So how do we know what can be run safely on Facebook?

Personally, I talk to other affiliates to find out what kinds of campaigns can be run without getting a lot of accounts banned. I also like to browse spy tools to see what kinds of campaigns seem to have more longevity than others.



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Using Spy Tools to Find Long-Running Ads/Campaigns

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Here’s how I find campaigns that have run the longest, on two of my favorite FB spy tools.


AdPatrol:

Search criteria:
Ad seen between = Today
Sort by = Running longest


MagicAdz:

STM members get a discount: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea…ISCOUNT-INSIDE!

Search criteria:
Order = Oldest Created
Time Frame = 01/01/2000 to present

For each MagicAdz search result you want to check out, click on it to open the details page, then do the following:

a)Click on the link for “Facebook Page:”, go to “Page Transparency” > “See More”, check the section “Ads From This Page” to make sure it says “This Page is currently running ads” (if not, there’s no guarantee that their ad account is still active, so wouldn’t make a very good example). If you like, you can then click “Go to Ad Library” and scroll to the bottom to see how long the oldest active ad has been running. (FYI: This will only show all ACTIVE ads, and not ads that are no longer being run.)

b)(On the MagicAdz ad details page) Click on “See All Ads From This Page”. This will show all ads MagicAdz has found for that FB page. Each research result will show “Ad scanned x days ago”. Take a quick look at all the ads to find the oldest one.

I don’t know of a way to find out exactly how long an FB page has been running traffic. But between a) and b) above, we can get a rough idea. And if we see a page that has been running ads for close to a year or longer, that still have ads running today, then I’d say it’s a viable business model.

Note: MagicAdz started scanning ads approximately 1.5 years ago (it’s March 2020 at the time of writing this – so maybe around August 2018?) So we won’t find ads that were “scanned” before then, but it doesn’t mean the FB page hadn’t been running ads before then.


Some Considerations:

Here’s some stuff to keep in mind while looking at these search results:

-Some of these businesses have been around for a long time, with websites and FB pages that are aged, so there are things they can “get away with”, that you and I can’t with our new website + FB Page + ad account.

-We don’t know what kind of ad budgets these businesses are spending. They may be spending a lot of money and have access to FB reps and therefore will be able to “get away with” what we can’t, OR, they may be spending small budgets daily, thus staying under the radar.

-This is why, once you’ve identify some business models you’d be interested in potentially pursuing, it would be good to “drill down” into those models by searching in spy tools for more examples on those models, to get a more complete picture.


Below are some examples of business models I’ve found, that has potential of being run on FB for a year or more without getting banned. I’ll try to add to this list as I find more.

(I’ve decided not to share examples of actual FB ads or pages in some cases, because I don’t want to have all of us clicking on links and screwing up stats for those affiliates.)



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Examples of Viable Business Models

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1)Ecommerce Store

It shouldn’t come at a surprise that owning your own ecom store or site is one of the safest business models.

Of course, whether or not FB will like you, will still be heavily dependent on what types of products you sell, and the ad angles you use. But that pretty much applies to anything you promote on FB.



2)Ecom CPA Offers

These would be ecom offers from ecom networks like Jumbleberry and Giddyup.

First of all, I must emphasize the fact that even if we run “100% whitehat” offers in a 100% compliant manner, we can still get accounts banned.

Remember the “banning by association” concept we’ve discussed before? I’ll go into more detail on technical setup and linking structures in a separate post. Basically, we need to know that there are safer ways vs. less-safe ways to set up campaigns for ecom offers (and actually, for any affiliate offers in general).

There are several concerns here that I can see:

a)The FB page you’re running campaigns from – is it top quality and linked to a site that looks like a real business? (The more legit the better.)

b)The site that contains your landing pages – does it look like a real, legit business? (Again, the more legit the better.)

c)Are any redirects used (aff links and tracker links fall into this category)? (Avoid using redirects in the ad.)

d)The domain of the url in your ad – how many other affiliates are running links from the same domain? (If so, very risky.)

e)The domain where you have your FB pixel installed – is it a “good” or “suspicious” site in FB’s eyes? How many other affiliates are running traffic to it? (Avoid having your pixel added to a site that risks being “tarnished” by affiliates running non-compliant.)

The most risky way would be to direct-link from ad to affiliate link. This is so risky I wouldn’t recommend it.

At the other end of the spectrum: The safest way would be to run an offer that is created exclusively for you, on a unique domain. A close second would be to run an offer where you have exclusivity for the FB platform, i.e. you’re the only affiliate allowed to run that offer on FB. If you can’t get exclusivity, try to run offers that only accept a few, choice affiliates – the fewer the better.

And if the offer owner allows you to run campaigns from THEIR FB page, all the better!

So what if you don’t want to go the risky way, but aren’t running enough volume to get exclusivity (which I’m assuming is the situation you’re in if you’re reading this newbie tutorial)? Then what?

Here are some good practices – the more of these you incorporate into your setup, the better you should be able to delay the banhammer:


a)Use a landing page. I’ve spoken to enough affiliates to be able to make the tentative conclusion that FB doesn’t appear to follow outgoing links on landing pages. This means that as far as “banning by association” goes, FB would be judging your campaign based on the quality and reputation of your landing page domain, not the offer site. (It should really help to make your landing page domain look like a real business, offering a good service of some sort.)


b)Avoid having your FB pixel added to the offer site. If one affiliate (or enough affiliates) decides to run against policies and gets banned, FB can flag the offer site, which can lead to your ad account being flagged along with it.

However, without having your FB pixel on the offer site, you wouldn’t be able to optimize towards sales – you’d be missing out on the ability to build look-alike audiences – one of the most powerful features of FB advertising.

That is, unless you decide to subscribe to the Prosper202 tracker:

https://prosper.tracking202.com/apps…02kw=stms-solo

(Note: STM does not make any commissions and this is not an affiliate link.)

Prosper202 has a “deferred pixel technology” feature which is very interesting. Basically what it does is, it allows for the FB pixel to fire on sales, WITHOUT having to get your FB pixel added to the offer site.

Better yet: Because this tracker feature uses S2S postback, it allows us to run offers from aff networks that DO NOT provide the option of adding our FB pixels to the offer page, and STILL be able to collect pixel data.

Here’s more info on the deferred pixel feature:

http://prosper.tracking202.com/blog/…-s2s-postbacks
@Mr Baffoe talked about this feature in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea…l=1#post387597

(DISCLAIMER: I haven’t personally tested this feature myself, although I have faith that any potential “bugs” would have been fixed by now since the Prosper tracker has been around for years and must have a solid subscribers base. If you’re in doubt at all, feel free to wait until I’ve tested it and provided feedback.)

Alternatively: Instead of having the pixel fire on sales, you can set up for the pixel to fire when a visitor clicks on an outgoing link on your landing page, and then set up your FB campaign to optimize towards that event. Of course it wouldn’t be as accurate as when you can optimize towards actual sales, but it would be the second-best option.


c)Avoid using tracking links that redirect. This is similar to the advice against linking from ad to affiliate link. When implementing tracking from ad to landing page, try to use parameters instead of redirects. Also, for outgoing tracking links on your landers, try to make the tracker domain the same as your landing page domain.

In fact: It may be wise to transition to a business model that does not involve any 3rd party links (aff links, tracker links), as major browsers such as chrome will be phasing out 3rd party cookie tracking. It’s not immediate, but will sneak up on us sooner than we know. If you’re interesting in finding out more, please see these threads by @Mr Baffoe:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea…iate-Marketing

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea…kies-in-chrome



3)Capturing and Selling Leads

In general, I know of two ways to do lead gen:

a)Send traffic to CPA offers (e.g. solar panels, insurance, mortgage, debt consolidation, legal), where the visitor will fill out their information on the offer page.

The concerns I’ve listed above for running ecom CPA offers also apply here.

b)Create the form on your own site, capture that data, and send it – either to an affiliate network or directly to lead buyers (e.g. solar panel companies, insurance companies – businesses that can contact and convert these leads).

These leads are typically sent through an API, via GET/POST method. This is referred to as “Ping Post” or “Host and Post”. The leads are normally sent through a leads distribution system, such as leadspedia.com, which would then send the leads to one or more buyers.


I’ll be doing a separate module on this topic at a later date.



4)Entertainment Articles

Example: https://app.magicadz.co/ads/101136197/eefea0

This particular ad was running for 978 days.

FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/meta.spoon

Website: https://www.metaspoon.com/

If you check their Ads Library and click on their ads, or go directly to their website, you may wonder how they’re making their money – you won’t see monetization of any sort.

However, if you surf from the full link MagicAdz got from that ad (or any other ads by that advertiser), using a VPN set to a Canadian IP, you’ll see that they’re monetizing that site with ads.

Full link with parameters: http://nullrefer.com/?http://www.met…011M1w2a3565a0

The site was set up in such a way that unless you’re surfing from the target geo AND from a link that has the correct parameters, you won’t be shown ads.

Don’t have the technical know-how to create a site like that you say? You don’t have to – check out this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea…t-monetization



5)Books and Courses

Creating your own info products can be a good way to start more income streams. And if we stay away from topics that are controversial or sensational, or topics that are normally associated with scams (e.g. get rich quick and easy), plus the product is of high-enough quality that customers don’t bitch in the ad comments or give bad reviews on the FB page – chances are FB will look favorably on our product.

For example here’s a book that has been selling on amazon since 2015:

https://app.magicadz.co/ads/100004621/e89aa5

FB page: https://www.facebook.com/SignsFromPetsInTheAfterlife

Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0991641426/ref=cm_sw_su_dp

This particular ad was running for 905 days:

The beauty of this business model? You don’t even need to write the books yourself.

Here’s an example of a 30k-word kindle book I paid $500 to an extremely talented, top-notch quality writer on UpWork to write, with minimal input from me (you’ll see it on amazon soon):

The ecover was ordered from Fiverr: https://www.fiverr.com/pro_ebookcove…ver-with-bonus

A potentially even more-lucrative model, would be to create your own online course. Again, if you think it must be a daunting task, let me show you just how easy it CAN be.

When I first started to explore energy healing, I came across this course:

https://academyofenergyhealing.com/c…tioner-course/

It’s a pretty comprehensive course, and I enjoyed it, but I’d say that at least 90% of the course materials can be find on the net, including:

-Definitions + explanations of energy healing concepts and modalities.

-Youtube videos (many of which were not made by the course creator).

-Free PDFs that can be found on other websites (the course instructor were just direct-linking to those).

For inspiration, here a sneak peek into the member’s area (click on the image to watch the animated gif on imgur – remember to full-screen):

You can completely outsource something like this on UpWork. For more technical topics that require more in-depth know-how than what simple web research will provide, hang out in FB groups or forums in the associated niche, partner up with someone that knows what they’re talking about, and either pay them a fixed cost or do revshare on the profits.

There are literally thousands of niches you can do this in.

So that would be your content. As for how to set up the delivery: A brief look at the source code revealed that the site above was built by wordpress, and the course area was a wordpress plugin from a service called “Academy of Mine”:

https://www.academyofmine.com/platfo…paced-courses/

The lowest-priced plan is $499/month, which pays for itself after the first few sales. The more technical of us can do this for a lot cheaper using member’s area plugins. (Although: The AcademyofMine service does have some pretty nifty features, such as enabling students to mark each lesson as complete, and submit homework and see a grade and feedback from the instructor. You get what you pay for, but not every course needs these bells and whistles.)

The product could even just be as simple as a PDF.

Alternatively: Can use Clickbank for product delivery.

Another nice touch is that the course is accredited by what appears to be a recognized authority:

https://academyofenergyhealing.com/a…ion-insurance/

The price of obtaining this accreditation? $299 one-time – around the same price as one sale of the course:

https://www.iictinsurance.com/traini…ining-provider

Many niches have these authoritative/governing bodies, and provide similar services. Getting your product approved with them can be a big selling point.

As for revenue – it’s easy to figure out how much revenue has been made from that course to date:

Granted, we don’t know what the ad spend was, but with that kind of margin, and some solid research on what types of audiences to target in campaigns and what ad angles to use in ads, it shouldn’t be difficult to turn a profit.

As for the marketing part, I’ve put together some tips in this thread: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea…-on-fb-in-2020

There are entire courses out there on how to create info-products, but hopefully I was able to show you how easy it can be done. Having your own product will allow you to avoid FB’s banhammer – again, nothing’s 100% guaranteed, but this business model is as safe as it gets.



6)Ad Agencies

We should all be familiar with how ad agencies work. It’s similar to running affiliate offers, except being an ad agency is so much safer – as we’d often be the only one (or one of few) running paid traffic for the client, and on behalf of the client.

Recommended setup: Use 1 ad account per client. And run campaigns using the client’s FB page to take advantage of their authority (assuming they’re a legitimate business).

FB understands that most businesses (especially smaller ones that don’t have the budget to have an in-house media buying team) don’t have the know-how to run ads, and that they would outsource the task to a media buyer or ad agency.

Every time I speak to anyone from FB (marketing specialists, live chat agents etc.), when they ask me what my business model is and I tell them I have an ad agency generating business for clients, they’d understand how that model works and would do what they can to help.

Again, there are entire courses on how to find clients. I may write a post on this topic after the core/general module and the step-by-step modules are done.


Do you have any additional information or campaign models to add to this list? Please do share below!



Amy