Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

I just got a beta invitation to facebooks conversion tracking. We have been clamoring for this for a while and now it’s here.

I literally just opened it up and will be testing it this weekend.

There is a new link in my facebook account, called tracking.

At first glance you fill in a tag name, you make this up, assign a category of the type of conversion, and then give it a value of what it is worth for you.

This generates a code that you paste just above the body tag on your landing page.

Then very simply, every time the page loads, it sends the data to facebook, and they record that as a conversion.

What this means is that you need to send the visitor to a page, after the conversion takes place, where you are going to put the code.

You can also track people through a sales path to figure out where you are losing them.

This paragraph fascinates me from the help PDF.

In your reports, if a converting user clicked on an ad associated with the tracking tag’s advertiser account, the conversion is attributed to the last ad the user clicked; if the convert- ing user never clicked on an associated ad but simply saw an associated ad, the conversion is attributed to the most recent ad the user saw. Note that reports may be delayed up to one day.

The phrase “if the converting user never clicked on an associated ad but simply saw an associated ad, the conversion is attributed….” implies to me that it is not going to track only click throughs which we are used to, but WILL TRACK VIEW- THROUGHS. A view through was first brought up to me by Marcus Frind. That is the concept of the user seeing the ad, but not actually clicking on it, and then googling or typing in your site later. My initial experiments on this without this new tracking did not show a result, but Markus Frind claims it is more significant that click throughs.

(hours later)

This actually is what this tool does. Unbelievable. Just when facebook advertising was getting figured out fairly well by a few of us, the game is on again. These new variables will require a much more sophisticated analysis, but will also allow for much more efficient spending of clicks.

This ties in again with the idea of the ultimate user experience.

It is also interesting that this coincided with facebook tightening up a little bit on some of the advertisers recently.

Lots to learn and lots to test in the upcoming days and weeks.

Stay posted!

This week I have been speaking to a new client who is interested in doing facebook advertising for their large online company. The usual questions come up, and I have been answering them.

In a world of affiliate marketers many companies think, “well we could just turn this over to affiliates and the affiliate can take the financial risk of covering the cost of clicks?”

It might work out, and it might not. Once you (or I in this case) have things going decently financially, the idea of risking large amounts of your capital for the possibility of making sales for another company, may not be that attractive.

A really important concept came up in my discussing ROI for the company. That is the concept of lifetime value of the customer. A good example of this is Travian. Travian is a game you play online where you get to build a village, raise sheep, build armies etc. etc.

When a customer signs up to play Travian I make around 2 bucks. It is free for the customer to sign up. Why in the hell would Travian pay me $2 plus what my affiliate company is getting when Travian doesn’t get a cent when the customer signs up? Well Travian knows that over time the customer will end up buying currency online so they can buy more sheep, or a wall around their town.

In my chiropractic office, the lifetime value of a customer is high, because we take extremely good care of them.

On the other hand if you are selling the customer something for free, but in the process tricking them into an illegal, or unethical monthly rebilling of their credit card then you may still be able to get a good ROI, but only because you are cheating the customer.

I predict that as we mature as a group of people marketing on the internet, and the customer becomes more savvy, we will be able to scam them less and less. (Thank God). This means that the real value will be by creating a lifetime relationship with the customer, and making your money off of them long term. This increases the value of the customer acquisition, and also increases what some of us are willing to pay for clicks. Facebook will dig this, because it increases the cost per click.

One of my biggest goals since going online has simply been a good way to handle e-mail that works.

After years of screwing around with different ideas and set ups, my dream just came true.

My little blackberry 8900, my Mac Air, and my Gmail account are finally talking.

Before today I had to delete the e-mail off of my mac, and then off my blackberry again later.

Yesterday, no joke, I finally got around to deleting the e-mails off of my blackberry, there were over 10,000 of them.

Why don’t I use an i-phone? Can’t type on the thing with one hand. Can’t type without looking. Can’t carry back up batteries with me. Breaks when you sit on it or drop it which I do regularly.

Literally took minutes to set up and now my gmail pulls, pushes, does jumping jacks and the whole bit.

Full on stoked that what I expected back in like 1997 is finally possible easily.

So when do I get my waterproof watch phone I expected back in 1995?

Click the little icon below, download it, and you too can delete e-mails off your entire gmail system while waiting in line at Chipotle.

Just got back from Alice in Wonderland. After Avatar and now this, the bar is way up there. I thought we were going to need holograms at the movies to create this type of reality. No need. Give it another 5 minutes and there will be no more need for actors, our computer screens will be 3D, and the movie will change based on our choices and reactions. Wow. To keep up is requiring us to to be faster and smarter than ever. Just WOW.

Up to now I could only target people living in San Diego and that was it. There were a few official cities in the San Diego area like Poway, that are their own city. But the Beverly Hills of San Diego, La Jolla, was dumped in with Barrio Logan, and San Ysidro, which are not exactly well..uhmm….not exactly the same demographics, and definitely not the same location.

Today facebook came out with vastly more cities.

If you are doing local it allows for vastly more targeting. Initially I believe this will decrease a bit of facebook income. The reason is that if you are marketing say for a local car wash that services a certain part of town, before this you would have had to target the whole town. This was a bit inefficient. But when I got it right, I could often turn it right side up anyways.

Now local marketers will be able to be much more efficient. They will not be showing impressions to users who are 10 miles across town and unlikely to use that local business. Overall I expect this to make the hot local areas like say Miami Beach, or Manhattan more expensive, but for local campaigns in these areas I expect to spend less to reach my converting target market.

Facebook has been experimenting with this for a while, but just rolled out a whole mess of cities. I predict there are probably a good 1,000 new cities added today, but I don’t know for sure.

Here are a couple of examples.

Previously in San Diego if you wanted to target La Jolla, (where my office is), or the part of town next door, Pacific Beach, both of which are neighborhoods but not cities, then you had to market to all of San Diego. Today it became possible to go after the specific neighborhoods.

It also used to be that you could only target Los Angles, which is massive, and now you can target neighborhood in L.A., like my home town Sun Valley (the auto wrecking capital of the world), and North Hollywood the neighborhood next door.

This option will take a while to become valuable. For example when I filled out my Facebook profile, La Jolla was not an option for me, only San Diego. It literally could take years for the majority of people to switch their profile to their local neighborhood instead of their greater city.

Until then I will be running ads both to the neighborhood, which will be more efficient, but smaller campaigns, and to the cities at large to generate larger volume.

Wild week with New York Times Facebook Advertising interview, Hanging out and giving chiropractic adjustments to Dashboard Confessional Group, presenting with Rand Fishkin and Lee Odden at OMS, phone call from one of the highest earners in the world (name withheld), letter from IRS saying they have a long lost $1,200 for me, huge facebook advertising home run, and it ended with surfing the san diego tsunami in La Jolla, and then being interviewed by Elliot Spagat of the Associated Press, and having it picked up and run by papers all over the world. I have to get the camcorder battery charger tomorrow, then I can post the video. What a week.

Here is the quote that was repeated hundreds of times around the world in papers:

“David Klein, a San Diego chiropractor, set up a tripod on a bench and recorded himself riding the paltry waves amid intermittent rain. When five or six small waves rolled in, he was convinced he had ridden a tsunami.”

“They actually got big enough to surf on,” he said, laughing. “If you blinked, you missed it.”

A tsunami is heading toward San Diego right now, traveling around 600 miles per hour, the speed of a jet. We just had a mondo earthquake in Chile, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded.

My office is two blocks from the water. Unlikely to be affected, but ???? So I flashed through my mind about what’s inside, all the records, is all the data backed up? Check, Check, Check. For 20 years we have had an emergency plan so that if the chiropractic office was ever destroyed, we could be back in business within a few hours, and fully operational within 24.

What’s funny is that I have fantasized my whole life about surfing a tsunami, and I am sure in San Diego in a few hours some of the crew will be. Today I think I will just be on the shore, not in the water, but I wouldn’t miss it for anything.

When we bought our house I even took that into consideration. Looked for fire risk, if the river flooded how high would the water get, how’s it build for a big earthquake, and how big of a tsunami would it take to wash our house out. Check, check, check, check!

I love when the earth does a little shimmy, or raises an eyebrow. The funny part is when people are surprised that it did. I was there for one of the huge L.A. earthquakes when I was a kid, and then there for the big one in San Francisco.

This is one reason I have never been able to be lazy. I am pretty much either playing hard, or working on something with an income potential. Trust me there have been tons of failures for every success.

Tsunamis come in many ways. Car accidents like the one that just vastly effected the family of a good friend of mine, recessions, stock market crashes, housing market crashes, employees quitting, getting fired, and the list is endless.

Then there are the slow ones, heart disease, arthritis, cancer, and mental deterioration.

Just cause I may sound a little cocky about keeping thing prepped myself, doesn’t mean I don’t have empathy for those who suffer. I have suffered plenty in my life, and I am sure I will again. 🙂 In fact most of what I do, is to help others and in fact that is how ALL of us should roll.

Here is the wake up call. These things, one or all, are on their way toward you.

I am always surprised by people who don’t work hard, who don’t realize that obstacles will try to rear their head just around the corner. If you reading this, then you have time to do something about it now.

The tsunami is coming. It is always coming.

So now is the time to backup your computer, defrag your mind, get some exercise, take your vitamins, start being honest, put less harmful stuff in your body, and wax up your surfboard for what’s around the corner.

As for me I am ready for the tsunami, have been for 20 years.

Hmmm… maybe I should grab my board 🙂

I have been spending a lot of time lately learning the affiliate marketing industry. It all started with my famous selling of a Slap Chop. In my talks with big wigs in the affiliate industry both affiliates, and companies, it has been presented as a challenge the fact that when you crack the code on an affiliate offer and get it to back out (be profitable), the affiliate company can get all the info. The problem with this can be that if the affiliate company can see exactly what you are doing, then they have the ability to compete with you on what you found to be successful.

Eric Itzkowitz the famous San Diego Internet Marketer, has been working on a solution for this, if you are sending the user to an intermediary word press landing page, before hitting the final merchants offer page. It Cloaks the Affiliate ID, so you don’t get ripped off.

Eric made a wordpress plugin, easy to install, easy to use, and easy to learn, and free so that you can gather all of the info yourself of what is working, but not let the affiliate company or the merchant get any tracking data.

Here is how it works.

When you are using Google Adwords, you append the destination URL with a ?kw=

This tells google to automatically append the url with the keywords the person was searching for when they hit your ad.

When the customer hits the wordpress landing page, Eric’s plugin, PPC Keyword Tracker, captures the keywords that google passed on to it.

Eric’s plugin randomly assigns a number to that keyword, that is passed on to the affiliate company instead of your real keywords. Eric’s plugin then becomes the decoder to let you take the tracking numbers that converted, and see which keywords they came from.

It looks easy if you are doing testing, and then if you are doing some volume, you can export it in excel to do more complex analysis.

Like  most people who run successful campaigns, I aint going to give it all away to you. But I am happy to give you a glimpse.

Some details in this article are faked, so you can’t rip off what I am doing. Overall it teaches the lesson though.

We just hit a big home run for one of our clients. They sell a high end product which costs around $12,000 per sale.

Let me walk you through the aggregate guts of what happened over the weekend.

This is for a national campaign.

You can see what happened with one of the campaigns above.

This is one of the pre-formatted reports available in facebook advertising.

It is a summary of what happened over the past 4 days with this campaign.

The first thing that is so remarkable to me is the total. There were over 6 million impressions.

That is a hell of a lot of looks at it.

There were only 1,176 clicks, which yeilds an average of .019% CTR. That means that only 2 times out of every 10,000 times people saw the add, they clicked on it. To me that is like standing on a street corner and showing your flyer to 10,000 people, and only 2 people pick up the flyer and look at it. That would suck.

In this case we paid over a $1.09 per click, that’s the CPC part. If you were trying to run a dating offer, or get someone to sign up for an online game, or buy a slap chop or some such thing, then this would be way too expensive.

If on the other hand, you are skipping the affiliate companies, and a company is selling directly to a specific group, a highly segmented group who are willing to buy the product directly without any middle men, then $1 a click can work out just fine.

The whole trick of course is to target just the people you want to see your add. You need to make sure they are the type of people who can afford your product, and make sure they are the type of people who will buy your products.

Selling High End

Figuring this out is not particularly easy, and it is not particularly cheap to figure out. Someone who knows what they are doing, can still easily spend $10,000 or more on tests before they figure out how to “crack the code” on how to do it. Figuring out how to sell high end items with facebook, is not for the meek, or those with shallow pockets. Once you figure out the basics, it is much easier with each new product.

I spent over an hour this weekend talking to Shoemoney about this subject. I am now in the process of creating a series of products to show the world what I have learned about this subject over the past year. If you are interested in facebook advertising, stay tuned, and I will show you the ropes.

The campaign above? I predict all of those clicks will end up creating probably only one or two sales, but each of those sales will be around $12k. Nice. But still, over 6 million impressions to get that one sale, something to think about.

Thank god we’re not cutting down trees to do this.