Arbitrage account farming is a complex process of preparing profiles for the launch of advertising campaigns. Arbitrageurs take actions that imitate the behavior of real users in order to get permission from the advertising network to launch an advertising campaign. This process involves many complex steps and requires careful preparation of each account to ensure its authenticity and compliance with the requirements of advertising platforms.
Application and essence of account pharming: where and when should you use this method?
The fact is that ad networks often block arbitrage accounts due to violation of the rules.
Thus, arbitrageurs need new accounts to continue promotion. Initially, you can use the accounts of your friends, acquaintances, and relatives, but sooner or later, these resources will be exhausted.
If a webmaster simply registers a new profile and tries to launch an advertising campaign right away, the fresh account will be blocked, preventing it from being promoted. The ad network recognizes that fresh profiles are promoted by people who have previously had other accounts blocked – this indicates a violation of the rules.
To bypass these restrictions and continue promotion, you need a pharming process. In other words, after registering a new profile, the webmaster does not launch an advertising campaign immediately, but imitates the actions of ordinary users so that the advertising network believes that this is a new profile of a real person.
On Facebook, to imitate the behavior of ordinary users, webmasters do the following:
- Fill out the profile, add photos and posts, specify information about age, gender, city, and other indicators.
- Actively interact, for example, like, repost, comment on posts, subscribe to other users’ pages.
- Carry out social activity, that is, look for friends and communicate with them.
The farming process usually lasts from two weeks to a month. However, longer farming is also possible, which will help increase the level of trust of the advertising network in the account. Trust, in this context, determines the level of trust that an ad network has in a particular account. A higher level of trust has a positive impact on account moderation and lifespan, reducing the risk of account blocking and improving the results of the advertising campaign.
Many users do not spam accounts for their own use. Farmed accounts can be sold at a profit, and in arbitrage teams or media buying companies, sometimes they are delegated to individual employees called “farmers”. The pharmacists are exclusively engaged in the preparation of profiles that are used by more experienced colleagues to conduct advertising campaigns.
The position of a farmer is usually the initial step in a career in arbitration teams. If a newcomer wants to join the team and grow with colleagues, they often start with this position.
Account farming is commonly used in the following ad networks:
- Facebook/Meta;
- Google;
- TikTok.
In smaller ad networks, pharming is rarely necessary. It is also important to note that the algorithm of pharming and account preparation may differ from one ad network to another. In this article, we will look at the process of farming accounts for Facebook.
Step-by-step instructions for farming accounts for Facebook
- Before you start the process of farming, you need to prepare certain tools and resources. Here’s a list of must-have components for pharma:
- Anti-detection browser. More information about the anti-detection browser can be found in this article.
- Proxy servers. It is recommended to use mobile proxies for greater efficiency.
- Unique user photos. Upload photos from social networks that do not belong to Meta. It’s important to make these photos unique by editing them in a photo editor and cleaning up the metadata. You should have 5 to 10 different photos of the same person for each account.
- Phone numbers that belong to the region in which you plan to promote your accounts. You can use virtual numbers and SMS services, or purchase physical SIM cards. The best option is to use physical SIM cards for greater reliability and security.
Before you get started, consider what accounts you plan to create, what numbers you will link them to, what photos you will use, and what data you will enter. All of this information should be carefully documented in a spreadsheet to avoid misunderstandings in the future.
When all the necessary resources and tools are ready, you can start farming.
- First, you need to create accounts. Here are the steps to follow:
- Create a tab in the anti-detection browser with unique user characteristics. Set the time and language to match the selected GEO (geographic location).
- Fill in cookies for each tab by visiting different sites that use cookies. Avoid Meta sites and visit 20-30 different websites. Try to visit them in different order to avoid patterns that Facebook can detect.
- Register a Gmail account for each tab using a virtual phone number.
- Don’t forget to change the IP address for each tab.
Once all the accounts are created, leave them idle until the next day.
- After registering the accounts, the next day you will start farming, which should last at least two weeks. During the pharming, do the following for each account:
- Fill in the profile: Fill in the empty fields in the profile, but avoid obvious patterns. Some data can be left blank until the coloring is complete.
- Subscribe to communities: Choose communities for dating, this will help you find “friends” and increase social activity.
- Friends: Leave a note in the dating group with the caption “looking for friends” or “looking for a relationship”. This will help you get friend requests. Add and periodically remove other users.
- Likes and comments: Like and comment on community posts and new posts from your friends.
- Messages: Message friends you’ve added or reply to their messages.
- Publications: Post your prepared photos to your page. You can also post thematic photos, such as images of cars.
- Surfing: Visit stores and websites that may have Facebook pixels. This is necessary for the social network to notice your activity.
- Weekends: Periodically allow yourself days off from your accounts, at least one or two days a week, to avoid being overly active.
Be natural and avoid creating obvious patterns. The less you repeat yourself, the higher the level of trust in the farmed profiles.
- In addition, there are a few other actions that need to be performed once for each account during the pharming process:
- Training: Take any course on advertising on Meta Blueprint, around day 6-8 of farming. This will help to show the social network that you are planning to engage in advertising and study its principles.
- Fan Page: Create a Fan Page on the 8th-10th day of farming. After creating it, actively manage it, publish posts. Post neutral content that may be related to the topic of your offer. For example, you can publish nutritional tips or recipes if you plan to promote weight loss offers.
- Business Manager: Create a Business Manager for the 10th-13th day of pharming using the Gmail account you created. If you need to verify your identity, create an ID card in any photo editor. The main thing is that it should contain a photo of the person from the profile, full name and date of birth.
After these steps, you can continue farming as long as you like, but before launching ads, leave your account inactive for 1-2 days. This is called a layoff, and it is necessary before starting advertising activities.
If your account looks like a real person’s profile, and you have spent at least two weeks on farming, and you have completed all the necessary steps, then farming can be considered successfully completed!
Conclusions
Account farming is an integral part of preparing accounts for launching advertising on major social networks. Without this process, you will most likely not be allowed to run ads from a fresh account. Thus, pharming becomes a mandatory step before launching an advertising campaign.