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.

To start things off for the beginners, a simple tip. Facebook charges you for duplicate clicks. You will see that there is a difference between the click numbers that Facebook reports and what you see reported on your affiliate network’s stats screen. Typically the difference is about 10-15%.

To account for this you need to add that 10-15% to your CPC (Cost Per Click) to maintain realistic ROI (Return On Investment) reporting. So for example when bidding 10c on facebook I would put the CPC as 11c into my Prosper202 Tracker. if bidding 20c I would put 22c.