MisterW

For the past few weeks I've been trying to learn the Facebook PPC game with direct link dating ads. I've read up on strategies for gaining a high CTR, from picture selection to border color, headline, and copy. I've experimented with highly specific targeting by precise interest and age, general targeting, bidding very low, bidding within Facebook's suggested range, testing out lots of different pictures, everything. Try as I might, I CANNOT seem to get a CTR higher than .05% for any ad variation. Earlier today I briefly had one ad hovering at around .09% CTR, but within a few hours it steadily fell to .04% CTR.

I see dating ads all over the place on Facebook, so I'm assuming that people are still making bank on them, but I just can't seem to get anywhere near profitable. My ads seldom get clicks, and almost none of my clicks convert (even the offer that just requires a Facebook app install). Is the dating niche on Facebook fairly saturated by the larger affiliates with very high budgets, or is it still possible for the "little guy" to break into it? Just wondering if I'm beating my head against a wall...

Bevo Ryan

check your demographics, and improve your ctr

Plenty of people making tons of $ from dating offers on fb. Your question should really be... how do i improve my ctr to lower my cpc.

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Tedel

I tried CPM payments instead of CPC. I got a decent response for $7. The ad showed 260K times.

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seolinker

How many ads you created overall ?

MisterW

For one dating campaign that I've been working on recently, I created 20 ads. In total, 171,857 impressions, 68 clicks, $50.72 spent. Out of those 68 clicks, I got 2 conversions. Best performing ad (by CTR) had 14,205 impressions, 9 clicks.

So my overall EPC is approximately $.08/click, while my CPC averages to $.75/click.

s1ick

From the fact that you're posting in the noobie forum, I can assume that either you're broke or you're stingy about spending money. I'm also going to assume that you're targeting the US. That's fine, just you need to adjust your targeting.

Hopefully you've figured out that you don't want to run low margins, so you've started targeting. The smaller the market, the better the roi.

Lets take for example gamers. You want to start targeting specific games. WoW would be a great example. You target male gamers who like WoW, but thats not targeted enough.

You need to target male gamers who like WoW in a specific state. You can't mention states in ads anymore so you need to be creative. I'm sitting in the Northeast and my balls are sweating off. The new york heat just caused a bunch of sewage to flow into the Hudson.

If you can't make money with that I'm going to make you buy me a flight to your city, and a cab to your house so I can punch you in the face.

You guys are lucky its friday and I've been drinking.

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MisterW

I'm posting in the newbie forum because I'm a newbie and I don't want to clutter up the other forums with obnoxious newbie questions.

From your experience with highly specific targeting, is there a minimum estimated reach threshold that you look for? For example, if you get really specific and end up with an estimated reach of like 5,000 people, is that small enough where it'll just fizzle out in a day or two? Most of my ads haven't been very targeted, so my estimated reach is generally in the 300,000-500,000 range. I'm guessing that this is why my CTR is terrible; my targeting isn't nearly specific enough.

I didn't realize that Facebook doesn't allow you to mention the state in the ad headline. I made an ad a few weeks ago that mentioned a specific city and it got approved.

seolinker

68 clicks from 171k imps is not good either, so what you did with winning ad ? Give it a run for more ? it may get better over time

MisterW

I've got the campaign paused for now because I want to figure out a better plan of attack instead of slowly bleeding money. I just got approved to promote the same campaign, but UK instead of US traffic, so the payout's a little higher per lead and I'll have more leeway with getting it profitable.

merereilly

Have you tried dating traffic on Plenty of Fish?

LErinator

I don't know if its just me but I'm seeing pretty much every single social media site, whether top tier or secondary, becoming saturated with dating ads - and for the most part the non-adult ones as well. Everyone knows adult-dating will kill international, but on the flip side it doesn't seem to be doing too much for the new folks doing buys on places like facebook and any other specific social sites.

MisterW

Nope, I've only been experimenting with Facebook Ads. I've been lazy over the past few weeks and haven't been working nearly as hard as I should be. Shame on me. I just got approved by my affiliate network to run two more offers, one in dating and one in games. I'll try to develop more targeted ads and see if I can get some decent CTRs (and hopefully start to see some profits).

In the meantime I want to start developing a website to work toward a more stable stream of online income. I've only been doing direct link PPC so far and while some affiliates seem to make substantial profits just from doing this, I don't feel comfortable trying to put all my eggs in one basket.

jonas33h

the best I have done is when I used a bulk ad creator I need to buck up and just start paying for the services 20 ads isn't really that many when you can creat 50-100 ads at a time.

What I can't figure out still is how long do you let the ad run before you deem it not profitable

secretagentdad

Go run the vista print free business cards offers but use words like
Classy
Calling Card
ect/

Send me a cut.

That is all.

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MisterW

What's your daily ad spend budget when you simultaneously test 50-100 ads? Seems like you'd have to blow through several hundred dollars every day just to get enough data to determine if the campaign's going to work.

jonas33h

I am at 25 daily but I will play that many ads and start pausing the ones that have low ctr . I pause them quickly and let the high ctr compete against each other. And the rest won't even get impressions. Hope that helps

MisterW

Yeah that makes sense. That's basically what I've been doing, but I've been doing it on a smaller scale. Kind of weird how with identical targeting and bids, some ads never get delivered and some get 10,000 impressions in a few hours.

MisterW

Update...

I started a new campaign today and it's looking much better than my previous campaign so far. I'm split testing 20 different ads with various pictures / demographic targeting. It's just about reached the spend limit for today, so here's what I've got:

45,614 impressions, 41 clicks, 3 conversions
Overall CTR: .090%
Top performing ads: .155%, .119%, .107%, .105%, .068%

As you can see, as compared to my previous dating campaign, this one's doing significantly better after day 1. Thanks again to everyone who responded to my earlier questions! Don't know if anyone's reading this now, but just in case, I have one more Facebook Ad-related question.

Since this is a dating offer, I'd like to run it only during evening/night hours. If I pause my campaign for several hours each day, will this affect my CPC? I think I remember reading somewhere that pausing a campaign / manually day-parting on Facebook will have an impact on your CPC vs if you just let it run continuously. Can anybody confirm or refute this?

1yerrot

I've NEVER had success with FB marketing. I know, I know. I was .doing.. it.. wrong..

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MisterW

Yeah man it's rough trying to learn Facebook Ads. Especially when you hear some people raving about how easy it is to make big bucks on Facebook as you struggle to approach breaking even.

Anyway though does anybody know if pausing a campaign will cause the CPC to raise back up once you unpause it?