Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

Chase just announced this morning that they will be “pausing indefinitely” their credit card affiliate program.  This is pretty big news considering it is coming on the heels of American Express announcing the cancellation of its business card affiliate program.

This is pretty interesting because it is leaving affiliates with less cards to promote, not to mention wondering what company will pull their products next.  Capital One? Citi?  If another major issuer leaves the market, credit card affiliates could take a huge hit, even more so than they have been seeing over the last 3 months.

I haven’t posted much recently because I have been trying to keep my nose to grind.  Not to mention, there is so much acai drama going on, it could keep anyone busy.

Last week, out of the blue, I was assigned a Facebook account rep (what up dude, if you’re reading, sorry about the cloaking post - swear I don’t do it).  At first I was really skeptical of what he could offer me, aside from being able to call him when I need big limit increases, which he did.  After talking with him on the phone today I learned SO MUCH about Facebook and he was an awesome guy.  It was actually pretty amazing everything he told me.  I am not going to share it all, I got to keep some to myself but here are some of the big highlights I learned from him:

• Contrary to popular belief, Facebook does not use interns to approve ads.  They have full time employees (yes I am sure it must suck) who approve ads and also double as customer service.
• When you see intern.facebook.com show up in logs during reviews, it stands for internal not as in an intern
• Facebook does pace your campaigns during the day and it paces on campaign limit.  So he suggested that I raise my campaign limits real high to like 20k/day so that it would show more ad impressions, instead of pacing it to a lower limit.
• If you want a big boy daily spend limit, they like for you to have a debit card associated to the account.  I was informed there are quite often large charges that get bounced, so if you attach a debit card as a back up, it can help to get large limit bumps.  I added one and they were quick to bump me pretty high.
• Using keywords can really help, even for broad demo’s.  He really stressed that I should try using keywords more than I do, said a lot of people don’t use them and they can make a big difference.
• Another suggestion was to really break out ads by city/state and call out that city/state in ads.  I’m probably not going to do it because I am lazy, but he said a lot of people see CTR boosts when doing this.

If anyone needs/wants a rep and spends decent coin on facebook, he said I could pass his info to a few people.  Just leave a comment here with your real email and I will get in touch with you.

I just recently picked up a dedicated from The Planet, they were having a “blowout sale”.  I got what I think was the best deal I could find.  The server is a dual Xeon 2.8, 2gigs ram, dual 73gb scsi’s, 100 uplink for $139/month.  From what I hear, this is a $200+/month server normally.  So far I have been very happy at The Planet, I just need to learn more about administrating a server.  I know very little about this stuff.  My friends at 3tailer recently got a server at The Planet too and they like it a lot.  Here is there review of The Planet (their server and service).

I think the sale is over, but you should go check, might find a good deal or two.