Day 13 - Paid Traffic

@eliquid This concept came up before in another threads and I dismissed it but now that I'm about to start a few Facebook campaigns I'm curious...

There's the part of me that only wants to target US, CA, UK, AU, etc. But I know I can load up on a ton of cheap likes at the Middle East, India, Philippines, etc. I also know a portion of that is going to be useless bot traffic.

What I'm thinking about is the shares and likes to be received as much as the traffic, due to their ranking power. My concern is that the bot traffic will never engage with my posts and essentially ruin my Edge Rank.

I believe it was @j a m e s who posed the question of what counts as a non-engagement...

Does the post have to load on their newsfeed and then not be engaged with, (actual live real data) or is Facebook just saying "We shot it out to newsfeeds and regardless if that person even logged on or not, they didn't engage". I hope that's clear.

Do you or anyone else have an answer or even a suspicion about this?
 
It would need to be people logged in and seen it to count and be measured.

However, if you are worried about bot traffic. Think about what goes into building a bot for something like Facebook....

Someone needs to code it to login and browse around as a profile. Generally these bot owners have tons of profiles. Do you think they are going to go "deep" in making their profiles?

What's more likely for a bot owner to create:
  1. Create tons of profiles in major cities ( thats where the "working ads" are ) with shallow profiles like female aged 25 living in Miami or NYC.

  2. Create a deep profile such as 36 female and mother of 2 living in GABORONE, BOTSWANA who likes Wheel of Fortune and reading the Bible who is married with a Masters degree working at Self Employed and does Yoga
Hope you catch what I am going into here without giving too much away publically. Target people that pretty much won't be bot profiles if you know what I mean...
 
I've been thinking about this lately. Having a small budget, what do you think would be better? Buying likes vs buying traffic on Facebook?

My main goal would be to generate revenue from display ads

I'm leaning towards traffic and building an email list rather than building a large Facebook page. At least with buying traffic could get some return from display ads + grow my email list at the same time
 
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Id do both.

Depending on your niche, it could be either method working well for you.

I'd buy both and append a tracking variable on the end of the URL and see which one brings you the most response and focus on that one the most.

By like I hope you mean the Like target in Facebook ads and not like as in some 3rd party fiverr person.
 
@eliquid As a beginner in paid traffic world, what would you recommend to the beginner? Which traffic source to start with? Also would $2000-4000 budget be sufficient to do this? My background is mostly in SEO/Web Development I'm willing to master paid traffic and get instant traffic unlike with SEO.
 
Kakarot said:
@eliquid As a beginner in paid traffic world, what would you recommend to the beginner? Which traffic source to start with? Also would $2000-4000 budget be sufficient to do this? My background is mostly in SEO/Web Development I'm willing to master paid traffic and get instant traffic unlike with SEO.
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I'd start with Facebook - it's easy enough for a beginner and cheap enough. Google PPC is very expensive these days and I can't bring myself to pay several dollars a click when Facebook delivers a lead for the same...

The thing with social ads is that the strategy is a bit different. The easiest way I've found to get value is to give something away and get them onto e-mail/retargeting and so on. And make your ad 'fun' instead of 'buy now buy now'. If someone searches google for 'buy cheap sneakers now' and you run an ad for it... they are ready to be sold to/buy. Someone scrolling FB on their phone... well you need to grab their attention with something.
 
Kakarot said:
@eliquid As a beginner in paid traffic world, what would you recommend to the beginner? Which traffic source to start with? Also would $2000-4000 budget be sufficient to do this? My background is mostly in SEO/Web Development I'm willing to master paid traffic and get instant traffic unlike with SEO.
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I am also in similar situation as you, and personally I would avoid networks where you need to use cloaker, such as facebook and google. I am thinking between Bing Ads, PPV (50onred or Leadimpact) or Native Ads.
Out of Big 3 PPC (Google, Facebook and Bing), Bing is not as strict as other 2. They allow you to direct link, some niches you cannot do on google and facebook without a cloaker. And other Tier 2 PPC networks don't have volume and quality as Big 3.

I also like PPV because it's cheap, it has cool targeting options and no restrictions like on PPC (Quality Score)
I really like that you can jack other people's traffic.

And Native Ads, they are newest and people still click on them thinking they are normal artices, they are great for lifestyle, weight loss and skincare niches. Targeting options are not the best tho, in networks I seen you can only chose category (broad niche)

You should also take in consideration cost for good hosting, tracking software, and if you are not a coder some kind of landing page software.

Good luck.
 
Thanks for your responds guys, appreciate it! By the way @Tove, why would they suspend your account on facebook/google ad words if you are running legit (white hat campaigns)? Why would we need Cloaker for that? I can understand those people which are making 6 figures a month using forbidden offers etc they need cloak etc, but my goal is 10k$ a month (profits), can't I make that money without cloaking?
 
Kakarot said:
@eliquid As a beginner in paid traffic world, what would you recommend to the beginner? Which traffic source to start with? Also would $2000-4000 budget be sufficient to do this? My background is mostly in SEO/Web Development I'm willing to master paid traffic and get instant traffic unlike with SEO.
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Id say $4k is enough, but you need to focus on 1 traffic source with it all. Either FB or Adwords
 
@eliquid why is it that after running my ads on Facebook for a week or two I slowly start to see that my (link)CPC is going up? The reach of the adset hasn't even covered 50% of the aviable audience. I'm running a conversion campaign and paying for CPM.
 
Eliquid is the paid traffic master, so he'll know better than I. But sounds like the majority of fans who are most likely to click, have already clicked. Now you're left with the people who are less likely to click. So the ad is being shown to people who are less engaged, thus your cost is going up. It will continue to rise as you reach less and less engaged segments of the audience. And will rise further when the audience has been exhausted and they're seeing the same ad repeatedly.
 
Sooooo....

There is no real easy cut and dry answer for this.

There are a lot of variables at play, but it seems like there are some things you might be missing or not understanding.

Bottom line, for whatever reason Facebook thinks your campaign is not as effective or relevant as it might have been before compared to other metrics they know about. It could also simply be the prices for clicks could be going up ( price floor ) since this is q4 for you compared to others in similar metrics as you.

Don't worry about your available audience and if you covered 50% or not, you need to be looking at frequency.

You potential audience might be 100k people, but many of them aren't going to see your ad because:

1. They are not on FB at the times you advertise
2. They have some kind of ad blocker for feeds or right hand side ads
3. Your competitors are winning more auctions than you when the audience is on
4. Maybe your budget is too small and FB is trying to spread the spend evenly for you over the 24 hour period
5. Some people like me, only get on FB once a week or so, so Im not going to see your ad.

I could go on and on......

Also, there is a bright side to this I haven't mentioned yet.

As you get more targeted with a demo, have you ever noticed the price floor for that demo is much much higher as you get more targeted and specific?

You very well could be paying more per click as FB builds up and seasons the pixel pool you want ( you're focusing on conversions ) which is going to hone in on more specific people and pool of people as it learns over time. It's actually not learning, but you get the drift, right?

Bottom line, forget what CPM or CPC you are paying. Focus on if you are getting the right amount you need CPA/CPS/CPL wise. That's all that matters in the end.

I could care less what my CPC or CPM is, if I am hitting my CPA goal. Those clicks could be $50 each as long as I am converting every single one of them. Know what I mean?
 
Thought I would bump with some tips in the next few days...

Display campaigns can be a waste if you don't monitor them.

Besides pausing and removing placements that are over obvious goals ( over CPA goals you set, or other goals if not CPA ), you should be weeding out sites that are just plain garbage and common sense before they even go over your goals.

One way you can do this is to find outliers.

Lets say you are looking at your display campaign placements for last 30 days and you realize that average CTR is 0.12%. That an average which includes really awful sites in your campaign.

Even if you look at placements that converted well for you ( within goal ), the CTR might be 0.20%.

Form a baseline you know would be way off, like 1% and find placements that hit that or are above it. See my example below....

2017-08-28_0241.png


Some of you might wonder why I put in Impressions greater than 10, that's because I like to give some benefit of doubt that maybe.. MAYBE... someone hit a placement, seen my ad, and clicked on their first visit or second visit.

Unlikely, but I'll give them the benefit for now.

What I'm left with is some questionable sites I'll take a look at by hand to see if they are spammy....

2017-08-28_0245.png



I'm also going to get rid of sites I know prob. wont make the cut, which are non-mainstream domains that are either non-english or really spammy types, like .info and .xyz, etc... Those are easily found by doing another filter like the below....

2017-08-28_0248.png



This is a good 80/20 method to find bad sites before they waste money most of the time.

Hope it helps!
 
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Hey @eliquid, thanks for a great course! I learned a lot.

I have been doing SEO for a while and have interest in starting with paid traffic. I was thinking about writing an ebook about how to lose weight and pay for FB and/or Google traffic.

However, I am not sure if people actually buy ebooks anymore. I myself have never even considering doing so.

This would be for a small country containing 10 million people, so I wouldn't be competing with US.

What do you think? Would it be a waste trying to sell an ebook? Perhaps buying traffic to a free ebook to collect emails and then sending them affiliate links would be a better idea?

I would appreciate your input. As I don't have any experience in neither ebooks nor paid traffic, I am a bit worried of losing too much time and money.

Thanks in advance!
 
Olov said:
Hey @eliquid, thanks for a great course! I learned a lot.

I have been doing SEO for a while and have interest in starting with paid traffic. I was thinking about writing an ebook about how to lose weight and pay for FB and/or Google traffic.

However, I am not sure if people actually buy ebooks anymore. I myself have never even considering doing so.

This would be for a small country containing 10 million people, so I wouldn't be competing with US.

What do you think? Would it be a waste trying to sell an ebook? Perhaps buying traffic to a free ebook to collect emails and then sending them affiliate links would be a better idea?

I would appreciate your input. As I don't have any experience in neither ebooks nor paid traffic, I am a bit worried of losing too much time and money.

Thanks in advance!
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People do buy ebooks.

I know a guy doing $50k a month in ebooks on Amazon as a self published author.

However, I think pushing an ebook directly on Adwords or FB would eat up a lot of your profit.
 
@eliquid

I want to begin running Adwords/Bing to my search driven site.

I found the value pr. visitor (search) on each page. Page -> Commissions/Visitors.

That gave me 3 pages, where I thought it could be really valuable, where my visitor value was >$1, and where I didn't rank in top 3 for the keywords.

I now have a couple of options.

I could create individual landing pages for these pages. Probably make them similar, but do some other stuff such as remove menulinks / inlinks etc, to keep them on the page.

Or

I could just have them on my normal landing pages and track adgroups/keywords with variables and a php redirect script, where I grab some variable set in Adwords (http://site.com/page?adgroup=example) or something like that. Should allow me to pick up the commission even if they go to a different page and click an affiliate offer.

What do you think about this plan? Is it preferable to use your own organic pages with Adwords (quality score?) or use a specific adwords only landing page.
 
I tend to use a specific LP.

Normally, your regular site LPs have "traffic leaks" meaning people come in and click around to other pages via navigational links.

I like to make my own LPs where I can limit or direct that bouncing around.

Plus it allows me to customize the page per "keyword" I bid on too.
 
Just wanted to bump this to let everyone know...

This was written in 2015 originally. A lot has changed since then.

Not sure if I can do an update, or if I even should, or how I should ( replace, just add here on page 2/3? ).

But please be mindful the ad landscape has changed a lot in the last 7-8 years when I wrote this.
 
eliquid said:
Just wanted to bump this to let everyone know...

This was written in 2015 originally. A lot has changed since then.

Not sure if I can do an update, or if I even should, or how I should ( replace, just add here on page 2/3? ).

But please be mindful the ad landscape has changed a lot in the last 7-8 years when I wrote this.
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You should do it here, please. I would like to learn more updated info. I am so glad this got recommended/linked by ryuzaki otherwise I would have ignored this.
 
eliquid said:
Just wanted to bump this to let everyone know...

This was written in 2015 originally. A lot has changed since then.

Not sure if I can do an update, or if I even should, or how I should ( replace, just add here on page 2/3? ).

But please be mindful the ad landscape has changed a lot in the last 7-8 years when I wrote this.
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Would absolutely love if you did an update to this because i've gotten into some PPC and can't help but feel like I'm just throwing money down the drain every time I try to test out some campaigns/strategies.

Had a google rep give me some help setting up and testing a YouTube pre-roll campaign, but instead of optimizing what eventually started working, she kept "testing" random high-level placements that ate up my budget without any traction

Honestly, even if you just want to ramble off your thoughts in voice I'd be more than happy to transcribe it for the forum. Whatever I can do to help make it easy to get whatever knowledge you're willing to share
 
Politico said:
Would absolutely love if you did an update to this because i've gotten into some PPC and can't help but feel like I'm just throwing money down the drain every time I try to test out some campaigns/strategies.

Had a google rep give me some help setting up and testing a YouTube pre-roll campaign, but instead of optimizing what eventually started working, she kept "testing" random high-level placements that ate up my budget without any traction

Honestly, even if you just want to ramble off your thoughts in voice I'd be more than happy to transcribe it for the forum. Whatever I can do to help make it easy to get whatever knowledge you're willing to share
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I wouldn't trust too much on rep. They are there to increase spend. I won't say all are bad, but most are there without previous experience in advertising. It's good to talk to get some new information.

At least where I worked we never really rely on rep. It was all about what worked for us and what didnt by testing. Usually the most simple targeting worked best. Just my two cents.
 
Biggy said:
Just my two cents.
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I agree - the rep reached out so I said fuck it lets try. They're all about maximizing impressions (i.e. spend - to your point), no attention to what's actually converting, just keep those impressions up.

You could tell they run off a generic script/template. Didn't even tell me to go in daily and exclude placements. If I didn't know any better, I'd have spent all my budget advertising on fuckin kids cartoon channels smh
 
eliquid said:
Just wanted to bump this to let everyone know...

This was written in 2015 originally. A lot has changed since then.

Not sure if I can do an update, or if I even should, or how I should ( replace, just add here on page 2/3? ).

But please be mindful the ad landscape has changed a lot in the last 7-8 years when I wrote this.
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Have your top 3-5 optimization techniques changed much?

Is there something more efficient then the below?
1 - Add more exact keywords (and pause your phrase match) ?
*Check Search console for exact keywords to add
2 - Negatives - add
3 - Ad split test
4 - Maximize conversions setting
5 - Target specific audiences using RLSAs

Are SKAGS/STAGS still the way to go?
 
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