Matt Marcin - Incentive Marketing

SocialMedia Tips!

I’ve had a lot of people asking how to use SocialMedia.com effectively since posting about it a few times. Like I had said before, it’s not the easiest media buying service available but it can provide a crazy amount of traffic quickly. I’ve seen some people say that they went through $300 in just 5 minutes. I personally have done $100/minute. That might seem like a lot, but if you are turning even a 20% ROI, it adds up! Today’s article is about using SocialMedia and not losing your shirt in the process.

Getting Approvals

New advertisers will need to get approval of every single ad they create before it will run on the network. I’ve seen this take up to 48 hours so you have to be patient. However, once you get approval on an ad, you can modify any part of it without getting approval again. Use this to your advantage when split testing your ad copy’s. Once you start spending $1000/day you can generally get in touch with someone easily to quicken the approval process.

SocialMedia has much less strict guidelines when it comes to ads compared to Facebook SocialAds. As long as the ad is not completely deceptive and it’s not a Crush cell phone offer, you’ll most likely be approved. It’s a great place to run offers that might not be suitable for Facebook SocialAds. I am not 100% certain if they allow ringtone offers though.

Controlling your Cash

Since SocialMedia gets so many impressions you can expect a crazy amount of clicks in a short period of time. With the speed that they will throw you visitors, it’s important to have a handle on your money so you don’t lose it all in 5 minutes.

The Daily Budget is the MOST important tool on SocialMedia. When you are testing a new ad copy, set that budget at $20-30 and see how it performs. You will be charged for all clicks up to the daily budget but any clicks that come after that are free. As you make adjustments, just increase your budget and the clicks will start pouring in within a few minutes.

Setting your Bids

Unlike AdWords and Facebook SocialAds, SocialMedia does not tell you what you need to bid. They let you guess and then wait around to see if it’s enough. The bid price you set is what you will pay per click. It is not the max bid. Keep this in mind!

Now, as a rule of thumb this is how I set my bids. I start with 0.15 clicks and get my initial 50 or so clicks from this. Now I know what my CTR is so I can price my bids to get traffic at the right price. Below is a little chart with approximate min bids depending on your CTR. Remember these are approximates. You may need to tweak them but this should be a good starting point.

• CTR: 0 to 0.15% | $0.30+ | Make a new ad…
• CTR: 0.16 to 0.20% | $0.25+
• CTR: 0.21 to 0.25% | $0.20+
• CTR: 0.26 to 0.30% | $0.16+
• CTR: 0.31 to 0.40% | $0.13+
• CTR: 0.41 to 0.55% | $0.11+
• CTR: 0.56%+ | $0.10

These ranges may change as time goes on. Bids are highest in the morning and then clicks get cheaper as more and more advertisers hit their daily budget. I’ve had ads with a 0.3% CTR getting a ton of clicks at 10 cents a piece an hour before midnight! You will need to play with your bids to get steady, affordable clicks on a consistent basis but once you get it right, you can get a huge number of clicks in a short period of time.

Text Ad Tips

I want to stress that you should avoid using words such as: CONTINUE, OKAY and GO as your Action Text on your ad copy. The majority of your clicks will be accidental. Unless you can convert accidental traffic, I wouldn’t use those on your ad copy. You will get cheap clicks though as your CTR will be around 1%. Other than that, just keep working on your text ads to squeeze the highest CTR you can.

Closing

SocialMedia is like a fire hose. You can drive huge quantities of traffic in a short period of time at a pretty cheap price. It may not be the best quality traffic out there but I’ve been able to get offer conversion rates of near 40% which as you can imagine, is big money! Now get out there and give it a shot :)