Back again with another update. After meeting many users in person I’m surprised how many of you depend on this daily for managing campaigns! Well I’ve made quite a few changes that should help out a lot.

Most importantly you’ll now be able to resume the script in case it’s stopped or fails. I know the biggest headache has been having to restart scripts all the time, so now you won’t need to. There’s a red start button at the top that will allow you to resume the script. Additionally, the last stop point will be saved to the ad file so that it can be rerun at any time, anywhere.

I’ve also made a big change to the saved files feature. Saved ad files will now be in XML format, which make it much easier to read in case you want to take a look, and this has also fixed several bugs in the process. (Note: you will need to recreate your old campaigns to be compatible with this version. The old campaigns can be read in any text editor)

You’ll now be able to include a radius when city targeting, just check off the checkbox and pick the radius you’d like to use.

Finally, you can now enter colleges when targeting users who are still in college or alumni.

On top of these feature updates there have been a whole host of bug fixes, best of all greatly improving keyword handling. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Cheers

I will be attending the ad:tech show in NYC next week. If anyone is interested to meet up and talk about ideas for the Facebook Ads Manager, Myspace Ads Manager (in development), or any other affiliate tools, send me an email (fbadmanager @ this domain) or follow my new Twitter account @4houraffiliate.

I’ve got a big release ready for y’all today. I’ve added a handful of new features as well as some improvements to make the tool more resilient.

- Remove icon for ad copy and images. Now you can remove unwanted images and ad copy from your setup.

- Image previews. See small icons of your images in the sidebar.

- Variable insertion into the url. Use the same insertion variables as the ad names to customize your urls. eg: url.com/?sub={country}-{gender}-{age}-

- Continue subids. Enter in where you want to start your subids.

For international ads, script files are now encoded to support international character sets (ISO-8859-1). Also, you will now be able to enter in city/state info for other countries - if they are supported, I’ll leave it to you guys to see if Facebook allows this for the country you are targeting.

I’ve also added several measures to make sure the script doesn’t hang or freeze in case of a bad connection or Facebook stubborn-ness.

Give this new version a try and let me know how it goes!

Back at it with another release of FB Ads Manager. This time I’ve added the remaining fields:

- Education. Target different education levels.
- Workplaces. Now you can enter in a list of workplaces to target.
- Birthdays. Target users on their birthdays. (Not sure how people would use this?)

I also fixed a bug related to entering keywords.

I’ve noticed that some people were using the custom ages field incorrectly and it was causing the tool to stop. The format of that field is a list of age ranges, not individual ages.

Right: 20-25, 26-30, 31-35, etc
Wrong: 20, 21, 22, 23, etc

In order to target individual ages, use “All ages in range” and set the lower and upper limits accordingly. Now if the custom age field is in a bad format an error message will pop up (rather than just stopping silently).

Next, now that Facebook has beefed up their interface to quickly do actions on multiple ads, I’ve taken out the ‘change bids’ section of the tool, so now it’s completely focused on ad creation.

I’m excited about this release, as I think it’s the best one yet. I’ve added a few hot features, although the best changes can’t be seen. Some users have complained about instability and quirks here and there that get fuxored while creating ads. I’ve done a little retooling and I think this version is going to be 10x more stable than the last version. Hopefully there will be less cursing now over the dreaded “Error creating ads, please restart the script”. It’s been a real challenge trying to build a reliable tool (hack) on top of an ever-changing platform/interface.

One of the most common requests was the ability to customize ad naming, so I’ve added that. This will work similar to the keyword insertion feature. Add a custom naming string such as:

{country} {gender} ad-{txt} image-{img} {sub}

And each ad will be named accordingly, ie: “Ca M ad-5 image-3 10″.

All the available parameters are listed on the tool, pretty self-explanatory. You can add the sub id to the ad name now which should make it a bit easier to reconcile your stats.

The next most common request was the ability to have custom age ranges, so I’ve added that too. Now you can enter a line like “20-30, 30-40, 40-50” and split test using those age ranges, rather than just the ones I’ve had before. I know I’m personally going to use this alot.

That’s it for now, hopefully that give you guys some more to play with. There still a few more lesser used fields that I’ll get around to adding soon.

I met alot of people at Affiliate Summit East in New York this last weekend that are users of this tool. It’s always nice to hear stories about how much this has helped with your daily work. Like one guy who has his wife help with his online marketing, and after using this tool ended up saving hours every day for her creating ads on Facebook. I have some kickass tools in the works right now that should help out alot on other ad platforms, stick around.

Well Facebook made a change to their UI the other day and completely broke the tool (as I’m sure you’re all aware). I’ve patched that up and added some new features for this next release. It’s been a long time since updating this thing so I figured I might put in something new to play with.

City/State Targeting - I know alot of you guys like to break down your demos by city and state, so here it is. I think this only works with Canada, US, and UK, someone correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll add that in too. Enter a list of cities or states to target, with the option of split testing, where each ad variation will be created targeting each city/state in the list. The ad name format will include the first two letters of the city/state (it does look a little awkward but that’s the best I can do, there’s a limit to how long the ad names can be).

Languages - Now you’ll be able to add in Lanuages. No split testing here as I don’t think it would really be useful here. Pretty simple.

Age/Location Insertion - This one I think is really powerful. Insert the age you are targeting into your header or body using “{age}” or the city/state using “{city}” or “{state}”. Watch your CTR’s go up with this technique. Hint: grab a list of major cities and split test with city insertion for a kickass campaign!!! I’ve heard of Facebook not liking this kind of thing but I see it all the time, great way to get the attention of comatose Facebook users when they’re making fluff friends.

Post any questions/feedback on the forum:

FB Ads Manager Forum - Version 3 Released

Have a happy 4th to all the Americans out there!

I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from everyone since the last version, only three people came to my house personally to slap me in the face, that’s something to celebrate.

The biggest issue by far was that resubmission doesn’t work anymore. As you might have noticed Facebook has selectively stopped letting you copy ads, using the “Create a similar ad” link, depending on which ad it is. Disapproved ads seem to be completely disabled, making it impossible to resubmit ads, manually or using this tool. Thankfully we can save ads here and re-run them anytime, making resubmitting unnecessary. Just delete your rejected campaign, and restart the ad creation process, same deal. Good luck trying to do that by hand.

Here’s the latest changes in this version:

- Grouped header and body together. The old way of split testing header and body didn’t make much sense, since they’re almost always a cohesive whole - mixing and matching different headers with different bodies isn’t the best way of split testing ad copy. Here’s what it looks like now:

- Changed the ad titles. Much more descriptive now, you should know exactly what ad you’re looking at without having to click through to the full screen ad.

- Bug fixes related to copying ads, stopping ads, etc.

That’s it for now, if anyone has any suggestions how to improve the tool, send me an email to fbadmanager aatttt 4houraffiliate.com

This post is for anyone in the AM game who’s thinking of a game plan for the future. Sure, you might be making lots of cheddar pushing Sham-Wow or Acai pills, but it’s not going to last forever. Do you have a long term plan to keep your business going? What’s your competitive advantage over anyone else? Selling other companies products online is fickle and is dependant on quite a few factors and entities. Any number of people can throw a wrench into the gears of your money-making machine, whether it’s a traffic source, advertiser, or another competitor.

What are your options? Here are some to think about:

- Develop your own product. Pick a niche that you’ve had success with promoting and that you’re interested in. Find out who your customers are; their demographics, where to go online, what ads they respond to, what they are missing in the marketplace now etc. Affiliate marketing gives a huge head start to new product development, you’ve already mastered several phases of the lifecycle. And you probably already have a nice stash of capital to launch. If you think you’re earning alot selling a couple hundred bottles of pills a day on your network, think how much your merchant is pulling in.

- White label: buy direct from the manufacturer. Go to a site such as Trade Key and find an exporter of the product you want to sell. Then it is your job to handle the marketing and sales. Here you can get creative, eg. marketing ginko powder as “Power Drive, the performance enhancing supplement”. You will not have as much flexibility to create the exact product your market will want, but you have much more freedom than trying to promote a similar product on an affiliate network.

- Start an ads consultancy shop. Here you will continue to advertise for other companies, but scale this far beyond a single man/woman operation. Automate processes as much as possible through outsourcing, software, and hired guns, and partner with other internet marketers to take on as many projects as possible.

All these options solve the critical problem of building a reputation and base of customers that is missing from the work of affiliate marketing. Give me a shout at Affiliate Summit West if you have any good ideas.

In this post I’ll show in detail how to install and use the features of Facebook Ads Manager. Installation is easy, just open the xpi and agree to install the extension.

To open the extension go to View > Sidebar > FB Ads Manager.

The extension will open in a sidebar with tabs for the two main functions: creating new ads, and managing existing ads.

** Creating New Ads **

The Create tabs shows a form that can be used to create multiple ads with split testing features. Ad copy, headers, images, and targeting can all be split tested by just checking an option.

To start off, there are 3 ways to create a new ad: in a new campaign, in an existing campaign, or by copying an existing ad. If you are starting a new campaign enter the campaign name and budget as you would on Facebook. If you want to create ads in an existing campaign, enter the exact name of the campaign you want to create the ads in.

You might want to pick the copy ad option if you want to take advantage of Facebook’s automatic approval (which doesn’t always work, you’ll have to try it out). To do this, enter the “Create a Similar Ad” link that shows up on Facebook.

Next enter the destination URL. This is a bit tricky, and works different from Facebook since this URL will be used to several ads. The way Ads Manager works is that for each ad created, a number is appended to the end of the URL, from 1 up to the total number of ads. For example, if your split testing 10 ads, and you enter “trackingyyz.com/?sub=” as your URL, the first ad will have a URL:

http://trackingyyz.com/?sub=1,

The 2nd ad will have URL:
http://trackingyyz.com/?sub=2,

Etc, etc.

This allows for tracking performance of each ad. You must enter a URL with a GET parameter at the end (ie “facebook.com” will not work).

Next up is the ad copy and images. Here is where to start split testing variations, and this is where the real power of the tool comes in. Let’s say you’re starting a new campaign and you want to split test images first, and keep the rest the same across all ads. Then you would keep all other split test options unchecked, and the split test images option checked, with a number of images entered. If you enter 5 images, 5 new ads will be created.

Now if you want to split test BOTH images and headers, 5 headers and 5 images, Ads Manager will create 5 X 5 = 25 ads. This will test each combination of image and header text. If you add gender split testing, there would be 5 X 5 X 2 (male and female) = 50 ads created. As you can see, this can grow pretty fast, so I’d recommend only split testing one or two variables at a time.

Here’s an example ad setup:

Finally, enter your targeting. Here you can split test by gender and age. Gender is pretty simple, but age targeting has a few useful options. If you don’t want to split test ages, leave the checkbox unchecked and just enter the lower and upper age range as you would on Facebook. To split test ages, check the checkbox and pick one of the split options.

All Ages In Range: Will create an ad targeted to each age in the range, eg. if you enter 20-24, there will be one ad targeted to 20 year olds, another ad targeted to 21 year olds, etc in total 5 ads.
Adult Split: Will create ads for those age groups. This is nice to quickly set up ads to different age ranges.
Teen Split: Similar to Adult Split, targets teens.

The rest of the options are the same as Facebooks own interface. Before running, make sure you are logged into Facebook in Firefox. Click the Run button and watch it go. If you made a mistake, the Stop button will stop the script from running.

Just a word of warning: go easy with this, if you create too many ads they will suspect you are using automation and may disable your account. I am not responsible if this happens, use this at your own risk. I have been using this tool for a while with no problems, just don’t be an idiot and blast them with thousands of ads! I’d say 1-50 is a good safe amount.

Another useful feature is Save/Open. You can save your ad configurations to a file and load them up anytime. You might even build into your workflow starting from different templates rather than starting from scratch My ads have gotten a hell of a lot better since using this tool since it encourages more split testing.

Targeting right now is missing a lot of Facebook’s features, in future versions I plan to add support for state/city targeting as well as keywords.

** Managing Ads **

With the manage ads tab, you can automatically resubmit ads or set bids for each campaign. This will save everyone a huge amount of time resubmitting ads that will end up going through anyway. I’m sure Facebook wouldn’t be happy about this, but until their fix their bunk approval process, you gotta do what it takes.

To use the resubmit feature, make sure when you open the sidebar your current tab is open to the main Facebook ads screen (http://www.facebook.com/ads/manage). If you don’t see your campaign names in the list, close the sidebar, open the above URL, and open the sidebar again. Now just select the campaigns you want to resubmit, and click the “Resubmit Ads” button. This will go through all the ads in the selected campaigns, and resubmit them, with the same bid amount and ad name.

Likewise, to change bids, select your campaigns, enter the bid amount, and hit “Change Bids”. All running or paused ads in those campaigns will have their bids changed.

Leave a comment here with any questions or suggestions for future versions. Enjoy.

Anyone sign up for freecreditreport.com and get burned by their free trial? I almost did.. it took 10 minutes on the phone on hold and listening to sales tactics from the nice saleslady before finally having my account cancelled.

You’d think after that hassle I wouldn’t go and try to make them even more money, well you’d be wrong. They happen to have a pretty sweet affiliate offer, and to do well in the affiliate game alot of the time you have to bend your principles a bit.

Here’s how I did today. Note this is strictly using Facebook ads.

With more work, I’m sure some of you can make this more profitable. My ROI is around 30-40%. Anyone with a better understanding of credit offers and their demographics I’m sure can blast this one out of the water. Here’s a hint: use the annoying singing dork in their TV ads as your creative, for some reason people like him. Sign up on Neverblue if you haven’t already and start running this one.