Most of the money I made this Summer was via Facebook Ads. I had a few campaigns that did very well for me. To have success I had to use trial and error, just like anything else, and to do this I had to make a lot of ads. This is how I organized, tested, and optimized my ads on Facebook.
Prosper202
I use Prosper202 for tracking on all of my campaigns… Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and even Facebook. For Facebook, I start by setting up the network, offer, and text ad that I will be using, and generate the appropriate link. It looks something like this:
http://trackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=xxxx&t202kw=
Redirect page
I then set up a redirect page. This is important because Facebook does not allow the url of your ads to be edited once they have been submitted. So if you want to change your bid, you can just change the link inside the redirect page.
The redirect page looks something like this:
<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
if($ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’) {Header( “Location: http://trackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=xxxx&t202kw=”.$ad );} //ads with $0.xx max bid
elseif($ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’) {Header( “Location: http://trackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=xxxx&t202kw=”.$ad );} //ads with $0.xx max bid
else {Header( “Location: http://www.affiliate-network.com/reporting.php?pub=xxx&offer=xxx?=none” ); } //this is in case I get traffic to this url that isn’t from Facebook.
?>
A couple things to note here about the redirect page.
- You must save it as a .php file.
- “fbxxxxxx” is what I name my ads on Facebook. The first ad I made was named “fb000001″. I do this so that I can organize my ads and so that I can see which ads are performing and which ones aren’t. OPTIMIZATION.
- The url I actually put for my Facebook ads looks something like this: http://www.mydomain.com/redirect.php?ad=fbxxxxxx
Tracking and Optimizing
Once I have all that setup, I sit back and let some data collect. Hopefully, I can easily see that I’m spending less money on Facebook than I am making with my affiliate network of choice. When I do have some conversions to check, I simply update the subids into Prosper202. I then sort my results by keyword and I can compare all of the ads. This lets me delete ones that need deleting and change bids.
This has become an efficient way for me to setup and test campaigns on Facebook. It seems like speed is very important in advertsing on social networks as people often copy your ads within a day or so.
Let me know if you have any problems with this. I would be more than happy to help you out.
