zorbasmedia

Driving Facebook traffic to high-payout financial offers. Experiment by ZorbasMedia

Hi, guys! ZorbasMedia is launching a new special project where we are going to drive traffic from Facebook to high-payout financial offers (from $400 to $850 per conversion, which sounds great indeed).

We have decided to give this project a go because Facebook traffic is currently trending out there and affiliates/teams are always on the lookout for new opportunities to grow and diversify their risks.

The finance vertical was chosen for a good reason. It’s believed that when it comes to $600-payout offers you have to fork over a lot of money on tests, and so there is no place for an average affiliate in this business. We have decided to show how you can run these offers and secure a sustainably positive ROI in three months on the example of a run-of-the-mill affiliate (me).

A few words about my affiliate marketing background: I used to run pops and push, and so I have a clear understanding of what affiliate marketing is. However, I have never worked with Facebook and financial offers before. I have all the tools necessary to get started on Facebook: accounts, cards, a cloaker, spy tool MagicAdz, and anti-detect browser Indigo.

The process of driving traffic from Facebook is rather complicated as such, so this is just the minimum tool kit to get started.

So, what are we going to do

The project plan is to publish 10-12 articles and host two webinars in three months. Testing budget: $5-10K.

For this special project, we have decided to partner up with Media500 because:

• we have known these guys for quite a while as trusted partners;
  the most impressive GEO coverage in the market;
• lots of offers to choose from;
• the guys optimize traffic on their side and send the right traffic to the right brokers, thus increasing the CR;
• payouts high enough to maintain the cash flow – net 5 on average;
• if you have been working with Media500 and have proved to be a reliable partner, they will be eager to help you with creatives, landings, translations, accounts and pretty much everything necessary to run a profitable campaign;
• high payouts, and if you run quality traffic you can get bumps;
• no caps;
• the guys can provide you with an opportunity to run prepay tests when it comes to certain GEOs;
• I know from personal experience that they are in touch 24/7.

I have chosen MagicAdz from all the spy tools out there because I did a little research on the best Facebook spy services beforehand and finally settled on Magic.

As I see it, this is the largest Facebook ad spy tool with extensive GEO coverage and cool features like filtering any ads by their verticals. You can also search the best converting offers at the moment and view all the ads linked to them.

We will run Tier 1 and Russian-speaking GEOs.

The project curators are Media500 affiliate managers Bully and Lady V who will give us detailed advice at each campaign management and optimization stage.

Before launching a campaign, I recommend you always discuss all the details with your affiliate manager because this is the person who has market expertise and a vested interest in your success.

This is an introductory article where I outline the concept behind the project and consult with my manager before launching my first campaigns.

I reached out to Bully, and here’s what he advised me to do:

zorbasmedia

Warming up accounts and inputting your payment info

We decided to rent all our Facebook accounts. You can drive traffic through both social and Business Manager accounts. We opted for launching our test campaigns from a BM account. Now, let me describe this process step-by-step.

First of all, our farmer linked rented accounts to our anti-detect browser Indigo account. All further actions were performed from this Indigo account.

We use Indigo since an anti-detect browser significantly simplifies the account management process on Facebook and helps you avoid problems.

Before launching a browser session, I connected my PC to my phone’s hotspot so that FB won’t identify static proxies at each new connection.

Then, I chose the campaign number and pressed “Start” in the Indigo admin panel. Then, the browser automatically opened a FB account page and ad campaign/BM settings.

I followed the strategy of warming-up your FB account a little bit before the general campaign launch.

For this, you will need a fan page dedicated to any whitehat subject. So, after creating two fan pages, I just posted an ad on each wall and started promoting them. Both ads included images of cats that I found on Google and a text saying, What nice kitties.

All this probably doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but you shouldn’t bother too much with warming up your accounts. After pushing the “Promote” button, I made the following steps:

• I created an audience and chose Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first and second accounts respectively;
• I stated USD in the currency field and opted for a daily budget of $1. It’s preferable to choose dollars to avoid losing money when you exchange currencies as you pay for ad costs in dollars.
• I input my card details.

Then, I just saved the fan pages and the campaigns started running. Once I spend at least $1 on whitehat stuff, I will start driving traffic to our offers.
My next step was to choose landing pages and make creatives.

Picking up landings and making creatives

We chose GEO Italy for our first campaign. Guys from Media500 provided us with landing pages that perform well right now. However, for the sake of representativeness, we also checked out MagicAdz to find out what else is running in this GEO.

Bully and Lady V sent me landing pages with celebrities. The spy tool helped me determine that the main angles for landing pages are celebs, family values, and lifestyle. I decided to test out two landing pages from the spy tool featuring success-associated stuff such as cars and money and landings with celebrities provided by Bully.

I didn’t just copypaste the landings, as it is preferable to uniqualize them. I sent the landings to our designer and he made new images with celebs on the subject matter we need. In general, only some minor changes were introduced. Also, I wrote three new texts for each ad.

MagicAdz conveniently allows you to filter landings by GEO and vertical. Moreover, you can download the pages without losing any data, you’ll just need to clear up the code a bit.
So, we settled on two landing page angles for each GEO:

• celebs;
• money, cars, success, etc.

For each angle, we will test one landing page with three ads.
We also made the following creatives. To ensure that these creatives perform well, I sent them to Bully. He rejected them and said that they would most likely be banned at the manual moderation stage. We fixed up the creatives based on these recommendations.
I borrowed the texts from MagicAdz, having decided that if they were running successfully, at least they didn’t have any trigger words that would get them banned.

So, that’s it about the preparatory stage, landing pages, and creatives. I am now ready to launch my first campaigns.
__________________________________________________ ____________

The next episode will deal with campaign management and my first results.

As we are running traffic from Facebook to a challenging vertical, we don’t expect easy profit. After we gather campaign data, we will be able to describe the launch and management process in more detail. That’s it for today, then. If you have any questions left, you can always contact me, Bully, or LadyV.

Don’t hesitate to write and ask your questions, guys from Media500 are super friendly and responsive and they will be eager to help if you come across some problems with their offers.

DVTimes

Sounds interesting.

__________________
My old and new pics I have shot

zorbasmedia

Hi everyone! We have an in-house media buying team in ZorbasMedia that tests various offers and traffic sources. We have decided to launch a special project where one of our team members will test GEOs and traffic sources he hasn’t worked with before. We would like to show that an affiliate with any experience under their belt can follow in our footsteps and get some decent results.

Max, we give the floor to you.
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It is a pleasure for me to participate in this project to see if I can secure a positive ROI working with a new ad format and new vertical. And if I can, how much time it will actually take. I’m going to describe everything I will do in as much detail as possible and provide all the screenshots.

First of all, I have set myself two goals: choose an affiliate network and traffic source to work with. When picking up a traffic source, I took the following factors into account:

1. It is supposed to be a source we haven’t worked with before.
2. A source must be simple and easy to understand.
3. A source must have as much traffic as possible for our offer.

I also had to pick up an offer, GEO and affiliate network. After I carefully studied a lot of websites where people discuss various GEOs to drive traffic to, I settled on India. The reasons for this decision are discussed below.
Then, I also had to choose a vertical. The options were as follows:

• Gambling. I wasn’t sure that it would perform well on GEO India.
• Crypto. Hmph…
• WapClick. Low profits.
• Physical products.

I looked up some case studies, talked with my fellow affiliates and decided to settle on physical products. I was advised to drive traffic to nutra. First of all, it appears to be easier than working with physical products. Secondly, it is more profitable. I did a little research on nutra networks and chose Dr.Cash.

The only thing left to do was to contact the network and pick up an offer. After I contacted the network I was convinced that my choice was right. The guys recommended me to work with their adult offers and I decided to give it a go. Why not? I haven’t worked with this GEO before and so this poses quite a challenge to me.

I decided to drive traffic from the TrafficStars ad network.

The tracker I use is Binom.

Now, I would like to explain why my choice fell on India.

Affiliate marketing in India

There are more than 1.3 billion people living in India. Of these, 500 million have Internet access as of 2019. Half of them use social networks on a regular basis.

As compared to 2018, the number of Internet users in India has grown by more than 20%.

It turned out that India is the leading country in the world in terms of Facebook audience size. This is where I could lie and say that I have never worked with Facebook before…

As I have mentioned before, I chose TrafficStars as a traffic source. As for the ad format, I decided to work with native ads. Here is my line of reasoning.

Leveraging users’ engagement with content is much more powerful than brute force advertising. Native ads perfectly match the look and feel of a website and are not supposed to look conspicuous and intrusive. They are shown in the right place and at the right time and provide a better user experience. Native ads basically look like a natural part of a website’s design.

The most popular and effective native ad formats for mobile devices are video ads such as in-article and in-read videos and text and graphic ads (a native unit, carousel, the Recommended section, native scroller).

Now, let’s get back to India. Indians’ interests are varied and diverse. Some of them play games, some watch videos and streams. There are two official languages in India, Hindi and English, and so you can use English-language creatives, which would be impossible if you worked with France or Portugal. Moreover, India is home to Kamasutra, which indicates that Indians have a certain penchant for all things adult.

Another plus point is a low price per click. It’s also worth noting that there are wealthy cities in India such as Mumbai and Deli where living standards are much higher. So, you can target these cities and get more conversions for practically no money. Well, at least in theory.

Picking up a Dr.Cash offer

Dr.Cash is an affiliate network that focuses on the nutra vertical. The network’s database showcases over 3259 nutra offers from direct advertisers throughout the world: Asia, Europe, Latin America, Eastern GEOs, Africa, CIS, and North America.

Dr.Cash’s super specialization is developing countries. The guys have the freshest offers in the market, rare GEOs, great bids and high caps.

What’s more, they have a cool support team that helped me to pick up the right offers:

• id 17164 Max X – COD – [IN]
• id 18466 Shilajit – COD – [IN]

In my opinion, adult offers are easier to work with and much more profitable. I’m glad that when it comes to choosing an offer my manager and I understand profitability in the same way.

I’m going to discuss how I chose pre-landers and landing pages in my next article. Now, I would like to share with you the creatives I made for my first campaigns.

Banner split test

I took the following approaches when making creatives:

• a happily married Indian couple; no reference to adult themes; the husband wears a mustache (by the way, did you know that low-caste Indian men are not allowed to grow a mustache?);
• adult;
• a picture of dick against a background depicting a happy couple;
• dick pick.

I decided to fork over $200 on tests. Hopefully, I will score a profitable campaign pretty soon.

In my next article, I am going to share the first results of my marketing efforts. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

zorbasmedia

Today, we are going to discuss how we picked up an offer and creatives and launched our first ad campaigns. We will also touch upon our first results.

Ad campaigns on trafficstarts.com

We created several ad campaigns based on a source type (PRIME, RON) and device (mobile and desktop traffic):

• web-MaxX-COD-IN-PRIME
• mob-MaxX-COD-IN-PRIME
• web-MaxX-COD-IN-RON
• mob-MaxX-COD-IN-RON

We didn’t set up advanced targeting options for tests. When the campaigns were already running, we made the following adjustments:

• we added a blacklist of IPs;
• we stopped RON and desktop campaigns because costs per lead were too high, so, only Android campaigns were left;
• we ruled out such categories as Gay, Dating, Shemale.

We decided to place ads only on two websites, namely xhamster.com and sexvid.xxx. Then, only xhamster.com was left (placement m.xhamster.com 2812)

Also, we tested out our hypothesis on dividing campaigns by sections (4 blocks) and time intervals (2 slots). Eventually, we had to abandon it, as the average CR turned out to be lower than that of a standard campaign. Another disadvantage of this option is that it is difficult to update the costs if you work with multiple campaigns and have to do everything manually. All our campaigns were CPM-based, and so we had to update the costs manually for each creative to get accurate data on the performance of each banner.

Choosing an offer

We picked up the following offers:

• MaxX (17164)
  • pre-landers: 9387 10977 11006 11018
  • landings: 5528 10482 10809
• Shilajit (18466)
  • pre-landers: 10932
  • landings: 10899
• MusliPro (18495)
  • pre-landers: 11254
  • landings: 11248

There is no need to save and then upload pre-landers and landing pages to your hosting, as the affiliate network allows you to create separate flows: first, you choose an offer, and then you pick up your pre-lander and landing. After that, you’ll get pre-lander and landing page links. You can add them either to a tracker as separate offers or to your ad campaign on an ad network.

I added the flows to Binom Tracker as separate offers.

It’s up to you to decide whether you are going to use a tracker for campaign optimization or not, but remember that:

• you can lose some traffic when switching between a traffic source and a tracker (our tracker is hosted on DigitalOcean, and there was no noticeable traffic loss);
• you should find out where it is more convenient for you to analyze your campaign stats;
• a tracker allows you to filter out unwanted traffic and add it to a blacklist.

The tests revealed that the MaxX offer performed the best.

Creatives
We used various approaches, but two of them proved to be the most effective:

• an Indian celebrity or black person with a big penis;
• a close up of a dick

The CTR of creatives varied from 0.3% to 1.3%. But at the end of the day, you should focus on the average cost per lead for each creative. Also, bear in mind that an ad network and a tracker display all the conversions you have generated. However, a considerable part of these gets sorted out by an advertiser, especially when it comes to GEO India. We will talk about this in more detail below.

First results

As for now, the stats are as follows:

• Total leads: 2014
• Pending leads: 1047
• Approved leads: 121 (9.29%)
• Rejected leads: 135
• Trash leads: 711
• ROI: about 0%

I requested data on trash leads from Dr.Cash showing why they were filtered out. Turns out most of them were doubles.
People just left their applications several times in a row, which resulted in a high percentage of trash leads.

By the way, the offer didn’t accept traffic from some GEOs (15 Indian states were stopped). Unfortunately, the network does not allow you to blacklist states, and so I will have to deal with this challenge later on. I will probably collect the IPs of these states and disable them. Or I will send these IPs through a traffic back URL to some dating offer. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

As for the approval rate, it is far from great. Dr.cash claims that the average approval rate is 11.15%, but mine turned out to be lower. I tried time targeting and drove traffic from 11 pm to 3 am and then 25 hours a day, but it didn’t affect the approval rate. So, I’m going to change some IP settings and discuss the results in my next article.

Yes, the average ROI is approximately 0%. Hopefully, I will climb into the green soon.

The next step is to optimize and scale up my campaigns, as well as to split-test new creatives, offers, and landings. This will be the subject of my next article.

See you soon!

zorbasmedia

Today, I’m going to update you on what I was doing in the last couple of weeks.

Last time I wrote on this subject, my ROI was approximately 0% and it turned out that I had generated a high percentage of trash leads. Most of the time people were just submitting the same form several times in a row, while some leads came from regions where there is no delivery service available. The traffic was stopped for a week and a half, and so I didn’t spend much money on it.

So, here’s what I have been busy with recently.

1. In addition to Max X (17164), I decided to test out some new offers such as Hummer (18278) and MenXXXL (18382). I also put new pre-landers to a split test (two pages for each offer). The tests revealed that the most successful sales funnel was the 12011 pre-lander, the 10998 landing page, and the MenXXXL offer. As for the other offers, I had to stop them.

Landing 10197 for the Hummer 18278 offer.

Landing 10385 for the MenXXXL 18382 offer

2. Then, I tried to find out what IP address ranges are assigned to different Indian states. If there was a direct correlation between an IP address and GEO, I added such IPs to a blacklist. However, this is definitely not enough to solve the problem with stopped GEOs completely. Still, I managed to collect an extensive blacklist of IPs. Contact me if you want to get it.

3. Another thing I did was to redirect the traffic from these GEOs to a dating SmartLink (ProfitSocial – Adult SmartLink With Prelanders ProfitSocial). Overall, I generated 142 leads in March, but they brought me only $4.75 in payouts.

4. I added new creatives to my campaigns almost every other day. However, the ones that showed a great performance at the very start turned out to be the most effective.

Data for March:

Money spent: $146

Generated leads (tracker postback link): 479

Stats from Dr.Cash:

Income: $200

The average approval rate: 11.08%

Total leads: 566

Approved leads: 41

The overall ROI: 40.4%

What conclusions can I make?

1. At the very onset of this project, I failed to account for the fact that there is no delivery available in some Indian states.
2. The traffic source does not offer precise GEO targeting settings.
3. Of all the offers that I tested, only one turned out to be profitable.

What I am going to do next is:

• scaling up;
• go on testing creatives and a couple of new offers.

zorbasmedia

Hi there! The third episode of our special project will be no less interesting than the previous ones because today I am going to outline the problems I ran across while launching my first Facebook campaigns.
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Good things first though! A couple of weeks ago I attended the TES conference in Lisbon where I met with my colleagues from all over the world, took some time off, recharged and recovered from the long Russian winter. I am personally a big fan of TES Portugal, as it’s pretty warm there when the conference takes place, and the event itself is held by the ocean. All conference attendees have known each other for years, which gives the show a friendly atmosphere. Historically, the TES conference is marked by a huge presence of pure or partially adult companies. However, as is the case with any other event, you can always forge new business connections and get to know some insights, whether you are working with gambling, nutra, or adult dating offers. So, I strongly recommend you attend TES.

Now, let’s move on to something more concrete, as those who drive traffic from Facebook saw a lot of changes in the last couple of weeks.

Firstly, almost all Business Managers with a $350 limit disappeared from the market, and so it’s next to impossible now to buy an account at a reasonable price. Those BMs that were left don’t grant you the admin rights and you can’t drive decent traffic volumes as an employee.

I only see two possible way-outs here: account farming or purchasing super expensive BMs that will probably be unsuitable for work.

Guys, if some of you have come across such an issue, please write to me on Telegram @stansemenov and share your experience of coping with these troubles, what is it that you do, etc.

Account farming can be a viable alternative, but it can significantly increase operational costs and require a larger team and more complex business processes, so I’ll opt for it only as a last resort. But maybe I’m wrong? I will be very grateful if you share your opinion on this.

This episode was expected to cover my first campaign stats in detail. However, it turns out that this article will deal with my main pain points, as everything I launched got blocked and rejected.

In the next episode, I’ll shed some light on the reasons behind these bans. At a rough guess, the reasons are as follows:

• the accounts were not warmed-up enough;
• the cloaker couldn’t cope with the workload;
• manual moderation;
• low account trust;
• inappropriate creatives and trigger words in an ad copy.

So, I’m going to analyze the source code to find out why the accounts were barred from showing ads. It’s already more than clear for me that running high-payout offers is not an easy task.

I contacted Bully @rotems88 from Media500 and he told me that this failure most likely stems from the cloaker, trigger words or using bitcoin images. We decided to discuss such things together in the future, and the guys are ready to lend a helping hand to trusted affiliates as they have been involved in this vertical for a long time and know how everything works.

Also, a couple of weeks ago I attended a meetup hosted by Alfaleads, talked with some top affiliates and found out that high-payout offers are killing it right now, a lot of teams have already secured a very high ROI, but this information hasn’t gone public yet. It seems that this vertical is trending now. There has been a lot of talk at the meetup about how you can use apps and lead forms to drive traffic to high-payout offers and circumvent all possible obstacles. It’s an open secret that apps are widely used in gambling, dating, and sweepstake campaigns, but I’ve never heard anything about this before when it comes to our vertical.

My fellow affiliates, if you have ever worked with apps to promote such offers, please be sure to contact me on Telegram @stansemenov and share your experience with me to ramp up this project and bring more value to the community.

My gut feeling suggests that apps could be the best option of them all. Besides, Media500 is also interested in such traffic and I would like to work with it as well. I want to see how it converts, what the average LTV is and what ROI it can bring.

By the way, last week I attended the meetup hosted by PropellerAds where I met an affiliate who also works with this vertical. I told him about this project and that all my accounts had been disabled. He read my previous articles and gave his comment.

Meanwhile, I’m warming up new accounts in the hope that Mark Zuckerberg and Affiliate Gods will take mercy on me this time. If you have any questions, be sure to contact me @stansemenov or the guys from Media500, LadyV @ladyVm500 and Bully @rotems88.