Further to my Facebook Monetization Video, I’m going to give a little step by step on how to build and profit from a points based facebook application.
The first step is to have a look and familiarize yourself with a few apps that are good examples of this business model.
(fluff)Friends 340k Active users - 3.5MM Installs
Get a Cute Little Animal Friend for your Profile.
Make him cuter by buying stuff with ‘Munny’ at the (fluff)Shop.
Participate in (fluff)Races to win Munny (gamble).
Fill out offers to get lots of Munny fast!
Personally, I’d be much more aggressive with the ‘Offers for Munny’ area of this app and have less free munny available, but I am a greedy bastard. This is a good example of a higher popularity app using this model.
My Aquarium 155k Active Users - 4MM Installs
Add an Aquarium to your profile, Buy some fish for it, send your friends fish for their aquariums.
This is the same guy as the ‘My Graveyard’ example I used in the video. He also runs ‘My Garden’ and several others. In order to send and get fish you need points. I bet you can guess how one goes about getting points…
Free Condoms 22k Active users - 400k Installs
Add app then do stuff. Get free condoms in the mail.
Earn “bangin bucks” which can be used at their store to get condoms or t-shirts for free.
I like this example because of its extreme simplicity, something which is highly desirable on facebook. You could build an application that lets you get anything and everything for free. You could build the killer app that does it all for everyone. But I bet you’d fail. Simple and clean is what people love. Not a “Choose from over 20,000 free things” but a simple “Get some free condoms”. What works on facebook is not a “Sports fan” application, not even a “Baseball” or “Hockey” fan app. What facebook users want is a drill down to simplicity and have a “South Surrey AAA PeeWee Slow Pitch Baseball League for One Armed Albino’s Fan”. IMHO. But I digress… back to the point.
So lets get started shall we!
Step 1) Build a facebook application that requires users to need something. Send a gift to friends, spruce up their profile, give to a cause, win a game, earn points, get credits, add mojo or whatever the hell you can cook up.
The building of FB App is covered extensively elsewhere. I will not be answering questions such as “How do I build an application?” or “What application should I build?” Or especially “What is this facebook you speak of?”
Step 2) Get a massive userbase with a strong desire for useless glittery crap.
This is the surprisingly easy bit actually. Where else but facebook can you make a crappy little program that puts a picture of a steaming turd somewhere and suddenly within days have a userbase of 10’s of 1000’s of people? Try building a regular webpage that does that and see how long it takes you to get that many users…
Step 3) Where can I find offers to use?
MillnicMedia.com, there are several other networks out there that will also work with you in doing this BUT none of them are nearly as smart, funny, or pretty as we are. We have been voted the TOP CPA NETWORK FOR OVERALL SERVICE AND SATISFACTION for 9 of the past 12 months‡. Don’t be fooled by pale imitators. We know facebook, we know developers and we answer our phones. Try getting someone on the phone from GOOG or CJ.
Step 4) Which offers you should use
Because you are offering rewards in exchange for completing offers you can only use offers marked as ‘Incentivizable’. These are offers where advertisers are willing to accept a slightly lower lead quality in exchange for a much higher lead volume. These offers typically have lower payouts than regular ones, but there are obvious enough reasons for that. If you are ever in doubt about whether what you are doing is incent or not, ASK FIRST. We’ll happily make that call for you.
Step 5) Getting people to fill out the offers
In my opinion, the real catch to making money through advertising in this web 2.0 world is making your ads NOT look like ads. Banner Blindness is rampant. No one wants to look at a banner ad, let alone click on it. By integrating ads into the look and feel and using language that is natural to your application, click through rates shoot through the roof.
Encouraging users to want/need points/credits versus being frustrated by not being able to do what they want without filling out offers is a fine line. Always make the basic functionality of your app available and accessable to everyone. Make the elite and special features available to everyone.
Let’s use a gift giving app as an example. Let’s say you have a “Give your Friends a Kick in Nuts” app. You want to make sure anyone can kick anyone in the nuts BUT if they want to kick more than say five friends in the nads per day… They need 10 ‘testibucks’ for every kick. Or if they want to send a ‘Super Ball Cracking Thunder Smack in The Nuts’ they need 750 testibucks. This way the day to day fun and viral qualities apply and you can still provide a good user experience as well as get a huge user base. BUT the heavy users of the app will generate the income needed to make it all worth while.
Step 6) Tracking who has filled out what
The most effective way to track back user action is by passing us a unique identifier through the URL string. The most obvious would be their FB userid. Within Millnic Media you will find two different types of URLs to send your traffic to us.
mnjump.com links
or
affiliate.millnicmedia.com link
With mnjump.com links there is a paramater called ’sub’
http://mnjump.com/?b=16201&cd=CD4&c=1338&sub=
so you would make that param = $fb_userid
Lets say the fb user id is 456789 then the link would look like this:
http://mnjump.com/?b=16201&cd=CD4&c=1338&sub=456789
with affiliate. links you simply append the subid to the end of the URL.
so the link would look like:
http://affiliates.millnicmedia.com/sw/16199/CD4/456789
You can append absolutely anything and have it return as a sub id.
You then write a script which regularly fetches conversion results from us. On the Millnic Media Statistics Page there is a button called ‘Download Optional Info”.
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This will return a CSV file with a list of all the leads you generated and the sub params that you passed to us.
Now here is the complicated bit… Not all campaigns are tracked in real time. Users take varying amounts of time to complete the offers (2 minutes to 2 hours). Advertisers are given a reasonable amount of time to run automated fraud, bad leads and duplicate lead discovery queries (a few minutes). Third party pixel tracking systems cache data and update at regular intervals (usually every half hour). It sucks but is the reality of the industry. Many CPA vendors will make claims that their offers track in real time, but here at Millnic Media, we prefer to skip over the bullshit spin doctoring and just tell you the truth.
So thats the problem, now here is the solution.
A) Let your users know UP FRONT that there is a delay in the tracking and that you have to wait for the ‘advertisers to report back to you’. Which will take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.
B) Provide a means for them to report missing credits/points to you. What we do is provide an automated ‘Contact Us’ form. All messages through that form AUTOMATICALLY get credited the points. It is just not worth the time to manually go through these requests and make decisions about who should get points or not. The points don’t cost you anything (or much anyway) so it is easier to give them away than to run a customer service department. Leads will get scrubbed (the same person may have filed out the same offer in the past on another app for instance in which case they would not get credit). Pixels misfire (people move on to the next page faster than all the many pixels on a page can load up - we all see how long it takes for shit to happen on facebook, well it is tee same for ad networks managing millions of clicks and pixel fires). A certain % of leads WILL fall through the crack. Again, any network that tells you differently is full of horse puckey. It is a small % and we raise the payouts to compensate for it. Instead of giving you $1.20 for an offer we give you $1.25, knowing that a few % will not get credited to you, so this balances it out.
Step 7) Geotargetting and managing those pesky foreigners
Most (dare I say all) CPA offers have limitations on which countries they are valid in. In order to make the most of your user experience and maximize your revenue stream you MUST manage geotargeting. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS check where your user is from and ONLY show them offers available to that area. Showing people in the UK offers that are only valid in the USA is well… stupid. If someone from the UK clicks on one of our USA only ads we do redirect them to an offer that is valid for them. But because it does not land them on a page that they are expecting to get to that matches the description of what they were looking for, the conversion rates are extremely low (next to nil). So the moral of the story is to alway check geo-locations and deliver content accordingly. We have offers for Germany, Sweden, Australia, UK, Canada, New Zealand, etc, etc. Use them properly and you shall be rewarded. Be lazy and you are effectively chopping 10% of your income stream off. Don’t be lazy… 90% of facebook usesr will feed you their country automatically and the other 10%, you can simply ask to choose a country from a drop down.
Step 8 ) Getting Paid
This is the fun part! We pay all facebook application developers who earn more than $1000 in any given week, THE NEXT WEEK! Any earnings you make by this Friday night you will be paid for next Thursday. We prefer to pay by ACH or bank wire but will also do a check or Paypal (we will ONLY do Paypal if you have already received and cashed a check from us, we do NOT do Paypal as a first payment.)
If you have any questions or comments about this walk through, please ask them in the comments section of this blog and I will do my best to answer them quickly.
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Thanks and good luck out there!
Jason ‘Chickenhole‘ Bailey
myAquarium
(fluff)friends
Free Condoms
‡ By more than 80% of the people in our office. There is always that one asshat that doesn’t agree.
