Last week on Twitter I mentioned how I was buying Facebook traffic,
Monetising it with display ads on my site,
And turning a profit.
Well, that tweet got a fair bit of interest,
So I’ll share more here,
In case you decide you might like to try it too…
If you missed it or want a recap, here’s the tweet.
I started off with the lowest budget of $1 per day and gradually nudged it up.
Here’s my spend so far on the campaign…
The cost is actually 2.7 cents per click, but Facebook rounds it up.
Now, over to my Raptive dashboard…
When I filter to Facebook traffic and that particular page,
I can see that the RPM is $40.39.
It’s dropped slightly since my tweet,
But each click is still earning me over 4 cents.
The pageview numbers don’t match up exactly because this page also gets organic Facebook traffic.
People don’t just click it, they also like and share it.
So I’m actually doubling my money here.
I spent $156 on ads, and got $322 back.
What’s more, every time someone likes the ad, I can invite them to like the page.
So they see my organic posts.
(You can bulk invite people who like your Facebook posts from the homepage of the Meta Business Suite)
And to really squeeze every bit of value from this campaign.
The page also has a pop-up to collect email addresses.
What now?
I tested a couple of different images – my own image worked better than a stock image.
I’ll continue to test a few more.
I’ll also continue to nudge up the spend so long as the cost per click remains low and the ad RPM remains high.
I’m also going to test this with another post.
Which posts work well for this?
I chose a post that did well in Facebook organically and that also had a high RPM.
In my Raptive dashboard, I filtered the traffic source to Facebook and sorted the page RPM highest to lowest.
For the audience, I chose a US audience with an interest in the thing.
(e.g. if the post is ‘longest train journeys’ I would choose an audience who likes trains).
Will this work for everyone?
No. It won’t.
If you’re not sure, you can test it with $1 per day to find out.
You need a high-RPM post that’s also attractive on Facebook.
My RPM from ads on Raptive is $50.11.
That can be hard to get in a lower-paying niche or if you use a different ad network.
Since I joined Raptive (it used to be called Adthrive) almost 2 years ago,
My RPM has been on an upward trend…
I have heard people talk of declining RPMs,
But that hasn’t affected any of my sites on Raptive.
My sites are fast,
They don’t have too many ads on
And Raptive takes care of everything for me so I don’t have to lift a finger.
My RPMs are the best they’ve ever been.
Their team are the friendliest people I’ve ever come across.
And occasionally, they even surprise me by sending gifts!
Raptive is pretty exclusive.
You need 100k monthly pageviews and the majority of your traffic from US, CA, UK, AU or NZ.
But once you have one site in, you can bring in newer sites with much lower traffic.
(This is great because nobody wants to spend hours faffing around setting up ads yourself on a site that doesn’t make much!)
I’ve tried Ezoic, Mediavine and Raptive (Adthrive) over the years,
I’ll definitely be sticking with Raptive now.
If you’d like to give them a try, you can apply here.
If you do apply, I’d be very grateful if you would Select ‘referred by a friend’ and then enter this code: “RAPTIVE – 4caf3b9f0065f5” so they know I sent you.
I’m not saying it will help you get in, but I do like their free gifts a lot and I could do with a new handbag, haha!
Seriously though, I’m not telling you this for the handbag.
I want to you maximise your earnings as much as possible.
And this is how I’m maximising mine.
– NSL