughly 1 in 16 clicks convert). How hard could this possibly be? Hmmm, famous last words.

How Not To Target The Right Audience

This is where I began to struggle a bit. FaceBook allows you to target by interest, the trouble is how many people put “being in debt” and “credit reports” as their interests? Not bloody many, that’s how many! I was left to try and target other parameters instead. Mainly their age and marital status. I based this on my own experience, when I was young and single my credit score was the last thing on my mind. I was more interested in getting drunk and girls. I decided to target middle aged to slightly older people who were married. Whilst this did limit my audience quite a bit I was convinced that these would convert better. I was after a ROI after all.

The Advert

I’m not going to lie here, rather than spend ages experimenting to find what would work best I used that old affiliate marketers trick. I monitored what was working best on Adwords and stole (I mean borrowed) the top 5 ads. I priced up the difference between running the ads as pay-per-click or pay per thousand impressions and decided on the later. At a price of only $0.51 per thousand impressions I was sure I’d be able to do something with this.

My FaceBook Affiliate Marketing Results

The first day things started of well, my bid was high enough and I was getting large numbers of impressions. 6 hours in and the cost of more than a couple of conversions in the red already with only 2 clicks to my name it became apparent that this wasn’t going to be that easy. This trend continued for the first day, I ended up with several hundred thousand impressions, about 4 clicks and a nice bill to pay. Bugger. I think the problem was an obvious one, even with borrowing the top ads from Adwords there was nothing there that could convince enough FaceBook users to click. The next day I persisted with the same ads and the results weren’t as bad, but only because my competition were out bidding so I wasn’t getting as many impressions, hence a lower bill! Overall those 2 days were costing me over $13 a click for an offer that only converts $15.

At this point I figured PPM was not the way to go with this offer I so switched out to a traditional pay-per-click model instead. I could bid on my target audience (which I also decided to widen a bit) for around $1.05 a click. Looking at NeverBluAds stats for my offer this would still leave me with a deficit if it only converted at the “average” rate (remember the offer was earning around $0.93 per click). I didn’t care, it was a damn site better than paying $13 per click and this was after all a learning experience. The next 2 days my click rate increased significantly (costing me more money) but the end result was quite a few clicks but not one conversion. Not one. I carried on messing around for a few more days trying various ads and targeting different segments of FaceBooks user demographic but nothing I did seemed to increase any of my positive indicators any great amount. Besides this my cost-per-click was ever on the increase, even if it suddenly started converting at a good rate there was no way I was going to make any money from this offer on FaceBook. So I stopped.

What Did I Learn

As my previous experiments with FaceBook had already proved there is great potential, certainly in terms of the numbers. It’s very easy to rack up hundreds of thousands of impressions. The problem is of course getting them to not only click but also to convert. I’ll let you in on a little secret here, I think I may have found the key to doing this with FaceBook. I mentioned above that there were no interests I could associate with my offer? I think that was my main problem, my audience was way too broad to work for me. Google have this right, keyword marketing, it’s what they’ve built their entire business on.

Experiment Number 2

Anyone can blab on about having theories, I decided that I’d try and prove mine so I started again. This time with a promotion I’ve been doing via organic traffic for a long time. Not only that but it had a number of interests associated with it that could work for me. I’ve been operating in the property niche for a long time now so have direct deals with a few companies, I was going to try getting sales/rental leads for a property development. The cool thing was they’d accept leads world wide so I could target multiple countries, the down side was that by narrowing down to interests my potential audience on FaceBook wasn’t that big. Determined to get PPM to work I started with that again, this is how I did:-

Not too bad at all! I found a great market in Hong Kong, and can probably kill the offer in the other countries (not surprisingly the US performed far and away the worst). The end result is an offer that I’ve been able to profit from for a week or so. Not a huge amount and it wont last long but it’s SOOOO much better than I did first time around. Not quite Uber Affiliate status yet but at my second go I managed a profitable campaign.

So there you have it, for me at least the key to getting affiliate marketing with FaceBook to work was finding an offer that I could target to people via their interests. Age and status targeting just wasn’t working for me. Seeing as how I’ve got my $250 in free advertising to spend I can now use this information to go away and try and find a campaign that I can scale and make some real money from, yeah like it’s that easy! Despite losing some money first time around this has been overall a positive experience, besides if you think I did pretty bad here wait until you here about my experiment with AdBrite!

(ps - As I’ve said millions of times, I’m by no means any sort of an expert in PPC/PPM affiliate marketing, I lose money so you don’t have to! If you’ve got any tips/advice/feedback please feel free to leave a comment, I really do appreciate it)

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Paul Barlow - Over 18 years writing software combined with extensive SEO experience has meant that I've been able to make a good living online for many years! This blog covers the money making schemes I have and still use.

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