Struggling with Facebook Ads?

Tired of seeing CPC bids at $1.30 +?

Well Facebook is ALWAYS changing in the way they run their platform and they’ve changed once again. Except this time, it may actually be for the better and get you those cheap clicks you’ve been looking for since the Facebook Flyer days.

Now you can see one of the ways Facebook decides to rank the so-called quality score of your ads by revealing your “Social CTR %.”  I’m sure most of you have heard about this if you follow their notes.

Here’s a paraphrase on how this newest implementation works:

This report will include columns for (1) social impressions: ad impressions that include social endorsements, (2) social clicks: clicks on ads that originated from an ad with social endorsements (e.g. a social impression), (3) social %: percentage of total ad impressions with social endorsements, and (4) social CTR: social clicks divided by social impressions.

As an example, here’s a screenshot of a campaign I’ve been running on Facebook and its social stats:

As you can see, varying ad copies have varying social percentages, although some of that may be due to the difference in total impressions.

Still, it helps to know which ads are being liked by users and in effect resulting in cheaper clicks. I’ve seen that ads with a higher social CTR still produce steady cheap clicks even though their overall CTR may be decreasing as opposed to an ad with a lower social CTR being more susceptible to a decreasing overall CTR.

You can use this by making sure your ads are socially relevant. Remember, Facebook users aren’t looking for something when their online, they are just trying to be social. If you can use that idea of “being social” as a gateway to your affiliate offers, you can get dirt cheap clicks and profit. As something to reference, here’s a list of top facebook keywords from dk’s blog. It’s not even about interrupting anymore. It’s more about engaging the user on Facebook with what their already engaged with. Do that and profit.

The following is purely my opinion and my experience of/with Tatto Media. None of it should be construed as a statement of fact:

I’ve been working with Tatto since the beginning of August. You know the network promising to give away a Lamborghini Gallardo?

You know why that makes me laugh? It’s because of the fact that in the past two months they haven’t been able to make me a single payment on time. It’s because they’ve promised such rewards as your beloved Lamborghini when in fact they haven’t been able to send me $100 Best Buy Gift Card and a $250 GameStop Gift Card – both of which I have earned through their 5-Year Anniversary contest ( See here -  just don’t get starry eyed at the hope of a lambo or any other prize). Instead they sent me a $50 iTunes gift card. Why not just call it the 5-Year Tatto – You’re Never Gonna Get Paid Because We’re Broke Funeral Ceremony?

Time after time I’ve been promised on-time payment. I’ve been given a multitude of excuses the first one being “oh we like to get paid out by the advertiser before paying out for our new affiliates” to “I’m having communication problems with out accounting department” – a common one I’ve received by my AM Mike Cataldo. As others have made pretty obvious to me – how can you have communication problems when you work in the same building??

But I’m not the only one having problems with Tatto. Take a look at this thread on WickedFire – Tatto Media Disappeared?

I’ve had many affiliates come to me and tell me they’re having the same problem and haven’t heard from the managers in months and have been given the same bullshit excuses. I’m still owed $xx,xxx by this network and I think enough is enough.

Tatto Media needs to stop f***ing around and come clean. Pay your affiliates and stop feeding them bullshit.

Here’s an AIM conversation I had with one of the partners at Tatto. I’ve hidden their sn to protect their privacy. In my opinion, it’s pretty apparent that Tatto is broke from this conversation.

Tatto (8:07:11 PM): sorry bro

Tatto (8:07:14 PM): i know its frustrating

Tatto (8:07:22 PM): keep on us

romastaflex (8:07:22 PM): i’m curious..why can’t you guys float?

Tatto (8:07:23 PM): talk to MC

Tatto (8:07:30 PM): we’ll …

Tatto (8:07:34 PM): between you and me

Tatto (8:07:41 PM): we are a direct advertiser

Tatto (8:07:49 PM): and our game is float

Tatto (8:07:55 PM): we do PSMS ringtones

Tatto (8:07:59 PM): 6 figures daily

Tatto (8:08:03 PM): we own the back end

Tatto (8:08:08 PM): we branded as a hybrid network/advertiser

Tatto (8:08:11 PM): lots of success

romastaflex (8:08:12 PM): i see

Tatto (8:08:17 PM): too little support

Tatto (8:08:21 PM): we thought..

Tatto (8:08:33 PM): we have so many affiliates and direct advertiser relationships thru CPM buys we use to do

Tatto (8:08:36 PM): lets pop in offers 95/5 …

Tatto (8:08:39 PM): build a huge business…

Tatto (8:08:43 PM): so far so good on the network side..

Tatto (8:08:45 PM): problem…

Tatto (8:08:48 PM): we got GREEDY

Tatto (8:08:53 PM): and we let ANYONE in

romastaflex (8:09:01 PM): ah

Tatto (8:09:05 PM): example we did $1,000,000 with evony

Tatto (8:09:11 PM): $85,000 was Fraud

Tatto (8:09:16 PM): …

romastaflex (8:09:17 PM): wow

——

So there you go. Make what you will of that. All I can offer to any other affiliates who are looking to run traffic to Tatto Media in hopes of a shiny new (read: 80k) lambo is that you’ve been warned.

Update: Surprise, surprise following this blog post they finally paid me after 4 weeks of screwing around and making false promises. This after threatening me that if I continued to ask about my money they would seek counsel. lolz. And they’re insisting I need to send back the $100 iTunes gift cards they sent me before they (hopefully) send out the correct rewards. After all that trouble, now I need to go to the post office. Lame.

It’s almost been a year now since I left to Istanbul to study abroad for a semester, followed by a whole bunch of travelling right before coming back the the U.S.

It’s crazy how time flies. Now that I’m done with my undergrad (which I used to think would take soo long to get over with – and now truth be told I kind of miss college), I’m starting to get the itch to start travelling again. I’ve been at home all summer long and while it’s been nice to be at home, I’m wondering what the future will bring. It seems almost every month I’m changing my mind as to what city I want to move to and rent an apartment out in – from Chicago to Miami to NYC. I guess time will tell as I still want to cover my bases before I plan a full fledged move.

I guess that begs the question of why I want to move. Well, I think that travelling and exploring different cities is one of those things we can and should do while it makes sense when we’re young and especially as young entrepreneurs to broaden our horizons. I’ve always kind of been inspired by Josh Wex’s “model” of being an affiliate as he describes on The Affiliate Lifestyle Blog and more recently in his article in FeedFront magazine of grinding it out for a few months and using that income to travel while maintaining campaigns. I’ve also gathered inspiration from Chris Guillebeau’s blog The Art of Non-Conformity and who is also releasing a book by the same name today on Amazon on sale for a whopping ten bucks.

Another reason is that I’ve also never truly been completely on my own even though I lived on my own in college – I was still surrounded by friends and close to home. So that’s something that I think I need to do in order to grow and learn to be content in my own.

Until then, I’m gonna keep grinding and see where things go. I’ll either end up travelling solo around the rest of the world, or checking out different cities in the U.S. and settle in my own place somewhere. Or both. Nonetheless, here are some pictures from my travels abroad last year that  I never posted if you want to check them out. Know a place I should check out? Post it in the comments!

Rome

Florence

Istanbul

Where to next??

It’s hard to believe that the summer is over already and that it’s SEPTEMBER. Crazy.

That means there are only four months left in 2010 and the busy holiday season is coming up. Time to start grindin if you haven’t already because there’s  a lot of money to still be made with people heading back to school and coming off of “vacation mode.”

Wanted to do an update post, however, about August and list my goals for next month.

It was an interesting month to say the least. Here’s the snapshot:

* I couldn’t show this as August earnings, due to it being September now, but it’s all from last month. And:

Traffic was split between another network. So that equals total revenue of $37, 778.90. Total spend for Aug. was:

So that’s a profit of $18,508.69. The interesting thing is that I only ran traffic this month for about 13 days total- about the first eight days of the month and five days at the end of the month. The reason for that is I was promised weeklies by the network I was working with and it’s the first time I’d really done any sort of volume with them.

I got pretty freaked out when my payment kept getting delayed so I paused all my traffic until I finally got paid 3 weeks after when I first started my campaign. I was almost scared I wasn’t going to get paid. So I was paused for more than two weeks and the crazy thing is before my first payment from the network was due I ran enough traffic to hit my credit limit on all my cards and so decided  to delve into my checking account to keep running traffic. Not the smartest idea looking back now I know. I even went into overdraft a few times in anticipation of payment. It’s a good thing I finally got paid by the network, but it was not an easy two weeks going without any cash in my pocket, which was right before ASE. I’m working with the network again now as they’ve promised to make payments on time now, but hedging my risk by splitting my traffic with multiple networks.

So I hit my best month ever and some of my best days ever with some $3,000+ profit days.

For this month, I want to continue to scale and I strongly believe I will hit my first $50,000 profit month in September. I’m looking forward to trying out new advertising platforms.

The only thing I regret about this month is that I put in so much time and credit towards scaling this campaign out, that I didn’t get to win a new iPad from Convert2Media for pushing $5,000 of revenue in my first month =(  Would’ve been really cool to win one, but oh well.

One more thing – I’m sure by now you’ve probably heard about the floods in Pakistan. I’ve been trying to help raise some money for helping the victims of the foods and it’s surprisingly harder than I thought after posting about it on Facebook and Twitter. The floods have barely been getting any media attention and disease is spreading fast. If you’d like to help, please donate through my page: Help the Pakistan Flood Victims . That country has been dealing with a whole lot of shit, and as much as I hate the kind of morally corrupt behavior that I see from the country of my origin, it’s not all the people and they still need help. I’ve only donated a little so far, but I’m hoping to match all donations. Thanks everybody.