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.

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.

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