Speaker 1: Hey everyone, Jason Aketiff here at A4D. Welcome to this brief video webinar, whatever you want to call it, called Facebook Ad Campaign Planning. As some of you know and probably were waiting for, I put this spreadsheet out a few days ago that came out of our media buying department. It's specifically built to figure out what CTRs are needed in order for a campaign to be successful on Facebook based on known conversion rates and CPAs or projected conversion rates and CPAs. This whole video and all this strategy is based on us moving from a reactive and kind of gut-level company to much more of a proactive and planning-based company. And everything we do here, we make sure that it makes mathematical sense before we actually start doing that thing. So essentially down here it says moving from throwing stuff against the wall and seeing if it'll stick to planning for success with each and every campaign we invest in, both time, resources, and money. In this brief video, what you're going to learn is what's important about planning a broad match campaign in Facebook, what CTRs on ads you'll need in order to potentially make campaigns successful, how to use your spreadsheet for that, and future plans for the media buying spreadsheet. As far as me, I've been a CEO of A4D since 2008. We've been through a lot of tumultuous times, ups and downs, and ran many, many campaigns. Currently we're 40 staffers here in San Diego, another 10 over in Krakow, Poland. We primarily focus on running CPA affiliate campaigns, both with third parties that being affiliates and ad networks as well as by media internally here ourselves. We also do a lot of product building, SaaS platforms, and things like that as well. Myself, I started as an affiliate back in 2003, and in 2003 I got started in this business doing some Black Hat SEO and then moved over into media buying and then into the network business, as I said, in 2008. Total done about a quarter billion dollars in commissions, that is through the network, through my own affiliate efforts, that is through our own offers, so on and so forth. We worked in roughly over 100 plus verticals, understanding how they work and how they monetize and how you can make them profitable. About a year and a half ago we decided to develop out a media buying department here at A4D. It started with a single person and we built it up from there. It had no systems, no processes, no management, nothing. We literally hired a single person in named Tom, and Tom came in and started doing some stuff in the media buying department. I immediately threw two other people underneath him in order to build a department out. Tom eventually left and now we have four people currently in that department, and it's running really, really well for us, which makes me super excited. On here, what it's basically breaking out is this is our full campaign rollout strategy or process. I think it's really important for anything that you do and your affiliate business that you think through what is my strategy or what is my process in order to make a new campaign successful. The first thing that we look at typically is what offers are out there. There's thousands of them, and we have an offer selection process that we rate whether it's good, whether it's scalable, whether the merchant's workable. There's many, many different deal points that make for a good offer for us. There's traffic source selection, where do we want to run this thing based on traffic source compliance, what they allow, things of that nature. Then from once we've figured that out, then we build some kind of a forecast out of what we think this campaign would be capable to do in best case scenario and worst case scenario, and then we do some media planning that is building out personas and then building the targeting around those personas. We dedicate budgets for testing and how we're going to roll that stuff out, and then once it looks like it's doing pretty well, how do we optimize it and iterate that process? And then once we've got something that's working really well, how do we scale it across traffic sources or across campaigns? We have just one other interesting thing inside of the department. We have our SOPs, our standing operating procedures for hiring jobs, what the titles are, what the hiring process, onboarding process, training process, all this kind of stuff for new recruits into our media buying department. So we don't typically go find somebody that already knows how to do media buying. We like to go get smart people that are good at problem solving, are very comfortable with numbers and math, and you can talk to me a little bit more about how we identify who we think is a great media buyer if you ever want to, just ping me on Skype or Facebook. Now the old way we used to run campaigns, and actually back when I was an affiliate, this is kind of how I ran campaigns, I would be like, affiliate manager, what should I run? Or I would ask some of my friends, or I would look at what was running out there, and I'd be like, oh, this seems like it might work. And then at that point I'm like, let me come up with some ads, or let me copy somebody else's ads, and I'm just going to throw it up and see if it works. And if it didn't work, I wasn't always sure why it didn't work. I just knew it didn't work, so I kept testing more stuff, but I didn't really have a formula to follow or a roadmap to follow once I rolled out a new campaign. And I wasn't sure how to fix the problems, I just knew the campaign wasn't working. I hear this a lot of times with affiliates where they come to us and they put up a campaign and they run it, and they just go, it's just not working. And the question is always, what specifically is not working about it? And that's what this does, is it helps you think about things in terms of a model. So where do we turn the knobs? Where do we adjust the levers in order to make this campaign successful? The new way is we still choose our campaigns on gut feeling or others' feedback. We calculate our chances of success based on a few numbers that we can gather. So essentially we'll gather the CPA or the lifetime value of the user, if it's a product we own, or what the lead values are, or all that kind of stuff. We'll then guesstimate a conversion rate or figure out a conversion rate based about what we've seen or heard in the marketplace. And then from there, our projections worksheet is going to give us feedback on what we would need to accomplish, and specifically in this case, on Facebook, what we would need to accomplish in order to make this campaign profitable. And then we decide if that's possible. Does it make sense? Just because something could potentially be profitable in the very best case scenario, does that make sense that that's the thing that we should work on? Then we build our campaigns, we run data, and then we look at our projections that we originally made, and we decide how close are we to where we made our projections, and where are things off? Is the conversion rate right? We obviously know the CPA, that's going to be fixed. So is the CTRs on the ads low? Do we need to fix those things? And so on and so forth. We build these projections out and we make these decisions of how we think things should go long before we actually deploy the campaign. And then if it isn't working, you take a look at those things and then you decide, okay, here's where I'm going to focus all my effort in order to make this thing successful. So I'm going to take us over to this Excel worksheet. So this is our Excel worksheet that I built up. I just made this yesterday. I actually did another iteration today and added an LP CTR or landing page CTR. This is with you're running an advertorial or if you're running a splash page or anything else like that, you can enter that data into this box here. But to start, we're going to start out with just assuming there's no landing page, we're running direct traffic from Facebook to our offer. And we break this thing down. So this is our CPA of what our offer pays. If we look at something like refinance, it's going to pay $40, $45. We'll do $40 just to make it a little lower and see what our chances are here. These things are three different ad placements inside of Facebook. You can see what they stand for over here. This is desktop newsfeed. This is mobile newsfeed. And this is right-hand side. And what this gives us is I set different conversion rates for these different types of ad units. Typically mobile on certain things is going to convert a lot less. Typically desktop on e-commerce is going to convert more and so on and so forth. So if we just take this here and we go conversion rate for our desktop newsfeed. So let's say direct linked. Our conversion rate is 1.5 and that gives us a 60 cent EPC. That means for every user that we send to that website, based on those assumptions, that user is worth 60 cents. So now you're going to see this 60 cents carry over to our desktop newsfeed section. And that 60 cents is going to show in here. Now, these units here are all fixed and were populated by us based on our internal media buying numbers that we're working with here and what we're seeing based on CTRs and CPCs. So as you can see, if you have zero to 1% on the desktop newsfeed, that is a $2 click cost to you. That's what Facebook roughly is going to charge you. 1% to 2% is going to be $1.50 and so on and so forth. So these are all the click costs based on what those CTRs or what those click through rates on those desktop newsfeed ads are. And then this does a calculation of how much money in this projection that you are going to make per click. So what we can see here is these top ones are red, essentially that means you're going to lose money. You see the negative sign here. And then on these ones here, we'd actually be profitable. So what this is telling us is if we're going to run some desktop newsfeed ads, what we need to do is get better than a 6% or I'm sorry, better than a 3% click through rate on our desktop ads in order to make those campaigns profitable. And I asked my team today, what were these CTRs based on? Are these clicks to website or are these just general CTR? They said these are general CTR as reported by Facebook, not clicks to website, which is a different CTR that's just based on what these metrics are. You can say the same thing here. So if you go to mobile newsfeed, let's say we convert at 0.75% on mobile newsfeed, oops, that didn't work right, 0.75, or we'll go 0.0075, yeah, that's what we wanted. Just rounded it up to eight, but it's actually 0.75 in there. So we can see here, same thing, desktop, or I'm sorry, mobile newsfeed. You'll notice here, by the way, mobile clicks are quite a bit cheaper actually for the same kind of CTRs where you'd be paying $2 on desktop, you'd be paying $1.20 on mobile. So if we put our 0.8 because we convert worse on mobile, what we'll find out is we need roughly a similar CTR. And again, the same thing is going to work here with the right-hand side ads. You can populate that and whatnot. So now let's do this. Say we want to run a landing page in here, and we think we can get a 20% click-through rate on our landing page. And from the landing page to the offer, now that increased our conversion rate 5%. They read an article on our product, they think it's a great product, they click through to actually sign up. This typically is going, good sales copy in your landing page or good sales copy in your article is going to drive up the conversion rate on the actual offer. So we've got only 20% of the people make it through the landing page, but let's say that helps us increase our conversion rate to 5%. And what you can see here is that updates all this information based on this. This doesn't actually update to take into account the LPCTR, but this one does. And so you can see here our overall click from Facebook to our offer or our EPC, or I should say our click from Facebook to our conversion rate taking into account the CPA and the click-through rate on the landing page is roughly 40 cents. So again, you can see here we need basically the same amount of CTR on those desktop newsfeed ads in order to make that successful. So you can play with this thing. I'm going to go back over to PowerPoint here. You can play with this. And what to do next, I'm going to put this spreadsheet up on oooff.com, that is my blog. I'll make a post up there that I'm going to post this webinar. There'll also be a link to this spreadsheet. Over time, I'll update the bid prices. I'd like to add some other traffic source, that being Taboola, Gemini, maybe some Google Display Network, so you guys can do these same kind of calculations to see if a campaign is going to be successful or not. So if you would, download that spreadsheet, start plugging in some numbers. What I like to do is go based off of some old campaigns that were successful, that weren't successful, and go look at all that data that you have from past campaigns and see, hey, you know what? If I got a CTR of this and I was only getting a .5 CTR on newsfeed and I was paying way too much for a click, if I could get a CTR up to 3%, then I could be profitable. Now that tells you where you really need to focus your attention. It's not finding new offers. It's not finding new traffic sources. It's not bouncing around from here to there. It's really understanding how do you get a high CTR on your offer, or I should say on Facebook, and drive down those click costs in order to make your campaign profitable. Once you've done some of that stuff, feel free to reach out to your affiliate manager if you don't know how to get a higher CTR, and I'm sure they'll have some ideas and some data that they could share with you on what other affiliates are doing. I know ours do here at A4D. The last thing I'd say is join our performance network at A4D. We're always happy to have new affiliates and be working with new people. If you want to get accepted at A4D, people ask me this a lot of times, just have a plan where you want to be in the next 30 days, 60 days, six months, and a one-year goal. What do you want to create? What do you want to build? What are you willing to dedicate? Where do you want to go? If you've been running traffic previously, make sure you have your data handy on your past campaigns, what's worked for you, what hasn't, what verticals, what traffic sources, all that kind of stuff. We only really want to work with people dedicated to the business. We're essentially coaches, our affiliate managers here, so we spend a lot of time and we invest a lot of time with our affiliates. And honestly, that time costs A4D money. We really only want to work with serious, dedicated people because A4D only makes money when you're successful. If you come here and run a campaign and run $500 in revenue, that might make us $50 and that is not worth the time to invest. You being successful and running a campaign that does millions of dollars a year, which a lot of our affiliates do, that's definitely worth it to us. The last thing here is really think of A4D as a business partner. I feel like in a lot of other affiliate networks out there, there's this combative thing where the affiliate doesn't want to share their information because they're afraid the affiliate manager is going to steal their stuff and so on and so forth. If that's your mindset and that's the place where you want to come from, this probably isn't the place for you. We really think of ourselves as your business partner to success in this business and we really want to partner with you to understand what's going to make you successful and how we can make that happen and how we can help you overcome those hurdles in order to get to the next level. That was our last slide. Again, thank you for watching this. If you have any questions, you can always find me on Facebook or you can leave a comment on my blog or you can find me on Twitter. Just really quickly, I'll write those things down so you can see them. Let's see here. New slide. My Twitter is going to be smack soar. My blog is oooff.com. We own a4d.com. If you want to learn how to do media buying and learn this stuff like a responsive muscle, I own a video game called StartupAlley.com that teaches all the basics of media buying, how to build good ads, how to build ads that perform well. Feel free to check out StartupAlley.com. Until next time, thank you for attending and I hope you have a great day and great campaigns.