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Dennis Yu is CEO of BlitzLocal.com, a 50 person shop in Colorado doing local Internet Marketing– driving phone calls for professional service businesses.
At yesterday’s Affiliate Summit East, Shoemoney, Alex Schultz, Zac Johnson, and myself shared our best tips with affiliates. Folks like Eric Schechter and Nick Abramovic were there to contribute insight, too. Highlights:
Delay in tools actually helps affiliates: Big advertisers won’t enter until there’s a mainstream API and some keyword research tools– they are too lazy. You have a window of up to a year to buy cheap traffic before the big guys come in and bid prices up.- Platform is hitting hyper-growth: Facebook won’t reveal exact revenue figures, but we can say the platform is doing at least a few hundred million dollars a year, based on them crushing their 70% annual growth target. International is the biggest opportunity.
- ePM is king: Like a traditional search engine, Facebook rewards advertisers who earn them the most per impression. Profit from that knowledge by adjusting your CTR and max bid in light of their CPM. People often ask about how much to bid and this is the way to be thinking about that question. You can bid far less than the suggested bid and still get a ton of traffic. If you can do a 0.2% CTR, that’s pretty good. If a lot higher, then you might be able to get 3 cent clicks in the US.
- Local is huge: Geo-targeted traffic is cheap (under 30 cent CPMs), as is any targeted traffic, as most folks buy with only country targeting in place. If you’re serving a massage therapist, plastic surgeon, or other local service business, you can dominate. Like traditional PPC, impressions are free, so you can get free branding. Put in your phone number for added trust and potentially free leads (since you pay only on the click).
Facebook pages are the hidden secret: With PPC, you have to pay for a click each time you see them. By driving your traffic to pages, you earn fans that you can keep sending messages to. Think of pages as a giant autoresponder campaign. In-line fanning in ads increases your conversion rate, since people can fan you from the ad directly.- Direct link or build a landing page? Think of direct linking as the S&P 500– it’s the average of what you expect to get. Compare your landing page against the direct link performance to see what’s better.
- Problem with ad approvals? If you submit 99 ads and 1 is approved, that’s not a sign of inconsistency. Or that you should submit 990 ads to get 10 approved. Rather, you’re pushing deceptive ads or sending people to pages that have tiny print on the price way, way below the fold. Don’t dance in that area, since you’ll get disapproved and eventually banned. It’s not really hard to judge if an ad is going to be disapproved– consider whether there’s anything misleading or if there’s fake content. Submit great ads and you’ll see your ads get approved faster and faster– until you get your account whitelisted. Whitelisting is where all your ads are automatically approved.
Questions? Facebook is quite responsive– hit them up at affiliate@facebook.com.
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Thanks for this great post! I’m new reader of your blog
Excellent article, I will take note. Many thanks for the story!
Thank you for great post!
yeh right.. great post, Thank You
HA HA!
Up to a year for buying the cheap traffic?
Its not really cheap to enter facebook advertising in the first place I thought.
@b.peppers– yes, targeting for local business is huge on Facebook, since geo-targeted traffic is cheap.
@ericschechter– thanks for being there! We love CB!
@zacjohnson– looking forward to next year.
Nice post, this was a fun panel to be on!
yes, I am agree with you. It’s really nice and fun panel to be on.
Thanks for putting this great list from ASE together Dennis. The Facebook Advertising system is something a lot of affiliates (both newbies and veterans) are constantly trying to figure out and master. I think these tips are a great resource for them to do just that.
Do you mean for targeting local businesses?