11/6/2011
So, it has been a few days since I've updated, and that's because I've been hard at work! I'm ecstatic to say that I've officially started "profiting" to a certain degree! Things haven't exactly been going "according to plan" though, and I'll explain on a day-by-day basis.
Day 1:
25 dollars profit.
Numbers were great on this day. Higher epc's than I had ever seen with this offer, and it was converting at a pretty great percentage. At the rate I was going, I was expecting around a 100 dollar profit for the day. This was despite prosper not tracking conversions at all, and I found out I needed SSL installed on my domain to get pixel tracking working properly... so.. things took longer than I planned to get that up and going and I had to pause. Still, it was my first profitable day ever, and 25 dollars was a big deal (to me.)
Day 2:
7 dollars profit.
The issue that hurt me most on Day 2 was that Day 1 gave me EXCELLENT conversions, but my CTR on the ads took a hit. As in, people were less likely to click, but if they did, it was more likely to convert. On Day 2, I suffered because my click costs were higher than Day 1, and oppositely, people were more likely to click, and less likely to convert. Numbers were greatly varied by hour, and as a result I saw disappointing epcs throughout the day. I believe I started running at bad hours, and I think I have a better idea of which hours "work" for this traffic on Day 2. The good thing about this day was that with all the clicking people were doing, my CTRs went back up to comfortable levels.
Day 3
Broke even
Disappointing day overall, but I won't let that stop me. My biggest lesson this day was running it at an apparently "bad" hour, as there were PLENTY of clicks with ZERO conversions. I was in the negatives for a while, but once I ran it at a different hour, I came back and got to "break even" levels. Lesson learned.
Goals:
Right now, I feel like I'll go into next week with a much better idea on which hours are "profitable" for me to run ads. I also need to work on optimizing ads. Right now, my average CPC is 9 cents, and while that's enough to be profitable if I'm working the proper hours, but I'm sure it can get much better. This international country gives me a total demographic of 650k, and while that's not too many people, its big enough to where I feel like if I were "properly" doing this, I'd be able to get way more than 20 dollars out of it a day.
So, in list form, goals for this week:
- Optimization of the ads I'm already running. Try out editing the images differently to make them more eye-catching, etc
- Optimization of my "running hours." I have a better idea of what hours are going to give me the best return.
- Putting up more campaigns. Now that I know at a very basic level how Facebook "works", I'm planning on putting up at least 1 campaign a day. I've got 15 or 16 campaigns that I want to work on at the moment, and even if I were making 20/day from each of those campaigns, that alone is pretty decent money. The thing is, though.. I feel like 20/day per campaign is CHUMP CHANGE and I'm clearly not milking the campaign to anywhere near its full potential. I really really really need to work on squeezing out every single cent.
If anyone has any suggestions/advice, I'd really appreciate it! As always, contact me on skype @ georgek8911. Please include a note in your request so I know you're from wickedfire and not some spam-bot. Thanks everyone!
I think I'm getting closer and closer to cracking Facebook. It's tough.