So in yesterday’s post about cloaking to facebook interns I mentioned that one way to mitigate against the new review process is to check the IP of the interns and store for future use. To help you get started, I went ahead and grep’ed some of my old logs and built up a list of review IP addresses.

You can view the full log file with the corresponding dates and referrer urls at intern.csv and the unique ips to be used for the cloaking script at intern.log. I plan on adding to this list in the future and hopefully get a nice comprehensive list of facebook ips.

On a side note, for those looking to get started with facebook ads, Neil over at Neilsweb has posted a nice collection of free facebook coupons to get over $100 in free clicks.

So the Facebook interns finally got wise to the old method of cloaking and have begun testing the ads both with and without the traditional intern referral url. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen the following requests occurring sequentially:

[offer url], 76.102.66.165, 09:48PM, 2008-07-01, http://harvard.intern.facebook.com/intern/ads/review.php
[offer url], 76.102.66.165, 09:48PM, 2008-07-01,

So it looks like the interns are checking to see if people are cloaking against the common intern.facebook.com style referrals. One easy way to mitigate this is to just log the ip of the interns on their first visit and compare against that for future requests. Not foolproof, but should work pretty well for the time being. The code to accomplish this can be found here.

Nothing groundshattering, but for anyone that needs a quick php script to plugin to existing systems, this should work for you. Additionally, if anyone wants to share the lists of intern ip addresses that they build up, feel free to post in the comments

Hmmm…command center may be a little overblown, but groneg from #cakes asked to take a peek at how I setup my Facebook campaigns server side so I figured Id just post a shell of the script that I send all of my ads through. This requires that you have DNS wildcards setup so that you can do cool stuff like true.domain.com, singlesnet.distracts.net, etc, but you can also modify it to accept parameters to index if you’d prefer that (comment if interested and Ill help ya out).

Some things to pay attention to:
if ($cloak) $offer = : This is the page to send a Facebook intern to … useful for getting your porn ads through.
$redirect : Set this to 1 in your case statement if you want to scrub out your referrer. This technique is covered in Scrubbing Your Traffic with Meta Redirects.
$iframe : If you want the offer to be iframed for whatever reason, set this to 1.
$landing : Set this to 1 for a VERY simple landing page. My Facebook lps are a single image with a link and title. Look at the third if case for the flags to set.

Anyways, here’s my code … feel free to post any questions you have in the comments and Ill do my best to answer.

Facebook Command Center - PHP CODE

DISCLAIMER: This post, like all of the other posts on this blog, was for informational purposes only. It was written for a friend who lost 10K worth of commissions from an advertiser after 2 weeks of sending facebook leads. It was not written to encourage screwing over merchants/advertisers in any way. Anyone who knows the services and sites I run, knows that I like to keep everything 100% WH

So, we all know that Facebook is great for driving massive amounts of traffic in relatively little time. They’ll throw their email, zip or contact info to any form they see, wander around for a bit, then bail out before moving on to super poke their friends. Now, the biggest issue with Facebook traffic is that it converts pretty bad on the advertiser’s end. I’ve heard stories of people having thousands of dollars rescinded from their accounts because the advertiser wasn’t happy with the lead quality. So how can we as affiliates using Facebook protect ourselves from this?

Simple: use other sources to supplement your Facebook traffic.

This is something that I used to do back in the days of cookie stuffing. I didn’t want the networks to see that all of my traffic was converting several hours or days after the cookie was set so I’d set up crapper pages to funnel in some real traffic that would convert on the spot. You use the shady source to send volume, and the legit source to trickle in clean leads.

We can do the same thing with Facebook. I’m gonna use Auto Insurance as an example because I know it does well on Facebook and there are a lot of merchants who have begun rejecting the traffic because of poor lead quality. This makes sense if you think about it … male college student sees a bright red flashy enzo appear in their sidebar, clicks the ad to see what its about, selects the state he’s in to see the car (we get paid), then, upon seeing the next screen asking for ton’s of personal info, decides its not worth the trouble bails out and moves on. We get our $3 lead, the advertiser gets nothing. So in order to keep our Facebook campaigns alive and running, we can setup some paid search campaigns targeting ‘buy’ Car Insurance terms to drive some leads that are much more likely to convert on the advertisers end. Now, because auto insurance is such a competitive market in search, chances are we’ll be running this campaign at a lost. This is fine though. Our goal is to simply send a handful of fully-qualified leads a day to the advertiser to make up for the facebook traffic that we’re sending in volume. I’d recommend using Microsoft Adcenter (hit up my PPC Coupons page if your looking for some free money to play with as they are normally the cheapest in terms of click cost and normally convert the best. In a niche like this, a single conversion will often make the advertiser upwards of $1,000 a year, so if you can send a couple a day, they’ll be cool. Also, be sure to kill the referrers on all of the traffic that you send, especially if you are direct linking. If you don’t know how to scrub your referrals, do a search for meta redirect…I’ll prolly be posting some code for this later in the week too as I’ve been helping a few people on IRC make sense of it.

That’s it

Alright … its been over a month since my last post on Facebook Social Ads, and in that time, I’ve been spending a lot of time scaling up my facebook campaigns and really getting to know their system. I’ve picked up a few more tidbits of knowhow that anyone getting started with advertising on facebook should know. Anyways, here are a couple more pointers to help you out if your struggling to make sense of fb (these are aimed at people who are just getting started, so if you’ve been in the game for a while, no flaming

Facebook spaces out your ad spend throughout the day

For some reason, it took me the longest time to realize that Facebook spreads out your adspend (and with that, your impressions/clicks) throughout over a 24 hour period. So if you have a daily budget of $250 (you can find out your current budget by clicking on the Billing tab in the Ad Manager), their system will serve your ad impressions at intervals throughout the day with your very last batch of impressions coming around 11-11:30 at night … this assumes, of course, that you have a campaign that is ‘good’ enough to deplete your budget. The fact that Facebook does this can be used in your favor: for example, I have a campaign running that converts best from around 3:00pm to 8:00pm, while only performing so-so the rest of the time. So if I pause my campaign until 3 and then resume it, Facebook will serve my ads at an increased rate so as to get it back on track with the daily spend. This allows me to get a much better campaign ROI while still being able to deplete my budget.

Campaign Budgets take 24 hours to update

I think nickycakes told me about this a while ago, but for some reason it slipped my mind until just the other day when I was tuning a new campaign. When you create a new campaign, it asks you to set the maximum you are willing to spend on that campaign. Most people will set their budget really low when first launching a campaign so they can see whether or not it is a winner. However, if the campaign does turn out to have potential and you want to scale up your spend, the changes won’t kick in til 24 hours from when you set it. Nothing magic here…just something that may save you some headache if your trying to figure out why the impressions stopped on your golden campaign. O yeah, and campaign budgets are spread out through the day just like daily budgets are

You’re Ads are going to get Jacked…Deal with it

Because of how easy it is to fire up new campaigns and ads, there are tons of people out there who are constantly checking the ad board and looking for prospective offers to run. In less than 5 minutes, they can copy your picture, ad text, title and offer and submit a dozen variations or copies of your ad. This is just how it works on Facebook…not much you can do about it other than squeezing the most you can out of your campaigns before they become saturated. And targeting different demographics and countries doesn’t help…especially when you got guys like concord cycling through proxies and profiles all day scraping the adboard.

Aim to get a $1,000 Account

Because of the way that Facebook distributes your impressions, its very important that you get your account maxed out especially if you find yourself a killer campaign. Facebook will increment your account around 2 days after (at least on my accounts…may be different on other accounts) you reach your budget. The increments go from $250 to $350 to $500 to $750 to $1000. Counting the time between updates, itll take you around 2-3 weeks to max out a newly minted account. Its also important to have a high limit campaign because of the above reason (competitor’s stealing your ads).

Think outside the Box

I’ve chatted with a handful of people who contacted me after reading my first post and its amazing how many of them are trying to promote offers targeting the same ol demographic. I think people assume that facebook = college students and are solely trying to appeal to this crowd. Play around with the targeting to see the wide demographics you can hit (theres 1.3 million women over 30 on fb, for example). There are tons of offers that work outside of dating, scholarships and free iphones.

Hope that helps some of you. In the words of Diorex (who’s blog is back up), your mileage may vary.