Hot Tips for Building Six-Figure Facebook Campaigns FAST!

If you’re running Facebook campaigns, this is a must watch. Paul Jeyapal is continuously making a name for himself in the affiliate marketing space. After finding success himself, he is passionate about helping the next generation find their big win.

This one presentation 10x AWasia 2017 attendee’s ROI on their ticket purchase. Paul goes over a little known “psychological leak” in your campaigns that could be silently killing all your profits, creating aggressive yet compliant ads, crafting ads where customers can’t say “no” and much more.

Speech by Paul Jeyapal | Co-founder & CEO, Synapse Media

Paul Jeyapal Speech Transcript

Alright, thank you so much for coming out to check out the speech. And thanks Eric for the intro.

I just wanted to thank everybody at Affiliate World Conferences.

I got a sneak peek yesterday before I came onstage to see them setting up. There was a lot of hard-working people working to put this all together.

So thanks for everybody that did that.

So quickly to kind of go over what Eric said. He covered a lot of this but I’ll just get into a little bit of detail.

I started out on the STM Forum. It’s about 6 – 7 years that I was on there in every single thread I could get my hands on.

I started out of mobile, went over to Facebook.

Now I’ve managed millions of dollars of ad media spend. Our agency primarily focuses on Facebook.

I’ve been in this space for 6 to 7 years. Now we primarily do performance marketing on Facebook for agencies and internal offers as well.

My Goal: To Help Affiliates And Media Buyers

So today’s speech and presentation are really about helping affiliates and media buyers in the room who are at that stage, where you have 3 or 4-figure campaigns but they continually die out or you find burnout. (Learn more about: Pay Per Call Dos and Don’ts: Inside my Most Profitable Campaign)

And you’re finding difficulties and actually finding sustainability in this space, actually creating a business around your affiliate endeavours.

Nobody wants to check their volume and continually see that campaigns are dying out and then go back to the grind of trying to get it to go again.

So, I’m gonna teach you guys strategies on how to get to 6-figures and stay at 6-figures.

Well 6-figures and then go to 7-figures and stay there.

It Starts With… Offer Selection

So first off, is not every offer is actually designed to go to 6-figures or a quarter million.

If you think about it, there’s a lot of restricting factors and a lot of them are invisible to you if you don’t really look beyond the surface level.

So for example, if the advertiser doesn’t have the budget or the payroll or they don’t have the proper merchant accounts in place, there are limitations on what they can do in terms of facilitating your ability to get to 6-figures with that offer.

Another thing is metrics.

Do they know their LTVs, do they know how much a lead is worth? Do they know how many buyers they have in their funnel to actually purchase from this particular funnel?

Another is logistics.

Like if you’re selling physical goods, how do you know if they have the shipping facilities? Do they have enough inventory, do they have the right fulfilment centre?

You can’t just put the pedal to the metal and then crank a quarter million sales but if they don’t have the inventory or the sales facilities to deal with that, it’s not gonna work.

And finally is digital.

So, if you’re in the lead space, some people just can’t handle that kind of volume.

Maybe they don’t have buyers on the back-end, servers go down when you start pummeling them with traffic.

There are just certain things that can be roadblocks to you that if you don’t know to look for this ahead of time, they’ll stop you while you’re trying to scale a massive campaign.

Scalable Offer Types

So this is what you kind of want to look for when you’re starting out.

Tip #1: Find Proven Advertisers

Number one thing I would recommend, find advertisers with a history of successfully paying affiliates and paying other media buyers.

I’m not gonna name names, but a lot of affiliates and a lot of media buyers have been left out in the cold for non-payment.

This is one of those biggest things that it could make or break your business.

If you’re exposed at having a quarter mil in accounts receivable, that could bankrupt your business.

Number one thing before you scale, consider this, “Is this person a reliable source to pay you back or to keep bankrolling you?”

Tip #2: Find Advertisers That Know Their Metrics

Number two is if the advertiser actually knows all their metrics.

Do they actually know what their lifetime value is, do they know all their LTVs or CPAs.

The people that really know their stuff, they can afford to scale with you. The people that don’t know their stuff, they’re inexperienced.

And as soon as you start scaling with them, they’ll freak out. They don’t know how to handle your traffic.

When we’re talking about physical goods, like production and shipping facilities, for example, Aliexpress, for those of you that are running e-commerce, they’re designed to handle high-volume affiliates.

You find a product in the US that you want to blow up on Facebook.

Maybe take it to a quarter mil and the guy is only used to producing 10,000 units, he’s not gonna be ready to take care of those kinds of shipping facilities, those kinds of storage facilities.

All these problems are going to arise. So something that people overlook is that when you start to make campaigns go to the next level, there’s increasing blind spots and issues that are gonna arise. And it’s your job to kind of foresee that coming and be able to deal with it ahead of time.

Tip #3 Have Digital Back-end

And then the last one is having the digital back-end.

If you’re doing a lot of leads, do they have a high volume capable CRM, do they have the buyer technology, do they have optimised servers to deal with high volume traffic?

These are all things that you should be looking for when selecting offers that you want to do 6-figures with.

So I’m gonna give you guys a quick example of where things can go wrong.

Say you’re you’re running a sweepstakes offer. It’s starting to look really good. You’re doing 3, 4-figures a day.

You figure, “Hey I’m gonna blow this up!”

But then all of a sudden you put your pedal to the metal. And you figure out that the advertiser doesn’t know what they’re doing.

They don’t know their numbers. And they don’t know how many leads are in their correct path.

They don’t know how many people are buying. And so basically it starts to fall apart.

And soon enough you’ll get a message from the advertiser saying, “Hey I want to shut this offer off, this isn’t working for me.”

This is just because it’s not working from their back-end.

Another example is going to be like a solar centre, right. They work with a call centre on the background.

Now, if they don’t have properly trained staff, they don’t know how to do the sales funnels, they don’t know what regions have what kind of regulations and permits and grants, these are all things that can come into your way when you’re trying to scale.

So you really want to work with veteran advertisers that know their metrics that have been through the ropes.

And a really good indicator is that they’ve worked with other affiliates that are doing a serious volume.

Alignment: Major Consideration To Getting To 6-Figure Campaigns

So a major thing to getting to 6-figure campaigns is alignment.

When you start out as an affiliate, it’s all about exploits. It’s all about how do I make quick cash now.

And you really have to abandon this mindset when it comes to trying to make 6-figures and the reason being is that you’re not trying to pull one over on the advertiser or the affiliate network.

It’s not just about finding an exploit or a hot campaign.

It’s really starting to adopt that mentality that this person is now my business partner. This person is somebody I have to be aligned with because there’s no way you’re gonna get to 6-figures by screwing somebody over.

You’ll get to 10,000 / 20,000 and they’ll bail on you.

But nobody’s gonna support you all the way to 6 or 7-figures if you’re trying to screw them over.

A Must: Understand The Business Model

So as an affiliate, you need to get on board with the advertiser. You need to understand their business model.

What works for them and how you can support them?

And then this is where you need to become more transparent.

With a lot of our advertisers, we tell them exactly what we’re running, what angles, what audiences were targeting. We’re passing sub IDs, we’re being super transparent.

And in return, they let us know right. Instead of kicking us off an offer, they say “Hey we can adjust a payout here or we can move you over to this geo or we can make this work a different way.”

Always Build Trust

As you go you’ll find that as you are aligned with the advertiser, the more success you’ll have.

And you build a lot of trust this way.

I know for a lot of you, you may not be working with direct advertisers right away, but you can treat this same philosophy with affiliate networks too.

If you treat them like your business partner, you’re gonna see a long-standing relationship. And you’re gonna build a business together.

If you try and screw them over for the short term, you’re not gonna see very much success.

And very unlikely you’ll get to 6-figures.

The other thing with this is, when you respect people from the alignment perspective, you start to get perks.

Exclusive offers, exclusive traffic sources that are just specifically for you.

Payout terms. They even will come into play to almost be like your bank at times. In terms of, they’ll support you in financing your ability to scale.

So typically this is what anybody who hasn’t hit a 6-figure campaign, this is what they imagined it to be.

They hit something big from 3-figures a day, 4-figures a day. They figure it’s gonna crank to like a quarter mil and just stay there.

And it never really works out like this. And I’m gonna explain why and in a couple slides here.

Mainly, the reason is you do not get campaigns that just go to the moon and stay there. There’s always burnout and there’s a cycle that kind of follows.

So typical 6-figure campaign is gonna look something like this:

Campaign Life Cycle (Example)

So just to give you an example, we were running a campaign in Canada. It was doing like $10,000 to $15,000 a day in spend. It lasted about 3 weeks.

And then it just started going downhill.

You can spin up creatives, you can spin up landing pages. You can do everything you want, it’s gonna slow that arc down but it’s not going to stop it.

And at some point, you’re just gonna burn out like a candle.

Canada as a geo is 33 odd million people. And there’s just only so many seed audiences you can make, so many lookalikes, so many targeting things that you can hit.

And if you’ve hit it hard enough at that kind of spend, you’re eventually gonna burn it out.

Why Do Big Campaigns Burn Out?

So why do big campaigns burn out?

Audience burnt out. So if you can run tons and tons of lookalikes, interest targeting but if you’ve been hitting the same offer in a small geo, you can completely take it out.

Another one is geo burnout right like we burnt out Canada.

There’s only so many people. And if they’ve seen your ad 3-4 times even through multiple interest groups, they’re just not going to convert anymore.

The offer can go down, budget or cap issues.

So you know, in the nutra space, there’s a lot of guys who have like merchant account issues. And a lot of different things that would dictate them not being able to keep the offer up.

Double Edged Sword: Spy Tools

Spy tools is an increased competition. This is one of the terrible things about having a monster campaign is once it blows up, it’s all now visible.

People are seeing it in AdPlexity, Big Big Ads, in Ad Sector and all these other tools.

And now you’ve got increased competition of people eating away at your angle, your offer, your whole setup.

Regulatory changes, not something people talk about but Facebook policies. They can impact how you’re running your funnel, pin submits, regulations and foreign geos.

That’s going to take out what you’re doing.

So there are all kinds of reasons that things can get taken out. And so you kind of have to just be able to understand that these big wins come and monetise them as well as you can but just don’t expect them to last forever.

This is a key and this took me a while to learn and I really hope you guys get a lot of value out of this.

The Key To Scaling: Redundancy

I kept chasing big campaigns. I was lucky enough that we hit a lot of big campaigns but I never found sustainability in my business until I understood this particular slide, which is redundancy.

It’s not about just chasing one campaign to another.

It’s about being diversified in a way where you can run so many campaigns that when you come into work or to check your volume dashboard, you’re not seeing zeros.

Because your big campaign went down but you’re seeing, “Okay, maybe I lost 1 or 2 campaigns and I can rebuild this over the next 3 or 4 days.”

You want to kind of be always increasing slowly and you might get a chip in your volume. But you’re gonna always kind of be building on top of it slowly.

So we’re gonna go into each of these and I apologise if you guys are like super-affiliates or more advanced. Some of this might be going over stuff that you might already know.

How To Pick Verticals

So how to pick a vertical. So spy tools, that’s a good way to take a look and see what’s kind of spooling up.

Monitoring trends, so like at this conference, I don’t know if you guys have been kind of like putting your ear to the ground, cash-on-delivery is a big thing, e-commerce products are coming up.

So these are the kind of things want to look for in terms of picking your verticals.

Network reports, I always take a look at top performing offer lists from all the different networks.

Verticals that are already generating millions in sales.

Don’t be other people’s guinea pig. Wait till it’s proven. If it’s done a million, 5 million or 10 million then you know it’s actually working.  So you want to get in there and get your piece of it.

And it’s available across multiple affiliate networks, other affiliates are doing 10k plus a day.

So you’re just looking for a verification that this vertical is actually working.

And then have friends or contacts in the same niche. This is a huge perk.

Different niches they have like different groups of people that hang out together.

It’s a great way to get intel on what’s working, what particular offers or verticals are working.

How To Pick Offers

So offers is very similar.

Ask for the highest revenue offers on the network.

Okay, so some people like to pick offers based on EPC. I’m not the biggest fan of doing this because you don’t know what’s driving EPC right.

If the guys are doing pop traffic, it could be really little EPC. If they’re running email traffic, it can be really high.

It’s not indicative of what the offer can do for you.

So I always like to look at revenue because it looks through all of that. You can basically see on the network, it’s doing this much damage.

Ask how many publishers are making it work.

Sometimes a rep will hit you up and say “Hey this offer is killing it. Yeah, I should jump on it.”

But the truth of the matter is, it might be one affiliate that works for an internal team that’s got it working.

I like to hear that multiple people got it working because then I know there’s a way I can attack it.

Pick Offers That Are Not Too Restrictive

But you don’t want to always chase something if it’s just one pop making it work. They might have an invisible advantage that you don’t know about.

And then you want to check spy tools. Same kind of philosophy as verticals.

And you want to pick offers that aren’t too restrictive.

So, for example, carrier billing offers in a very small geo, it might make you a $100 a day.

But do you really want to spend the time and effort and try to stack those kinds of campaigns together? Or do you really want to focus on finding campaigns that can do volume?

And then check offer links on Similar Web. If you plug in any offer link in Similar Web, you can see if the traffic is going up, spiking or plateauing.

It’s a good indication if that offer is worth your time.

Bonus Tip: Be Careful Of Affiliate Network Recommendations

Oh yeah and there’s a bonus tip on the bottom of that slide.

One thing you got to keep in mind is affiliate networks or if they’re clearly businesses.

And sometimes they’re incentivised to push certain offers because they’re getting a higher commission rate or the advertisers pay them a certain amount.

So, always look out for your own interests. Verify what you’re being told. And don’t go down the rabbit hole chasing offers that you shouldn’t be really promoting.

How To Write Profitable Angles

So how to write profitable angles.

This is how our team does it, is we’ll look out into the landscape find 4 or 5 benchmarks.

So, if I was gonna run a cash-on-delivery offer, I’ll scrape Facebook. I’ll see in this particular geo there are 3 or 4 different types of landing pages.

Throw it into all of our tests. Cut it down to 1 or 2. And then we’ll make a template out of it. And I’ll show you guys an example when we go onto the next slide.

And then this is the number 1 tip I’ll give you about writing profitable angles, is to try and break down why that angle works.

What’s the emotional trigger, what’s the actual driving force behind making that lander work?

Is it all the before-and-after images, is that a particular kind of sales copy?

And really sit down and analyse that and make jotted lists of points so you know what’s driving the success of that lander.

Just copying and pasting stuff, you’re not really understanding how to duplicate or scale that at a later date.

And then create as many variations as possible.

Break Down Why The Angle Works

So you want to be able to scale it out. You want to have multiple templates that you can upload and run in different geos.

So this is just like a finance lander. I’m sorry if this is anybody’s actual lander out there.

But I just found this. And I wanted to show you guys kind of like, what we do internally like to take this and give it to somebody and say “Hey, can you spin up a different variation? One for students or one for seniors.”

It’s very difficult because it’s like you’re giving somebody a creative task to try and replicate.

So what we like to do internally is we like to look at it from like a component structure right.

So what is this landing page in terms of its parts, which is it’s a benefit-driven headline, calling out the target audience to introduce the problem, target audience related image, benefit, statistic or fact, qualifying the user for the offer, benefit cliffhanger, offer sales copy, and a multi-option CTA banner.

Now, when you give this to a writer or to somebody on your team to duplicate, it’s way easier for them to actually break it down and be able to make multiple copies that you can run in different geos or spit out multiple angles.

How To Structure Your Facebook Ad Accounts

Okay, so how to structure your ad accounts.

People don’t put a lot of emphasis on this but I’ll tell you guys a little story.

We know somebody that was running about $15 to 20 million an ad spend in Facebook on one account but they had multiple campaigns running in that same account.

One campaign got flagged and it bricked the whole account, so they lost most of their revenue.

Diversifying all of your campaigns across multiple accounts is key.

I mean it’s a tactic used by black hat but it’s very much applicable to white hat.

Because the more diversified you are in the sandbox, the less likely it is that the whole ship is gonna go crumbling down.

So we like to keep all of our accounts separate.

So, create 2 BM’s, 5 accounts under each one. If you have agency accounts, you get up to I believe 1,000 sub accounts and separate your accounts by geo or vertical.

We find it easier for a management standpoint and reporting that way.

But also isolate high risk and gray hat offers into their own account. So if that account goes down, it’s not going to impact your day to day white hat campaigns or your other verticals or campaigns that you’re running.

And also keep payment methods separate.

You don’t want one payment denial or like one suspicious transaction taking up your entire chain of accounts.

How To Pick Geos

How do pick geos to run?

So it’s this is gonna be more or less restricted by the vertical that you choose. You know certain geos don’t even have pin submits. Certain offers aren’t available in all geos.

Bankroll. Can you afford to compete in tier one? Like I encourage a lot of people to run outside of Canada and the US. There’s a lot cheaper traffic, way less competition, tons of money to be made.

But it’s like a pride thing or I don’t understand why people don’t do it.

And it’s also, affiliates are always looking for the least path of resistance. Like getting translations isn’t that hard and it can lead to a lot more ROI or you can go hammer time and try to make 30% ROI in Canada, right.

And make sure that advertiser has a track record in that geo.

Like I said, if they haven’t monetised in that geo before, don’t try and be their guinea pig.

End Goal: Be Diversified

So this is your goal at the end of the day is to be very diversified.

When you come in and you look at your volume campaigns, you want to see, like in this example, 15 to 20 campaigns running all diversified across 3 or 4 different niches, different countries, different accounts.

It’s all separated.

So this is your defense mechanism when you come to work.

So you don’t come in and see everything go to zero. You might see a chip, you might see a dent, but you’ll always be powering forward.

If you come in in 25 campaigns or up, and the next day you lose 3, you might be able to get those 3 back up in the next few days. And then add another 5, add another 6, and you continue to pile this on.

This is how you get to 6 figures.

It’s not sitting there trying to chase unicorn campaigns, it’s building a diversified portfolio of campaigns that have the risk all spread out.

The Portfolio Approach

This is what we focus on in our business. So the gray line represents our portfolio.

At all times, we have a portfolio of campaigns that have all of our income coming in through different geos, different offers, different campaigns.

Then we chase the unicorn campaigns on top of that.

That way my business doesn’t live or die by the next big campaign. I can still ride these huge waves.

But at the same time, I can hire media buyers. I can hire team members and I don’t have to worry about my business going bankrupt because my unicorn campaign burned down.

The Campaign Killer

Alright, so this is kind of cool.

I learned this the hard way by split testing the living crap out of stuff. But we learned this internally and I’ve had tons of affiliates reach out to me. And I’ve helped them with this in the past.

What happens is that this particular subject we’re going to talk about, it led to me figuring out a campaign that was basically break-even. Not making money, to making 400, almost 350 or 400k on it.

And is about fixing just a very small thing. But once you understand it, this concept is huge.

As a media buyer and affiliate, I get tons of people sending me campaigns to ask for feedback. And this is one thing I see and people don’t know how to like, kind of analyse it or fix it.

So I’ll go over it with you guys.

Vital: Funnel Congruency

So it’s funnel congruence, delivering exactly what you promised to the user.

This single concept can make or break your campaign.

So what you have to understand is when you create an ad, you’re making a promise to the user. Whether you realise that or not, people don’t get it.

But like in the newsfeed, when you put a picture up and you have the ad copy, you’re saying I’m promising to show you content that matches this.

Affiliates like to get lost in the details, right.

Instead of figuring out the fundamentals, we like to do CTA split test. “Is the green or red button is gonna work?”

Our landing plane split tests like for speed, pricing split tests, upsells. We like to tinker with all the little details.

But none of that shit matters if your funnel is not congruent.

You can tamper with the CTA button and make it a billion different colours but if people aren’t clicking, it’s not gonna do anything for you.

Average Affiliates Focus on CTR and Cheap Clicks

The average affiliate focuses on CTR and cheap clicks. So they’re trying to get it up in the 18-20 % CTR. And they’re focused on getting a super cheap clicks.

Super-Affiliates and Media Buyers: Focus on High Intent Clicks

Super-affiliates and media buyers are focused on high intent clicks. Qualified clicks, high CTR, high CTR, overall traffic quality as secondary conversions, and most importantly concurrency.

Is a click that I’m actually buying qualified. That’s a huge thing you have to consider.

So I’ve seen this a ton, like I get campaign sent to me and I check them out. And this is a lot of what I see is super high click-through rate, cheap clicks, 10-15 cents isn’t converting.

You take a look at their landing page, and it’s like, they got a high 18 to 20% percent ad CTR.

They have a 2 or 3% landing page click-through rate. And that 2 or 3% is usually curiosity and it’s not qualified.

And they have zero conversions.

So I’m gonna actually go through an example with you guys so you can kind of understand how to identify this problem. How to fix it. And how to kind of grows your campaigns from it.

Example of A Typical Creative

So this is like a typical creative that you’ll see out there that has this problem going with it.

So every day for 36 years, this came back to haunt her. And then the up top title says “It kept me up at night.”

Now when you see this, people are gonna click on it. It’s gonna have a monster CTR rate.

So you’re gonna have something like 18% CTR. Your linked CTR is gonna be really good and your CPC is gonna be super low.

But at the end of the day, nothing’s really gonna be converting.

You might get the odd conversion but you’re basically tricking people, right?

And the problem is this is very misleading, extremely vague, attracts unqualified users, and very high negative feedback.

So you’re likely to get your ad account banned writing stuff like those, pretty fast.

And here’s the thing, what are users expecting to see?

They’re expecting to see the thing on the left. Some story about like a horror case or that’s relative to what the ad that they saw.

You hit him in the face with like some sort of finance offer. And saying she was haunted by her debt, is just gonna piss the user off.

So I’m gonna show you how you can actually kind of address this.

And you’ll see this kind of ads on native and on Facebook all the time.

Ad Treatment #1

So ad treatment number one, we added the word debt.

So every day, for 36 years her debt came back to haunt her.

Now your ad CTR is gonna start decreasing but your link click-through rate is gonna remain pretty solid.

The correction here is, now you’re going to start actually attracting qualified users.

Just the simple thing of adding the word debt in there, you’re now telling people what the story is about.

So they’re now coming through a little bit more qualified.

It’s less misleading, less vague, and attracts better clicks.

Ad Treatment #2

So this is ad treatment number two.

So at the very top it says, “I remember taking a deep breath and exhaling. For the first time in many years, I felt like I didn’t have a negative cloud of debt hanging over my head.”

Every day for 36 years, her debt came back to haunt her, find out how she finally paid it off.

Now, your CTR dropped from 18% to 13% but your conversion rate actually improved. And now you’re actually getting people to get this campaign to start actually making profit.

Because when you’re actually getting that click into your funnel, it’s qualified.

They know what they’re expecting to find out. How this woman, who was in debt for 36 years actually figured it out.

So getting super qualified clicks.

These ads are clicked bait but they’re really qualified click bait.

So this is the secret sauce, it’s putting click bait on top of actual congruent ads and making what I call unicorn ads.

Super high CTR but super qualified. That’s the major key here.

This isn’t from this particular campaign. But if you take a look that bottom screenshot from volume, that’s one of our campaigns.

So 35% LP CTR and a 45% back-end conversion rate on the offer.

This means you’re bringing in traffic that is super qualified and it is backing out 50% of all the clicks that are going through the LP. You’re actually almost converting.

So here’s a couple of quick tips and tricks on how you can improve funnel congruency.

Ways To Improve Funnel Congruency

One of the things I like to do is go to the offer page of, getting the ads right is one part of it, but you can also do a couple different tricks like this.

So for example, you go to the offer page, you find out what the colour of their click-through rate or their call-to-action button is. And you can actually jack the CSS and put it in your lander so it matches.

So when they click buy on your lander, it matches the exact same thing they see on the offer page.

It’s all about congruency.

It’s got to feel like everything they’re seeing feels like it is put together in a seamless way.

Next thing is you can use their colour theme and match the offer page.

Another thing is like, if it’s for example, financial websites tend to use a certain font or theme. You can match the offer page to your landing page to make sure it all looks the same.

So this is how you fix or this is how you make a funnel congruent and make it profitable.

That concludes my presentation. I hope you guys enjoyed it.

Hope you guys can take this and apply this and take your campaigns to 250k.

Q&A

Paul:

Eric who’s gonna come out and ask me some questions.

Eric:

Yeah, I think, are we getting chairs? They told us there would be chairs. It’s been a long day. That was really good. You’re also gonna be able to catch Paul on the live stream at Facebook Mastery Live. And he’s got more tips.

Paul:

Yeah. There’s like a second part to this presentation. It’s like super technical stuff. And that’s gonna be at FBML.

Eric:

Nice, have a seat. Join me. How you feeling?

Paul:

Good.

Eric:

I think that went really well.

Paul:

A lot of people in here.

Eric:

There are a lot of people, yeah. So Paul, you’re an up-and-coming name in the industry. Who wrote this? You’re known for giving back by being active in community, openly sharing insights and lessons you learn along the way. But with the industry being traditionally sort of keeping things close to the vest, how do you see the line being drawn when you help others?

Paul:

It’s difficult because there’s so much time in a day. And I would love to help everybody. But like I’m not in a position where I can handhold everybody with their campaigns. I find that it also comes back to you. The most successful affiliates are very self-sufficient. They can take a small piece of advice that you give them. And Google search a hundred different things and figure it out on their own. And those kinds of affiliates succeed a lot faster.

Help The Next Generation

But I think it’s important to give back because the learning curve in this industry is extremely high. If you can break through, it’s your responsibility to kind of help the next generation do their damage too.

Eric:

Yeah and it’s just this whole rising tide, raises all boat things that as the industry gains, you know, as a total. And if you’re gonna be ahead of the curve as well, right. You’re giving things away but you’re also constantly innovating so you can kind of toss off things as you go.

Paul:

Yeah exactly, Mister Me Too’s don’t last very long in our industry.

Eric:

Nice. So if you’re an affiliate and you’re starting to hit the 5-figure mark with some Facebook ads, what is the timeframe for reaching the 6-figure mark if you applied everything you spoke about today? And we’re talking about grinders here, we’re not talking about side hustlers.

Paul:

If you went home right now and just focus on diversifying your campaigns, say, for example, you have a campaign doing 4-figures a day in one geo. If you hit up the offer advertiser and say “Give me 5 more geos and translate what you’re already running”, within like 3 days, you could be like tripling in revenue.

Eric:

It’s crazy. So we haven’t done this today actually but we have some microphones set up across the front. And we’d love to turn it out to the audience here. Paul put a lot forward there. And so if anyone has a question, just pop right up to one of these microphones and hit us with it. Or if you want to know about my ICO that I’m launching.

Paul:

Buy-in now.

Eric:

Anyone? House lights? Pressure is on you guys, someone come up. No? I guess we haven’t set the precedent with the crowd asking questions really. It’s all good.

Audience Burnout

So audience burnout can be predictable. You spoke about it in your talk there. A lot of the time you’re gonna burn your audience pretty quickly. What types of offers are more prone to this, more volatile? And what advice you have for better long-term offers that will have longer shelf life?

Paul:

Yeah. So the stuff that’s really restrictive is when the targeting has to be something specific. Like this person has to have really good credit, this much income, blah blah blah. And it’s like when you see on Facebook and you’re setting up your targeting and it’s gonna get smaller and smaller, once you get into that range where you know you’re gonna burn this out. If you’re struggling to find audiences over a 100,000 then you’re probably on the wrong track. So like we typically like to be able to work on offers where I could have audiences where I’m targeting 1-2 million or a 4 million plus. And there are multiple opportunities there. Whether that’s over lookalike audiences or interests, I want to be able to target big groups of people where I can keep this offer at scale. Because you have to really look at the ROI on your time right. Is this worth all the investment? Is it gonna last me 3 or 4 months? And is it worth stacking on my pile of other campaigns?

Recommended Tools

Eric:

Interesting. So are there any like third-party tools that you find sort of indispensable? Any sort of like creative tools or any sort of like PMDs? Any tools you’d recommend?

Paul:

Yeah I was a huge fan of WhichAdsWork.

Eric:

I think everyone was a huge fan. What do you use now?

Paul:

I use BigBigAds. And there are a couple other ad spy tools that are coming up. But it’s just a different approach.

Eric:

Yeah.

Paul:

It’s got fundamentally the same data there. For us I think, internally we rely on a lot of just like classic tools like the Photoshop Premier and stuff like that.

Eric:

Spreadsheets.

Paul:

We do use some data sources but a lot of it we just use in-house Facebook tools just like audience insights.

Ad Spying

Eric:

Yeah. So one of the other things we’ve done together is you produced an ad spying course for us. It is based on WhatRunsWhere or WhichAdsWork but it’s the principle that you talk about. You talked a little bit about your sort of philosophy of ad spying. Why you use it? How you innovate? What’s your general principle with ad spying?

Paul:

A lot of people put a lot of emphasis on the ad creative part of it or they’re like always trying to look for these like hot ads that have a lot of engagement. And I’m more about, I like to do the FBI approach of like going to multiple sources and rounding up everything. For example, when I spy, I keep track of affiliate IDs. So if I see somebody with like a monster landing page or I keep seeing the same affiliate running monster campaigns, I’ll take a look at who the affiliate ID is. And keep an eye out for that because I know it’s a super affiliate.

Create Bigger Facebook Campaigns

So stuff like that where I’m always looking for not just what’s inside the creative tools but like things from domains, traffic, referral sources, like all these things. Cumulatively, I look at how I can kind of use that to my advantage to create bigger campaigns.

Eric:

So it sounds like a lot of your business is sort of CPA-based. You’re running a lot of offers and things like that. But you’re an agency, have you diversified more into sort of more traditional agency clients? And how do you balance out the workload? Because obviously the scale isn’t usually gonna be as high on most agency campaigns unless you land a monster client? How do you balance the workload between the high producing profit things and maybe the more steady secure agency clients?

Paul:

This is where like running a business really derails from being an affiliate because you gotta sit down and run the numbers and understand your costs and what your labour costs are, internally. But we start looking at opportunities from multiple perspectives. And one of the things that we look at is just, do we want to work on this? Do we like the person? And the other thing too is like relative to the other stuff we’re working on. It’s hard to justify taking on a managed client for $5,000 a month when you have campaigns that are doing $5,000 a day. And also this is just a little tip for those of you that are trying to get into the agency space.

Bonus Tip: Consider Your ROI On Smaller Clients

You’ll find that smaller clients want more time from you. So the guy who wants to give you $5,000 a month is gonna want 30 hours of back-and-forth email. Whereas the guy who will hand you 200k a month, he’ll probably talk to you 3 times a month. And so you really gotta do this ROI calculation of how much time am I putting in. How much money are we making? But my whole presentation was about diversification and that doesn’t just apply to offers, right. Our business below the performance side is diversified like that. But even on a higher level, we’re diversified on the agency front performance and now getting into e-commerce. So we have multiple redundancies, where we’re protected.

Eric:

Yeah. So when I first met you, we were both at Go2Mobi, which is a mobile DSP. You were on the internal team. We just did a panel earlier today about internal versus external media buyers. I’m just curious when you were on that team, when did you know that it was time to bounce and go do your own thing?

Paul:

Honestly, I went there with the intention of wanting to learn and be part of a startup. I always knew that I was gonna run my own shop and work with my business partner and I’m building something bigger. But when I felt that I wasn’t learning anymore and I had hit that ceiling, that was kind of the parachute time for me. I’m one of those people where if I’m not being mentally challenged, I get really irritable.

Eric:

Okay, I got it. So you’re positioning yourself, and you’re doing a really good job I gotta say, as a thought leader in the space, your posts. If you’re not following Paul, it’s Paul J, right?

Paul:

Yeah, full name is Paul Jeyapal. You can find me on Facebook. Just launched a YouTube channel and doing more public speaking.

Eric:

Nice, yeah. You can see that we do a podcast together, went pretty well. We have to do another one again soon.

Paul:

Yeah, I got a couple people come up to me and talk to me about that.

Eric:

Oh nice, so you’re positioning yourself in this way but who are some people that you’re really keen on learning from? Who are some of your idols in the space?

Paul:

Lorenzo and Stackman. And all these like, the OGs from the STM Forum. I think, Jason Akatiff, and Jason Kryski. There are guys here doing like monster numbers and I think it’s like, you’ve really got to identify with what resonates with you and what’s meaningful to you. And to me, like seeing guys in this space just like building massive businesses that are like possibly exitable doing 100 million plus and revenue, That to me, far excites having a lifestyle business making 5 grand a day or a couple grand a day. I just think that like building something huge and employing 200 or 300 people at someday that’s amazing to me.

Eric:

Why?

Paul:

Well I just think that, you got to ask yourself, how many people in the world have been able to accomplish that? Like build a 200 person company and hit 100 million in revenue or whatever, right. And that’s an extremely difficult challenge. And I want to challenge myself to get there.

Eric:

So it’s about the challenge, I always try to find out like, what is really driving people to do these things. And you know you get to a million, it’s like, “Okay when’s ten?” You get to ten, it’s like “Okay when’s a hundred?” Like what’s wrong with it? It’s just the way we got to do it, right?

Paul:

Yeah, I think entrepreneurs would struggle with retirement because it’s just the way your brain works. You’re always trying to build stuff.

Eric:

Oh we’re never gonna retire. I don’t think were gonna be able to. There’s gonna be no Social Security for us by the time we get there. Nice. Okay, do we have anyone? Oh, we got a question right here. Tell us your name. Can we make sure the mic is on? I think that was good.

Audience (Marcus):

Can you hear it?

Eric:

Yeah.

Audience (Marcus):

Hi my name is Marcus. And I have one question actually regarding, let’s say the first mile, so how you scale from zero to let’s say $100 per day or $200? How you set up your split test or how much money you invest, let’s say for this for the testing? The start.

Picking Offers and Verticals are Fundamental

Eric:

Just to figure out whether you have potential, you mean?

Audience (Marcus):

Yes, correct. And how much are you willing to spend to see if you have a loser or not? And what’s the strategy? From zero, how you scale from 0 to 100?

Paul:

Okay, so there a lot of the principles about like picking offers and verticals that will apply regardless if you’re at zero or if you’re at 5,000. Picking offers and verticals correctly is fundamental. The amount of money you need is all relative, right. Like if you pick native or Facebook, and also like do you want to run in tier one Facebook or do you want to run in a very small geo? The prices are relative, right. So there’s a bunch of different variables. Personally, I don’t recommend starting to media buy unless you have like 5 or 10k in the bank. And if you’re going to start on Facebook with 5 or 10k, I would probably not start in Canada or the US. Try and get another, for example like New Zealand. They speak English.

Eric:

Barely. Just kidding, I love kiwi’s, I don’t know why I did that. Sorry.

Pick Smaller Geos

Paul:

But like for example, you could run in New Zealand and you don’t have to translate your landing pages. It’s a smaller geo. You can test it out and you can get more bang for your buck and kind of cut your teeth there. So I would definitely recommend going to a smaller geo, focus on learning as much as you can with a smaller budget. And just test relentlessly but make sure you follow what I mentioned up there on how you pick offers and verticals. And do all that testing on a micro level. And then once you start seeing patterns of success, that’s when you can replicate and go up from there.

Audience (Marcus):

What is micro level? Is this 20 bucks a day? 50? 200?

Paul:

Okay, you gotta ask yourself, like I said, ROI of time. Do you really want to be wasting your time trying to massage a $20 a day campaign? For me, if it’s like, our skills are different because of where we’re at as a business. But like even as a solo affiliate, I wouldn’t waste my time with anything that’s not making like a couple hundred bucks a day because there’s other opportunity cost to that. You could be working on another campaign that could be producing $500 a day. So I would focus on finding campaigns where you can make at least $100-$200 profit minimum a day and stack on top of those.

Audience (Marcus):

Thanks.

Eric:

Yeah no problem. Any other questions out there? Yeah, jump up. Maybe just go over there. Yeah that one works. Hello.

Audience (Solo):

Hi I’m Solo from India. I have a question. So I’m not too sure about the quality of leads from the lead generation ads of Facebook. So I do see that there’s a massive number of leads which turns up, but the intent of the person subscribing or signing up, it’s not purchase or anything. So they sometimes they just click sign up but for no reason. So is there any way that we can control this because I see there’s a massive turnaround of just people subscribing or signing up, despite doing the right audience targeting, despite reaching out to the niche. I do see them just signing up for the sake of it.

Paul:

Okay, sorry we’re having a little bit of a hard time hearing you.

Eric:

Come right up, there’s just so much sound going on.

Audience (Solo):

Like, my question is this.

Eric:

That’s better.

Audience (Solo):

Okay so my question is with respect to the lead generation advertisements, there’s a lot of fake leads which comes into picture these days. So there’s a lot of leads but then they’re not with genuine ones despite doing the right creative, right targeting but we see that the intent of the person signing up is not to purchase or to take even a call, but it just they just click sign up. So that’s like a user. Is it Facebook behaviour as such that everybody’s just signing up for every advertisement that they see? Or is that we put some protocols here. So that’s my question.

Evaluate Your Offer

Paul:

Yeah, so to evaluate that, like is your offer in any way incentivised? Like are you giving away something or are you giving them some sort of like, well what’s your bait to get them to give you the user submit? Because like sometimes when you get a lot of like poor quality leads coming in it’s because like you’re telling them you’re gonna give them an iPhone or $100 credit. And they’re doing it for the credit and they’re not doing it with the intent. So that’s number one, is evaluate whatever bait you’re putting in front of them. It might be the wrong thing that could be attracting the wrong type of quality. And the other thing too is if you’re leveraging Facebook, go take a look at your database and figure out who’s the highest quality users that you have. And how can you build lookalike audiences off of them. Try that from the targeting perspective. Also work your way back on the ad front and see if you’re being transparent enough. Like if you’re getting a lot of signups but they’re not coming with high enough intent, maybe you need to screen them better with your ad. So you know, like maybe mention the terms of services or a negative part of your funnel that would weed out the looky-loos from the people who will convert. So just make sure they know that at some point like, I’ll give you a great example about this. If you’ve ever seen like ads running for adult dating in the past, guys always put no credit cards submit, no nothing blah blah blah. The person goes to the page, they gotta pay a credit card, submit and it doesn’t work.

Eric:

Yeah.

Paul:

So you get a really poor quality. So be up front, tell them there’s a credit card submit and you get a higher quality user on the back-end. So whatever your wants or needs are as an advertiser, communicate that more effectively on the front-end.

Audience (Solo):

Thank you so much.

Eric:

Yeah no problem. We got time for one more question if anyone’s got one. Oh, come on up. I think both mics work now.

Facebook Campaigns: Big Budget + Manual Bidding versus Low Budget + Automatic Bidding

Audience (Ralu):

Hi, hello guys. Nice to be here. By the way, my name is Ralu. And I really have a quick question. Big budget with manual bidding versus low budget and automatic bidding. What do you think? I’m not talking about the testing phase.

Eric:

We like big budgets we can’t lie.

Paul:

Like for scaling?
(Recommended Reading: Secrets To Facebook Compliant Scaling)

Audience (Ralu):

Exactly.

Paul:

So I really wish I had a definitive answer for you because we test manual bidding versus auto bidding a lot. We’ve recently seen a lot of fluctuations in that. Like for example, there’s Q4 that’s going on right now, which is making it very difficult, but what I would highly recommend you do is that take both strategies and test them. But triplicate what you’re doing. So like if you’re gonna test manual bidding like a very large budget, say $500, make 3 versions of that ad set and the same for the low bid or automatic bidding and let them come out of the gate and see which one does the best. And don’t spend your full budget. Like, spend like $50 or $100 and whichever ads that perform the best, stick with that one.

Audience (Ralu):

It will influence the output a bit.

Paul:

Pardon?

Audience (Ralu):

I mean, if I do that. If I put, for example, the ad sets within a campaign, 3 of them. The manual one will influence and will increase the bid from the auto bid of the normal.

Paul:

So when you’re optimizing, like if say the budget is $500 and you’re only getting through like $50 of it to make your decision. There is audience overlap, you’re correct but what you’re testing for is, the way Facebook works it’s like a spotlight right. Like in this room we have 100 people or you know 500 people. If it picks the 5 people in that corner and they don’t buy, you start getting really high CPMs. But if it goes over there, and it picks 5 people and 3 people buy, it does really well. So what you’re trying to do is, just out of the gate, try and find a good segment that it tacks on to and then shut off the other one so they’re not competing. But it’s more about getting that first sample size right. So that’s why I like to triplicate, so I do it on an ad level and on an ad set level. And I understand that it can be some overlap but we’ve seen success doing it that way.

Audience (Ralu):

But what would you prefer? Which one?

Paul:

So my recommendation is you try both. And then, so run 3 versions of your manual bid. Three versions of your auto bid. And then pick the ones that perform the best out of the 3 after $50 spend out of say, all 6 ad spends.

Audience (Ralu):

Okay, thanks.

Eric:

Yeah, thank you. Alright. Oh yeah, one more quick one, sure.

Audience:

Okay, thank you. We are doing digital surveys. I sell a website. And we have now almost had more than half a million traffic every month. We use to do Google ads and Facebook ads by ourselves but you know, we are new to digital advertising industry. So we have a few experiences. For now, we are thinking about scaling up our advertising. So here’s my question, what’s your suggestion so that we could be team for specialised to do this kind of digital advertising? You want to suggest us to find a third-party agency? Let’s say our main market is in America and Canada. What’s your suggestion and why? And what is the best practice to cooperate with the agency there? Thank you.

Eric:

Sorry did you say you’re a publisher?

Audience:

No.

Eric:

You have a product?

Audience:

Yeah I have a product. So we need to consider if we have a limited budget. Let’s say $50,000 monthly. So should I recruit a team to do this kind of Facebook advertising by ourselves? Or should I find an overseas agency, like agency in America?

Paul:

Easiest answer is to come see me after. So the answer to that is, if you know your offer works on a performance basis, if you know all your metrics and stuff like that, I would work out like with the agency that you work out with. A deal that’s incentivised based on performance. If you do a lot of stuff that’s just based on spend, you can get taken for a ride and your incentives aren’t aligned. But I would I recommend that for like $50,000 a month, probably best to find a really good performance agency like ours…

Eric:

Really?

Paul:

…that can really handle this for you and optimise and take you to scale. As opposed to trying to teach yourself. And I wouldn’t recommend going to just talk to other agencies, especially, unless they have a history of performance. Because running performance versus branded campaigns on Facebook is 2 separate beasts. It requires a completely different skill set to get people that complete actions and do sales and things like that.

Eric:

So yeah talk to Paul.

Audience:

Thank you.

Eric:

Yeah. You’re welcome. Okay, everyone thanks very much. Let’s give Paul a great round of applause, so much value there.