Laundering your Facebook Traffic

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 I’ve heard stories of people having thousands of dollars rescinded from their accounts because the advertiser wasn’t happy with the lead quality.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