How Publishers Can Profit from Buying Facebook Traffic

The thing that you have to understand about Facebook advertising is you just have to test a ton of stuff, and most of what you test is going to fail for all kinds of different reasons that only Facebook knows.

We have 13 full-time [staffers] focused entirely on Facebook traffic. That number doesn’t count our video team. We have a paid team of four people that is focused on taking the top 15% to 20% of our organic Facebook posts and putting money behind them.

If we have a piece of content about the movie “Iron Man,” we can use our data to see if fans of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are also “Iron Man” fans. So when it comes to targeting for that “Iron Man” post, we will do one version of that post that goes just to fans of The Rock. This data is based on all of the voting on Ranker that tells us fans of X also like Y.

We haven’t been hit much by Facebook’s various algorithm changes, other than the fact that we don’t have as many viral home runs anymore.

It really depends so much on if you are on mobile vs. desktop, and on how granular your targeting is. But I’ll just say this: We’re able to consistently buy volumes of traffic on Facebook for less than 2 cents a click.

No. We get half of our unique visitors from organic search.

We’re actually starting to license this software to other publishers. We have done a successful test with one large publisher, and we’re open to taking on others. We have a queue of seven other publishers lined up to test it.

Pay to play is here to stay as a piece of the Facebook traffic puzzle. It’s not the only part, but it’s an increasing part of it.