Successfully marketing your Facebook applications is of course the key to creating substantial passive income by running them. This guide covers everything you need to know to get started marketing your Facebook applications via PPC or CPC advertising networks.

Introduction

Marketing your apps through paid means such as PPC advertisements is without a doubt the easiest and most time-efficient way to get users to your applications and start generating some revenue from them. Of course, the catch is that you'll have to pay for the traffic versus spending your time to drive traffic for “free”, but this shouldn't be a concern. We'll discuss why in more detail further into this guide.

For now, we'll begin be addressing the topic of HOW marketing Facebook apps via PPC advertising or other means is different than advertising a website with paid traffic.

First of all, let's talk about sources. All of this traffic you'll be buying needs to come from somewhere, right? Well if you were advertising a standard website, there's really only one name that comes to mind first when thinking of possible places to advertise: Google AdWords. And this is with good reason, AdWords is a great network for driving affordable traffic and certainly deserves it's reputation of being a millionaire-making-machine, but there's just one problem. Running ads for a Facebook application on AdWords, or really any other similar PPC network (Yahoo, MSN, Adbrite, etc..) would be a colossal waste of money!

You see, there's one thing to keep in mind about Facebook apps; users must be logged into Facebook to use them! Now, of course you can certainly advertise your apps on say... Adwords if you really want to, you just need to realize that most of the people who click on your ads will NOT be logged into Facebook when they click the ad, meaning you are further decreasing the chance that the click will convert by them actually going through all the steps to login etc and finally adding/authorizing your application.

Let's look at this flow in more detail. To begin, we'll look at the two possible scenarios that exist when a user is ALREADY logged into Facebook and finds themselves adding an application. First, let's differentiate the two.

The first possibility has a user clicking a link and being sent directly to the “Authorize” screen. The link the user clicks could be anything... an ad for the app, a Feed, a notification, we'll get more into this later. Here's the flow:

The second possibility adds one step to the process. Some time ago, Facebook began allowing applications to show content to users who hadn't “added” the application yet. Logged in Facebook users can then navigate to and view these pages of the application without having Authorized the application first. What emerged from this was essentially 'landing pages' for some applications. On these landing pages, users can get a taste of what the application has to offer... for example, some RPG games will allow users to take a few actions, like equipping a weapon, or choosing a character type. As soon as the user begins interacting and attempts to take an action that would lead to another page, or to storing something in the database, the user is prompted to add the application to continue.

So which of these methods of getting users to add your applications works best? To be honest, we haven't ever noticed much difference in authorization rates between the two in our split tests, and now usually construct our applications to send users directly to the Authorize page. There are a few reasons for this....

First of all, if you know anything about PPC advertising and increasing conversion rates, (or common sense really..) you will know that the more obstacles there are between the page a user begins on and the conversion opportunity page, the lesser the chance the user will actually make it to the conversion opportunity page, let alone convert whatever you're offering. This being said, why on earth would anyone ever want to add an additional obstacle, a 'landing page' to their application's authorization flow? Well, again the idea is simple. The hope is that the user will like what they see on the landing page, add the application, and continue to use it in the future. So the idea is that it creates players who are more likely to continue playing the game by filtering these players out on the landing page. As was mentioned, we haven't seen any benefit that justifies the extra work it takes to setup a landing page in our split tests, so how you approach this step is up to you.