Facebook Bidding Question

Arvind

New member
Mar 30, 2008
19
0
0
Hi,

I am new to facebook ads and have just started running a campaign where my ad is recieving a good CTR (0.08-0.1 approx). However, even though my CTR is high my CPC isn't going down.

How long does it takes facebook to reduce my CPC? I started bidding at $1 per click.
or do I need to manually change my bids to receive a lower CPC?


(I tried lowering my bids manually and impressions stopped so I again started bidding high)

Should I keep it running with a high CPC (with a lower daily budget) and expect facebook to lower my CPC over a period of time? If yes, what time frame should I expect from FB to see my CPC's fall?



-
Thanks
Al
 


Feeling helpful today and you asked good questions. I'll try to give good answers.
I don't know US traffic very well, but abroad, .1% CTR ads get scrapped, I'm shooting for .2%-.3% or it's not worth it.

Generally, for me, it goes something like this --
1) FB suggests ridiculous price (only $1.83-$3.95 per click!) and I create my ad at bid .01 (so when they approve, I don't get a flood of traffic until I want it)
2) When I'm ready to start traffic, I start bidding about 40% of their ridiculous quote. My budget is high enough that I can spend ~20 clicks per ad at this bid. (Since traffic is distributed throughout the day, if I want to spend up to $50 at noon, I set my budget to $100. At these ridiculous bids, I should spend $50 nearly instantly. POOF!)
3) Watch for ~20m. On each creative, when it hits 15-20 clicks, I start dropping the bids. If I know my target bid price (e.g. you have bought ads in this demo, and you know you can get traffic with a $.10 bid), I drop to this immediately; if I don't, I bid .01 so that my other creatives get impressions, and follow the steps below to find my target bid price.

important Ignore the high numbers in the CPCs column on facebook reports today, they are weighted with outliers from our initial $50 spend.

If you don't know your target bid, you can find it in ~1 day of careful tinkering; Say you want to spend $250 per day, and you have a new batch of ads that got 20 clicks each at $.75c. You've pruned the .1% CTR ads, and have a few potential winners left over. Your campaign budget is currently set to $100, and it's noon, so you've spent about $50.
First, lower your bids 75% to about $.25, then up your budget to $120. We're gonna see if we spend another $10 (half the budget increase; because it is noon), or if we get no traffic.
Go play with your dick for an hour.
If you haven't spent another $10-$12 by 1pm, the volume is not satisfactory. Adjust your bids upwards, then set your campaign budget high enough to burn another $10 in the next hour.
If you have spent $10-12, you're still getting volume at that price. Drop your bids, up your budget, leave it for an hour and don't check it.

Keep adjusting your bids, then upping your budget; the goal is to have your spend equal to ($budget * hour_of_day / 24), roughly (it's not precise), and you're spending in $10 increments to find it. You can do this about 10 more times before midnight, but it's always gone quickly for me. By the end, I'll have spent $250 today, and probably lost some money in testing, but I now know that a) I can spend $.xx for a click on a .2 CTR ad, and b) my best creatives are X, Y and Z, and I can get clicks for (30/50/90)% cheaper on them, and c) tomorrow, I'll get easily twice as may clicks for the same price, make twice as many sales, and if the traffic stays strong, I can probably keep dropping my bids until I again fall short of my target budget.

Whew, hope that helps.
 
  • Like
Reactions: megatabbers
0.08% - 0.10% is a sufficient enough CTR to see CPC breaks. Even though uplinked mentioned above that you need 0.20% to make things happen, it's not always the case. The bigger your demographic, the quicker you'll receive CPC breaks based on CTR. Meaning, a 0.15% CTR on a 3M demo will get a bigger % CPC break than a 0.15% CTR on a 300k demo. At least this is what I've seen in my years of running on FB.

If for some reason you're hitting a .10% CTR and can't seem to get a lower CPC, there are two reasons:
1) Not enough impressions for FB to take your CTR into account yet. Facebook only starts looking at your CTR after X amount of impressions. So possibily running the ad a bit longer will solve your problem.
2) Whenever I've been in your shoes, what fixed it totally was waiting for the next day to come around. I remember when I had a .20% CTR ad, but was still paying in the 40c-50c range on a young demo. Well as soon as the next day rolled by, that CPC dropped straight down to 5c. This is all awhile I never touched my CPC bid; it was at 50c the whole time.
 
+Rep

What do you all do when testing 15-20 creatives and only one ad gets all the impressions? Do you go through and pause each ad after say you get 15-30k impressions? Or do you just stick with the ad that FB decides to send all the impressions to?
 
Some good advice here and honestly, I always target for 0.20%+ CTR as mcgrunin rightly said, usually it takes around 5% impressions of your total demo for FB to actually justify a lower CPC. I have ads running @0.75 CPC but actually being charged at 0.05
 
0.2% is the CTR, I should be aiming for?
But most of the case studies that the so called "gurus" publish happen to tell 0.02 CTR is more than enough to buy traffic for cheap on FB.

Can anyone, clarify this.


Thanks
Al
 
0.2% is the CTR, I should be aiming for?
But most of the case studies that the so called "gurus" publish happen to tell 0.02 CTR is more than enough to buy traffic for cheap on FB.

Can anyone, clarify this.


Thanks
Al

If you created more than 1 ad you'd know 0.02 doesn't get you anywhere.

Test for yourself!
 
umm...i'd work anything that is over .1 (optimize these) and pause everything lower. 2 is really the money zone.

pretty sure if you do a blank picture with gibberish text you'd get around a .02 CTR so whatever "gurus" you're paying attention to are full of shit. fb wont even give you impressions after the initial flood at that CTR
 
that's because the shit you're reading was not written by a guru, it was an ebook written by an indian paid by a guru.

doubt the guru ever read past the cover page.
 
Some Good Shit Here, This post is probably the best helpful tip I got so far on Wickedfire..I probably make a million $$$ by noon tommorow using some of these techniques... Thanks Ya!!!
 
I got a question...

Do you make all ads active at the same time or do you test each ad one by one?
 
Hi,

I am new to facebook ads and have just started running a campaign where my ad is recieving a good CTR (0.08-0.1 approx). However, even though my CTR is high my CPC isn't going down.

Well i don't play ball with ads that have less than .2 CTR, which means my prices drop very low even before facebook stats update. It goes like this:

1. create campaign (stupid good)
2. wait for it to get accepted.
3. once accepted, the next thing i see is ~120,000 impressions, some amount of money spent and a whole lot of dirt cheap clicks.

Good luck.
 
I got a question...

Do you make all ads active at the same time or do you test each ad one by one?

Well, If all ads are in one campaign, then facebook will send all impressions to the top ads which have the highest CPM/CPC. IF you want to test all ads better to have them in seperate campaigns.

I am having a hard time, trying to pull my CTR up with images.
My question here is - if you are not targeting dating or the education vertical, then what sort of images should you use to get a better CTR.

Let's say, you are trying to get a form filled up for "senior assistance living" and targeting 35-50 year old men to fill the form for their parents. What sort of images to use to get a better CTR?

If it had been dating - I understand girls with big tits
With education - College Logos etc

but what sort of images to use for senior living assistance?

Any ideas?

BTW: Thanks for the imput on this thread.


-
Thanks
Al:arcadefreak:
 
I am having a hard time, trying to pull my CTR up with images.
My question here is - if you are not targeting dating or the education vertical, then what sort of images should you use to get a better CTR.
Shit people will look at. Things that pop off the page or attract the eye.
Let's say, you are trying to get a form filled up for "senior assistance living" and targeting 35-50 year old men to fill the form for their parents. What sort of images to use to get a better CTR?
A big gold watch, or an old lady at the doctor, or something funny and completely unrelated. It doesn't have to make sense, just find good pictures, then throw in a bullshit tagline to glue it together. High visual attraction = high CTR = low CPC = high volume = monies.

yes-i-am-sure-i-am-serious.png

If it had been dating - I understand girls with big tits
With education - College Logos etc
IMHO don't use logos. I'm of the opinion that people see logos all day every day, and they ignore them.
 
Shit people will look at. Things that pop off the page or attract the eye.

A big gold watch, or an old lady at the doctor, or something funny and completely unrelated. It doesn't have to make sense, just find good pictures, then throw in a bullshit tagline to glue it together. High visual attraction = high CTR = low CPC = high volume = monies.

yes-i-am-sure-i-am-serious.png


IMHO don't use logos. I'm of the opinion that people see logos all day every day, and they ignore them.

Any ideas, why not to use pics of cuties (similar to dating) for grabbing attention in this niche?


-
Al
 
Any ideas, why not to use pics of cuties (similar to dating) for grabbing attention in this niche?


-
Al

Using completely unrelated pictures like hot girls for an unrelated offer may get you a high CTR but a low conversion rate. It will also almost assuredly negatively affect the quality of lead to the advertiser. This is all assuming FB let's the image through in the first place.
 
But then as uplinked said, isn't images of watches/old-going-to-doctor also not irrelevant to the example offer ?

These sort of images would also increase CTR but CVR will be low. Don't you think so?


-
Al