The Micro Affiliate

Well, this was news to me, but it certainly explains a few things. There was some discussion on WickedFire about whether Facebook is killing dating campaigns, for one reason or another, recently. The theory seemed unrealistic to me, if for no other reason than that an automated system would have to be pretty damn advanced not to catch non-dating ads in the net and this would be ridiculous to imprement through manual review – why not just disapprove the ads on submission if they dont like the dating niche so much?

Turns out they are limiting impressions to ANY ads that are similar to other ads being shown, for the same reason that they limit your one same ad being shown to the same user too many times. Here’s a response from Facebook when someone from Affiliit.com asked them whether they ‘throttle’ dating ads. The response was posted on the Affiliit forums:

” In an effort to preserve a good user experience, our system monitors the number of times any given user sees a specific ad. If there is another ad that is the same or similar to that ad, our system takes that similarity into account. This similarity tracking can happen at any level (is independent of campaign or account). If the user things it’s the same when s/he sees it, then the system attempts to limit the ad(s)’ frequency.

What this means in your case is that your ads are probably not different enough from other, similar ads that your audience is seeing, or not different enough from ones that they have seen and found irrelevant or unpleasant. One reason the payout on certain dating offers is so high is that it’s difficult to drive traffic to them.

I recommend differentiating yourself in your current space (different offers, different text, different images, etc.), or changing spaces (e.g. Expanding internationally). If neither of these is possible, you will have to bid more to get the impressions, and therefore CTR that you need.”

On a side note, seems the facebook review doesn’t understand what CTR means, judging but his use of the term in the last sentence.

Affilliit.com, btw, is a new-ish Affiliate Marketing Training Program. I’ve just started having a bit of a look around, I’ll probably post a review at some point. I know the guys that started it back from my PPC Coach days and one of them gave me an account to check out what they’ve built over there and so far I’m impressed. They cover areas including PPC, SEO, Social Media and PPV, but their SEO is their strongest area and they have a huge range of SEO tools, reflecting that. Anyway, I’ll save the rest for a review some time.