So a fellow friend and twitter follower created a poll for me and asked me to share it with my followers, I did.

This is the results from the twitter poll a friend of mine created online, thanks @yuryrush! When he created the poll to my question, I shared it with my followers to see what they would vote on. Here is the color breakdown: Red = Red, Blue = Blue, Green = Tie, Orange = What is an LP?

Really interesting to see my followers didn’t know what an LP is. Then again they maybe messing with me. Most of my followers are also experienced marketers as well. But I was still curious to see the poll results to my actual results. You voted and from this poll you said blue would do better when it came to CTR.

Now lets take a look at my results. I rotated an image using my split testing software, on PPV traffic. As you can see below the results speaks for themselves the CTR of the blue button did way better than the red button.

You were correct!

The red button was more prominent because its big and its red. The big difference is color does play a role in how users interact with a website. Even though the blue button was smaller and not as BIG as the red button it still performed  better. This also was happening on a landing page I created which then went to a email submit.

Red, its meaning…

Red is more of a warning, danger, war power, strength, love, passion. Emotionally it doesn’t represent the offer well to the consumer. It is also stated that it creates excitement, which for this specific offer it should have. But it still didn’t perform that well.

Blue, its meaning…

Blue seems to be a trusted color. We have been exposed to blue since the days of the internet and we are just use to seeing blue on the internet from hyper links to traditional web colors. Emotionally it represents confidence, intelligence, loyal, faith. So with that, no wonder the blue button did better than the red.

Use this small test to take a look at your current website or landing page and make adjustments base on the colors you present to your customers. Everyone sees something different but emotions is a very powerful part of a user’s reaction. Take advantage of it, especially in online marketing. Utilize color to your advantage.

Better yet, test your curiosity with different variations. For example I rotated my LP creatives to see if one or the other will do better. Using a split test software will help you increase your productivity. Even better it will allow you to see which creatives will outperform the other and produce better results.

Key points of today… utilize color to your advantage and test!

Related posts:

1. Cross Reference the Advertisers Landing Page!
2. Webinar: Get a 74% CTR with Your Landing Page
3. LP Jumper – Split Test Multiple Landing Pages

… but once I got home I created a campaign from an affiliate offer I was already promoting. I thought to myself, I should be able to take advantage of this buzz (sneak punch) that will probably last a couple days. I am assuming there will be a controversy about the fight.

So that night around 2am, I started to create a small Facebook campaign around that sucker punch. Below are my ad CTRs from my campaign and also my targeting:

1. United States
2. Age 25 – 45
3. Categories: Health and Well Being, Outdoor Fitness, All Sports, Out Door Actvities
4. Reached: 17,314,780

So I think one main reason why my CTRs were so low is because of my ad copy. Now that I am looking at it, I could have done better – but at 2am after the fight with some alcohol in my system, it was sub par. Also one big thing about this campaign is I only did 3 ads instead of my usual 5 ads for testing. I was not able to find any other pictures from the fight except these. I was pretty limited.

One part of this campaign is one of the ads has an orange border. I did this specifically because its bright and it relates to Floyd’s trunk colors. So I was playing an association campaign here. Meaning I was trying to bring some sort of relation from an obvious to an ad. In this case, the trunks had orange in them, his gloves were orange, even the shoes were orange. So I tried to bring that association to the ad. Which is why I think it received a higher CTR than the rest.

I really wanted to use another image from the fight but I could not find it. The only thing I can say I could have improved on this the ad copy. The next morning from Saturday, I forgot about it until this morning (I need to stop drinking). So I was not able to adjust my ad copy, which I think would of made a difference from my CTRs.

Another interesting thing I noticed was there were a lot of Internet Explorer users after 1am. When the ad ran during the day I saw more FireFox and Chrome brower users. This was just interesting to me seeing such a dramatic change from day and night.

Also, these ads were very cheap all less than .41 cents a click. Let me know your thoughts about these ads and more importantly about the fight that happened this weekend. Weak.

Related posts:

1. CTRs for my Hurricane Irene Ads on Facebook
2. Start a Facebook Campaign for Less than $30
3. Using FBML to Make Your Facebook Ad Campaign Viral

Since I started getting birthday wishes on my Facebook wall, I was curious to see how many of my Facebook friends will wish me a happy birthday by either writing on my wall or sending me a message. The reason why I decided to see what percentage of users will write on my wall is the fact birthdays is always displayed in the upper right hand corner of Facebook. This means users will almost always see whose birthday it is everyday. This can tell me 2 things…

1. Percentage of users who log into Facebook
2. Percentage of users who will communicate

I found this intriguing because, I personally seem to log into Facebook everyday and randomly. I wanted to know personally is this ‘syndrome’ happening to everyone else that I am friends with? and if so will they wish me a happy birthday. It is hard to know who logged in and then find out who wished me a happy birthday, that specific data is hard to get. So I just went with the total friends I am friends with. I also try to keep my friends list under 1000 because I want users who I personally know or have at least communicated with in the past.

Anyways, out of 987 friends on Facebook only 237 wrote on my wall wishing me a happy birthday, which is 24% of users. I am grateful for the friends that have wished me a happy birthday yesterday. I definitely enjoyed my bday yesterday, thanks everyone. 

So this tells me that maybe only 24% of users either logged during the day and saw the Facebook notice of my birthday. So I thought this was interesting mini study to find out who actually would want to extend their text to keep the friendship or relationship strong. It is interesting to see that about 24% of my friends either logged in during the day and saw the notice and they took action on it.

The other interesting part of this is also new friend requests, I get some everyday. I did notice an exponential new amount yesterday. I would contrast this to the friend relationship. If someone wrote on my wall, there is a small notice on their wall stating they “wrote on Ian Fernando’ wall” – thus expanding the reach of my birthday.

So this tells me even at 24% the reach I can get with someone just commenting or leaving a note can greatly influence other users to take action. Being it was my birthday, it might have been more proactive for users to write and interact than if it wasn’t my birthday. I definitely do not get 200 wall posts on my profile, I either get 1-3 a day if that.

This tells me users will interact if there is a need to do so, example someones birthday. There is a need to interact with that user because Facebook notifies that user or others are influencing them. It was just a curious thought and a thought I thought worth sharing.

Thanks again for everyone who wished me a Happy Birthday and Happy Born!!

Related posts:

1. Start a Facebook Campaign for Less than $30
2. Sync Twitter with Your Facebook, Why?
3. Why Facebook Fan Pages Matter to Your Business

While news stations and radios are creating hype around Hurricane Irene, I thought to myself – can I help people by promoting something relevant? I called up several advertisers and I was unable to get a specific offer I wanted created. So I went over to Clickbank to see if there was something I can promote. There was.

I was a bit reluctant to even push a Clickbank product because I personally tested Clickbank products on Facebook and it doesn’t do so well. Also there was also another reason why my ads didn’t work, I’ll get into that in a bit. I found 2 info products about surviving during an event like a hurricane. It had high gravity and it looked very promising. I also found another ebook about the top foods you need to survive during a hurricane.

These 2 info products looked very promising, as teh data provided by Clickbank looked. So I decided to push them on Facebook. The reason for choosing Facebook Ads as a traffic source is because I imagined a lot of people would want to see how their relatives and friends are doing during this event.

Here are my demographics I targeted:

• United States – Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, Connecticut
• Age 30 and Older
• Categories: Parent, Engaged, Baby Boomers, Parents with kids 3-19 years.
• Additional Categories: Charity Causes, Health and Well Being, Outdoor Activities, Traveling
• Total target: 4,098,180

With a frequency of 1.6, I was able to get a decent amount of clicks to my ads. My ads took a while to get approved and I only ran the campaign for just a bit to see what kind of reach and clicks I would get. I wanted to see if users are willing enough to take out their credit card to learn how to survive.

Here are my CTRs for my ads:

Things I could have done to improve this campaign:

• Started this campaign 1 week prior to the event instead of 24 hours
• Created borders around the images
• Split test different variations of the image with border color and size
• Whitelabel the CB page with custom LP and Order button

The first bullet, is probably the best because 24 hours users are in frantic mode. I also was thinking users would be in such an emotional state they would want to find out how to help their family in anyways possible. It backfired and learned my lesson here. Everyone is in a mode where they want to make sure they have everything, this ebook would have probably helped users prior to the event. Have I started this campaign 1 week ago, it may have converted well. My reasoning is users are in a mode where they are still uncertain and are probably doing research on how to make the best during this extreme weather.

That was a lesson learned for sure. I personally didn’t see much relative ads during Irene, so there was no competition at all that I saw.

Related posts:

1. Ryan Deiss, You Have Cluttered My Facebook
2. Facebook Flyer Pro: Cost Per Click that Hates Me
3. Surgically Determining Facebook via Cost Per Sale

I would never ever monetize a site with adsense, just because of the complexity it can be. You really need a high volume site to utilize adsense. Well 2 years ago I came out with a platform that does just that, called CPA Shuffle – which I have stop. Now the end of 2010, a new platform rises, Clickbooth CPC.

Similar to adsense and my past idea CPA Shuffle, it takes offers puts them in an IAB display style box and displays offers. The difference is you get paid on a per click basis, similar to Google Adsense. So if someone clicks on an offer, they convert you are just paid on a CPC level not lead level.

I do not know how they calculate the click earnings but I think it is definitely way more than adsense. Here is my stats with only 2 clicks which earned me $.40! Baaalllin! Anyways, there was a bit of confusion on the reporting.

So I asked Clickbooth to call me up to discuss these numbers. Parts of the reporting is really confusing, so when they explained it to me, it became clear on what the numbers meant. For example:

• Impressions if the Ad Unit itself
• Ad Unit Impressions means each ad (offer) that was within the Ad Unit.
• CTR is the the Ad Unit CTR as a whole
• Ad Unit CTR is the individual ad (offer) CTR

So if I have a 300 x 250 ad unit, the Impressions would be (let’s say) 100 and the Ad impression would be 33 – because there are 3 ad displays within the ad unit itself. Interesting numbers. Now I did collab with Clickbooth a bit to better improve their system and give some great ideas on how to better their reporting and even monetize it as a whole.

Currently I am rotating this on another blog with banners and even adsense. I want to see if the banners (affiliate offers) or Google Adsense itself will pay better than Clickbooths CPC platform. I am simply just rotating the code, with OIO Publisher.

So the way that the CPC system works is advertisers pay to be within these ad blocks, no offers are being pulled from the network ad being displayed on the CPC Platform. When I created CPA Shuffle, I pulled offers from the network and displayed them on ad blocks. My thinking was I can always get new/updated offers and display them in specific niches and get a higher payouts if they convert.

I am even thinking about re-opening CPA Shuffle because my technology is already surpassed Clickbooth’s CPC Platform. I think anyways. Plus it was a 2 years ago that I came up with this idea. The industry is just catching on. The only difference is Clickbooth CPC platform displays images and text, similar to a facebook ad. While CPA Shuffle just did traditional adsense style format, text.

Here is an example of an ad in the health category on a health blog I have. So you can see it only has 1 ad related to health. The other 2 can be categorized elsewhere.

This is the other problem I have with the ad platform, no relation to the niche or category I chose. The reason is because advertisers optionally put themselves into the CPC platform. Offers are not pulled from the network. So it fills empty space with other advertisers.

Now, what would have been awesome, since they are tracking each offer unit, the ability to see what offer received the click. This way if I have this ad on my health blog and the EDU offer is getting the most click I can change my ad unit category to education on a health blog. Better monetizing the site.

But they are working on the platform still as this is still in beta. So more advertisers will be added and hopefully have a more targeted offers for the sites or niches everyone have. It seems only the popular diet, health, edus are populating within these ad units.

The reporting definitely can be more user friendly and the creation of units as well. I actually didn’t like the way ads were created, so I took the time to decipher the JS code  bit. It works the same way the old adsense style box worked. By simply reorganizing the JS commands a bit you can pull any category and adjust the ad unit size. But then it does throw your tracking and reporting off for traffic sites a bit, then again the ad unit captures the referring site. So the reporting should be able to see this in the reporting somewhere, but isn’t – I know they are capturing it because the referring site is being passed through on a per click basis.

You create ad units by traffic source, so this way you can easily track which site is producing the most clicks. Since it was a bit of a hassle, I just dissected the JS a bit to make it easier for me.

Reporting is the most important part, the more data I have the better I can optimize these ad units. I am still playing with these ad units, rotating it with banners and adsense. So I will give an update on what I find. Maybe restart CPA Shuffle?

Related posts:

1. Google Adsense Releases Referrals 2.0
2. CPA Shuffle in Private Beta
3. RevResponse: An Intriguing Alternative to AdSense

Last month Ian did a really good post on how to use FBML to make your facebook pages viral. If you haven’t read that yet be sure to do so here.

I wanted to expand on what he was sharing to help you make your pages even more viral. Ian referenced several shortcomings of FBML, like the inability to customize your calls to action. However many of these do have some sneaky work arounds. By leveraging the Facebook social graph we are able to take advantage of some of their intended external codes to benefit us directly on their site.

Forgive me for being somewhat unoriginal, but like Ian, I’m also going to talk about a page I was running during Halloween. I’m also going to share the results of it at the end of the post.

I actually saw a few different pages for the ‘Vampire Me’ offers so I decided to go an alternate route with the ‘Zombie Me’ offer. Naturally I figured it wouldn’t quite have the buzz appeal that the vampires have with the current twilight craze, but there was significantly less competition and I thought I might be able to leverage some eye catching graphics to make it pop. I was actually promoting the offer on PPV as well so I already had a few images and a creative from the offer to use on the Facebook page.

The first thing I saw on some of the ‘Vampire Me’ pages was like Ian’s, they were being compliant with Facebook’s rules about not being able to FORCE users to ‘Share’, ‘Invite Friends’, etc. However looking at those I thought to myself “That probably works but how can I make it better”. I specifically remember seeing some really good examples of ways to force users to do things (see post Sneaky Facebook Tactics) and really wanted to leverage those. I found a few sites that offered tutorials, one even had some images I could use, so in ultimate laziness I went with them.

As you can see we really want the users to do a few things with the pages. First like the page, secondly to share the page, and lastly to click through to the offer. So your page sales funnel will look something like this:

Ian had a great tactics for getting people to like your page. Where you use the FMBL code to basically say ‘If someone likes this page display this, otherwise show them is’. This should definitely be your first step on a page, get them to Click the like button. You can see the image I used for this below.

Once they click the like button they would then be revealed the ‘next’ button.

So you can see they were FORCED to like the page to move on. However after this step we can ask them to share but not force them. So watch what I did. On clicking the next area, it will hide the current page and reveal a 2nd page.

This 3rd page now asks them to share the page and it has a slightly customized ‘Share’ call to action. I was super lazy so it was just a larger share button with some arrows pointing to it. They don’t actually HAVE to share it, as you can see the ‘next’ button is already available and functional. We simply want them to think they have to.

The FBML Code

So a couple things went on during this page. We made it appear like the user was clicking through to multiple pages, requested a lot of user action, and had a few custom call to actions (ie: the share button). Lets look at how we can do this.

The multi-page effect is created by using FBML Click to Toggle markup. You basically give each one of these mini pages a standard CSS div styling and tell it to hide it and then display another one. If you had just two pages you wanted the user to see/click through to. You would assign them each a div id of ‘Step1? and ‘Step2? and then at the bottom of the first page FMBL/HTML place the below code.

<a clicktotoggle=”step2? clicktohide=”step1? onclick=’FBML.clickToHide(“step1?);FBML.clickToToggle(“step2?);return false;’>CLICK HERE TO GO TO NEXT PAGE
</a>

Where it says Click here to go to next page, you can leave standard text or use an image like I did (ie: the Next images).

Next lets look at the ‘Share’ button. If you remember with Ian’s example, he would’ve loved to have had a better share button, a customized one could’ve increased Shares dramatically. The secret here is to take a look at Facebook’s social graph plugins that everyone already uses on their blogs and websites. You basically already have an area that will let a user ‘like’ or ’share’ your page. So its basically just stealing the quick HTML code there and using your own custom text or images to be the share call to action.

<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=LIKE_PAGE_URL_HERE” target=”_blank”>SHARE THIS</a>

So you just go get the actual URL to your Facebook page and place it there and use your customize share text or images.

That Wasn’t That Hard Was It?

I hope you all liked this post and it answers some of your dreams and wishes. There is really a TON you can do with FB pages and I am just starting out and already drooling at the possibilities. You can check out this page on my blog to see the FULL results of the campaign. I show you how I advertised it, how I split tested it, and how much cash I made from it.

You can also download the full FMBL code of the page on my site, so check out the full campaign here.

Related posts:

1. Using FBML to Make Your Facebook Ad Campaign Viral
2. Case Study: Auto-Tweeting Blog Comments
3. LinkedIn DirectAds: A Case Study of $2 Clicks

The last post I stated I used it to find the perfect headline title. Well the results showed I am first page for “platinum seo plugin”. I am not number 1 but I made first page out of 216,000 results. I think that is pretty impressive. I just wanted to share my results and I just bought the multi license to work on my other sites.

Again, this will work best with niche sites rather than a make money online blog. Since I do have other niche sites, it iwll be installed on all of them! Keyword winner is definitely a plugin to have very easy to use. Enter a set of keywords and it spits out the results you want to see and what you should use base on 3 criteria: Google Insight, Trend, and Competition.

Check out Keyword Winner!

Related posts:

1. Platinum SEO Plugin: Keyword Winner
2. The Keyword Minute: Free Report
3. Your Copy of Keyword Elite 2

In marketing it is important to tell your users what to do – buy, subscribe, etc. With Fanpages, I tell them to like the page as an incentive. Enough likes will get you more visibility. The more visibility the more users click on your campaign.

Since Halloween is over I am going to show you one of my campaigns.

Halloween is over this is a good time to show you how to utilize FBML on a campaign I recently did. This specific offer was a download offer and I did this about 2 weeks prior to Halloween. It was a simple concept that I wanted to take advantage of. The reason I got fascinated by FBML is because of some Facebook ads use the like function to get more reach as an incentive to get something in return.

If you do not know what FBML is… please read Social Media Informer on How to Install and use FBML.

First I created the Fanpage landers to tell the user what to do. Even the Fan Page main image has an arrow telling what the end user have to do to see themselves as a Vampire. I strongly believe in landing pages to help increase the quality of leads and to filter out useless clicks. Landing pages are always good to get better control and feel of your end user before sending them to the actual offer.

… anyways.

I wanted to see how this will take affect on a campaign. So I found some FBML code to incentivize the traffic to LIKE a page in order to receive something. Here is the code used:

<fb:visible-to-connection>

WHAT IS SEEN AFTER A PAGE IS LIKED

<fb:else>

<div id=”non-fans”>WHAT IS SEEN WITH NON LIKES</div>

</fb:else>

FYI: If you are an admin of a page, you will not see this function in action. You will always see the “LIKE” lander.

The landers are just images I custom made, I find it easier to use images than actual HTML. I can create the strong CTA with arrows pointing to what I want the user to do first. It just gives me more control over standard text.

So when the user likes the fan page, they see the below image. Which has another share functionality to it, a “Step 2″. Again I tell the end user what to do making sure the CTA is clear and bold. Here I tell them to share, with the share a light box feel popups and asks them to share. This share function is also customizable via FBML.

Here is the code for the FBMl share button:

<fb:share-button href=”FAN PAGE LINK HERE” />

You can also customize what popups in the Share box:

<fb:share-button>
<meta name=”medium” content=”mult”/>
<meta name=”title” content=”name of fan page”/>
<meta name=”description” content=”description of fan page”/>
<link rel=”image_src” href=”url to image location” />
<link rel=”target_url” href=”http://URL OF FANPAGE”/>
</fb:share-button>

• meta name=”title” content=””name of fan page” – the name of your fan page
• meta name=”description” content=”description of fan page” – the description you want to use.
• link rel=”image_src” href=”url to image location” – if you are using an alternative image, this would be the location on your server
• link rel=”target_url” href=”http://URL OF FANPAGE” – the url to the fan page that you are sharing

This is great because you can now control the content of the popup box and make it even more appealing for the user to share with their friends and make it more visible by simply utilizing your own image.

If you know any media buying techniques, then you should know what to do with the image. If not, I use a bright background with a darker foreground. This brings visibility to the image and more eyes to the Fan Page.

Also it lets you create a community sense by creating an interaction with the share functionality. Since you can control the text you can input anything you want. I created a copy that basically said “I just uploaded a picture of myself as a vampire”. The reason I did this is because Facebook is a social community about what their friends are doing. So I just created a curiosity copy for the share text function.

Now the only problem is most users did not use the share button but instead clicked on the image which took them to the offer download. But some did share it and increased visibility a bit more. There is no way to resize the share button and I tried to make my text bigger, but that makes the share button non-visible because of the text size taking over the button.

If there was a way to control the Share button size I can see this campaign do better. Since it is a fixed button size it is a hit or miss.

I just simply put the share button at the top and added Step 2 to help the user follow the steps needed to participate. I hope these FBML codes will help with your Facebook ad campaigns.

There are so many other FBML code to use with  your fan page such as social proof of users already liking the page, comments on the fanpage itself, etc. I have been reading up on the FBML and how I can continue to use it to my marketing benefits – even created my own script for WordPress which I will release soon.

You can actually see my FanPage and see the FBML in action, if you already have not liked me. More strategies are also listed at Infinite FB to help you with your Facebook campaigns.

Related posts:

1. Understand How to Finally Use Facebook
2. FaceBook Advances: Properly Using the MarketPlace
3. Ryan Deiss, You Have Cluttered My Facebook

There are some interesting concepts about this traffic source because there are variables that can just ruin your campaign. So first, here is the overall campaign after just 3 days. A total of 84 clicks, .023% CTR, cost avg CPC 2.20, total spend 185.49. For some reason I was never able to hit my limit of 100$ a day.

Why I chose DirectAds, because no one has a job and I feel marketing agencies or even consultants may want to use Facebook Ads for their business or even people with no jobs maybe interested.

* This case study might be all over the place.

Not really impressive stats for 3 days but ehh. So I treated this campaign as if I was advertising on Facebook. The goal was to get a decent CTR. Since my product is $77 I figured I can spend $2 a click. It would be near impossible to be profitable on an email submit offer at $2 a click. The campaign started with 1 ad and then as I started seeing the clicks, I made 2 more ads which got better responses.

Below are the stats on he ads I created. The first one I ran for 1.5 days, then the others ran along side the first ad. Reason why the spend for the first ad is higher. So you can see the stats and see that my 3rd ad did better than my first 2. I am unsure if the CTR is good on their network, but I assume it was good because I am treating this as if it was Facebook, which I know I shouldn’t.

The link went directly to my home page of Infinite FB. Which is also optimized to capture leads if they tend to exit.

The approval process was fairly fast almost in 15-30 minutes my ads were approved. They had no issue from me using the Facebook logo or use Facebook in my copy. So it seems they are fairly lenient. But I think they are because no one is really advertising on their platform. The ads on their network are from other advertisers. I do not see any affiliate offers on there, just because $2 clicks are just freakishly high, it’s hard to even test.

My Target:

• Target Audience 5,153,744
• Gender: Males
• Age: 25-34 and 35-54
• North America
• I did not chose Seniority, Industry, Job Function, or Company size. This campaign was strictly Gender, Age, and Geography.

Traditionally I do not like to generalize, but the targeting is just bad. They limit Job Functions to titles such as CEO, VP, etc. Industry is also limited. There is no keyword targeting, so in the end I had to generalize my campaign. I had no option because my target volume was too low when choosing an industry or job titles.

The traffic received came almost immediately, there is also a delay in real time clicks (Prosper202) with their clicks, about 1-2 minute delay. So I would see my click on Prosper202 then 2 minutes later see that click on DirectAds.

The biggest playing factor was the headline and copy I had in my ad, the third ad did better just because I figured out the type of users clicking and the actual demographics on LinkedIn. It was interesting to test and play around with copy.

Final results:

Total Spend: $185 | Total earnings: $70 | 1 sale out of 84 clicks | $.83 EPC

Uncontrolable Variables:

There are also an extra variable within your ad that I totally disagree on the DirectAd network. The fact that users get to see who is advertising, just boggles my mind. When I created my first ad last month, I noticed my name was on the ad. I did not want anyone to know I was advertising, so I made a dummy account. Which might have hurt my ad and is the reason why I think this function should be removed.

The image below shows you that the ad is automatically associated to you. The footer of the ad will say From: Your Name or Company. Which also is clickable to the end user. This doesn’t make sense, because you are now limited to advertise your company and if you have no information in your profile the end user may see it as a false ad. There are just different factors to it.

I do not see the big benefit for affiliates or advertisers, this only benefits a company or person. Having that link clickable isn’t useful at all, the other factor is your ad isn’t guaranteed to flow with the click. By this i mean, your ad will not be displayed when the user clicks on it and it will still count against your impression if it does reappear (I assume).

So this variable is just a bad way to advertise on LinkedIn, again only benefiting the company or person.

Another variable is the type of ad being displayed, you have no control if you want to display text or full ad. There are 4 places that the ads are being displayed:

1. Sidebar within your inbox or messages
2. Top of LinkedIn profile and dashboard as text (see image below)
3. Sidebar as either a 250 * 250 with 3 ads or 300 * 250 with 2 ads
4. Footer of dashboard and profile page

Not sure if there are more, but those are the ones I noticed and here are the screenshot of the image placements. Again you have no control if you want to chose text or full ad, nor to get to chose placement or style of ad. So you do not know if text performs better than the actual image. This is a variable I couldn’t even track.

So there are way too many variables within DirectAds, that I learned a month ago and the past 3 days. This ad network is not meant for affiliates because the offers and EPCs are just low for the $2 clicks. Again impossible to do dating, 1 field submits, maybe even rebills at max payout of probably $45 would still be challenging.

I also think they are still doing a lot of testing because ad formats are being moved and changed around.

I think DirectAds is aiming for big advertisers that has a huge budget to just dispense and waste. Maybe LinkedIn do not want affiliates or online marketers advertising on their network? Whatever the reason $2 a click minimum is just a waste of money and time.

Have you advertised on LinkedIn? After reading this case study are you going to?

Related posts:

1. LinkedIn DirectAds: $2 Per Click – Worth It?
2. MySpace ADs: First Case Study
3. Case Study: Auto-Tweeting Blog Comments

I got an order of 1000 additional likes for my Fan Page, which you can view here. Since I started it the growth happened slowly and it rapidly grew over the next 2 weeks. When I first inquired about this service, I asked some simple questions. Some were about targeting and what country they are from etc. I just didn’t want people to like my page, I wanted targeted users and people who will interact with the fan page.

After some small interrogation questions, I went on with the service and waited till my 1000 likes came about. Today, I took a look at my insight and saw that I have seen growth.

As you can see there has been a growth of users to my fan page. I gained about a total of 1200 new users to my fan page. SocialKik over delivers to make sure they hit their 1k like to your page, so you can receive more than 1k likes. As I am going over the Facebook Insight to the page, I found 70% are from the US which is good. I didn’t want 80% to come from India or another foreign country, since my target audience is in the United States.

The most interesting part is where my users came from. Looking at the stats below you can see that I have another ajority in the Philippines and UK, which is not that surprising because according to my analytics those are heavy hitters as well. I am also surprise to see that little are from India. Usually with these services, the users are from India.

SocialKik says there are no bots or spamming done. Instead of using bots they invite users, meaning they can like your page or not. It is up to the users to decide to like or not. So it is up to the end user to decide if I like or do not like your page. SocialKik says these are real users.

I post on my Fan Page quite often and I found some users do really interact with the page. Some comment and even like the posts. So I can say that these users are real, you can even check it on my Fan Page. SocialKik definitely did deliver and I am satisfied with the results. Looking at my Facebook Insight, I can see users interacting and visiting the page.

Now as far as turning interaction into potential leads/buyers I do not know. As of right now I enjoy the interaction of my new community on my Fan Page. I just hope these new users do not leave the fan page, I guess I just have to keep them interactive.

BTW for some reason Jonathan Volk seems to follow my footsteps in online marketing and decided to post a review as well.

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