Reducing your CPC
I've mentioned several time throughout this guide that the basis for determining your starting CPC is absolutely ridiculous. If I was promoting "shrunken midget heads" I would need to start off my ads at $0.35 the same as I would for "DUI lawyer". Ridiculous no? Well if you try starting it off at $0.05 you just won't get any impressions.
So how do you get your CPC to go down? You have to improve your CTR. That's the same basic logic as with any other CPC program. The only problem is that your ad is still being displayed to hundreds of thousands of people who are not actively looking for what you're advertising, they just have it listed as an interest.
The key is to target very small niches. I mentioned in the "testing and tracking" section that you should experiment with different demographics to see what brings the best conversion, well let me emphasize the point again because it will also be crucial to improving your CTR and in turn lowering your CPC.
In the end it all comes down to testing, whether it's targeting a smaller market or creating a more eye catching graphic.
After a few days, you should lower your bid amount by $0.05 and gauge how it affects your impressions. If you see that your impressions drop dramatically then bring them back up $0.01-$0.02. Do this gradually over the next week and within two weeks depending on what niche you're catering to you can easily have your bids as low as $0.05.
Getting your ad approved
There's a lot of debate regarding whether or not Facebook actually reviews every single ad manually. It's more likely that they have filters in place which makes it much easier to get away with some slight deviation from the guidelines. There is one factor that will trigger a manual review and that's if you're advertising to people under 18. If your ad is borderline do not advertise to people less than 18 years old. This will result in a flag on your account, and if it happens again your account may be suspended.
Landing page or direct linking
I've played with the two a lot, and from my experience landing pages are not effective with lead campaigns. Your purpose is to get your visitor to enter their personal information to get something free. There's no need to pre-sell them, they clicked on your ad because they want that "free trial" or they're interested in "applying for a credit card". Take advantage of Facebook's loose policy on affiliate links because it may not be long that they're going to enforce it.
Type of campaigns
While I'm not going to reveal the details of every lead campaign I'm running on Facebook I'll give you an idea of what I found converts extremely well:
- Contests. It doesn't even matter what the prize is, if you tell people they can enter a contest to win something just by entering their e-mails they won't hesitate for a second. The payouts are generally small, around $1.00-$1.50 per lead but if you're getting a 100 leads per day at $0.05/click you're looking at a $95 profit.
- Free games. You'll see these often especially on Neverblue Ads. They payout can be as much as $2.50 just for the user downloading a game.
- Columbia House. As of writing this they were no longer associated with any of the affiliate networks, but I'm positive they'll come back soon. Their offer was $25 per subscription. With their new policy that the user only needs to buy 3 dvd within a 2 year period, it was an easy sell.
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