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Facebook and CPA Bidding (or oCPM towards Conversion Pixel with target bid) (4)

06-09-2015 10:15 PM #1 fatcow (Member)
Facebook and CPA Bidding (or oCPM towards Conversion Pixel with target bid)

Hi guys,

me and my business partner would consider ourself as advanced facebook marketers (lots of client work, affiliate campaigns, content networks) but now we try to move our successful campaigns from other traffic sources to Facebook.

We actually have a great setup:

- We tested creatives/target groups with different bidding typed (all oCPM towards PPE and CTW) and got some high CTR images (above 5%) and already great conversion rates
- We have email lists from converted people so we made some great lookalike audiences
- We even have a conversion pixel placed on the checkout page we use to optimize our actions for and we can also use it to create more lookalike audiences

We still ask ourself what the best way is to scale the shit out of this on Facebook. I know there is different methods like broad testing, granular testing etc. and of course testing a lot with bidding modes, images, blablabla..

But what I am really interested in is CPA Bidding and letting Facebook optimize for us, but there is not that much information about this out there and I got a little confused during my research (btw great blogpost from qwaya about this: blog.qwaya.com/learn-how-to-get-max-out-of-facebooks-optimized-cpm)

We are using Qwaya and when submitting the ad we chose "Optimize toward Facebook Conversion Pixel" and put our conversion value of $35 (the amount we value a conversion) in it. We made sure the budget is at least 4-5x larger than that target bid and activated the campaign.

So far we had it running for one day, had 1 conversion and really high cost per click (which is normal?)..also the CTR is not as great as before with other bidding types although we are using the exact same image.

Would love if someone can chip in on this and give us some advice with FB CPA bidding (or scaling such campaigns in general)...

Thanks!

06-11-2015 10:30 AM #2 fbqueen (Senior Member)

You need to keep in mind that the fb conversion pixel you're using needs about 25 sales to fully optimize your campaign. If your objective is conversions you definitely need to run more traffic to get more and more conversions.

When I put my objective as conversions I usually bid for clicks and not ocpm, it just worked better for me in the long run. Lookalike audiences are a great way to find more prospects for your campaign. It's a numbers and testing game.

06-11-2015 08:47 PM #3 fatcow (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by fbqueen View Post
You need to keep in mind that the fb conversion pixel you're using needs about 25 sales to fully optimize your campaign. If your objective is conversions you definitely need to run more traffic to get more and more conversions.

When I put my objective as conversions I usually bid for clicks and not ocpm, it just worked better for me in the long run. Lookalike audiences are a great way to find more prospects for your campaign. It's a numbers and testing game.
Thanks for the advice. I am fully aware of the minimum number of conversions, the pixel actually has several thousand conversions daily (but not from my traffic).. so the big question is, does the pixel firing conversion need to come from my ad click or can it be ANY conversion?

So you're using power editor and choosing website conversion as the campaign objective, choose your pixel and then just bid cpc?

06-13-2015 03:29 PM #4 zeno (Administrator)

Facebook definitely makes things confusing here. Instead of being transparent about the exact bidding mode they lock things in to a campaign objective and use fuzzy UI systems. I liked it when you could just pick between all bidding modes at the ad level.

To clarify, yes in the case where FBQueen picks "bid for clicks" it will be a CPC bidding system. In this scenario, the audience to which ads are delivered will be the same/similar to the audience when you optimise for "clicks to website" but bid oCPM (I call this oCPM:clicks). You can readily confirm this by doing both and seeing very similar ad performance at the CTR level (same audience response).

However, if you do bid CPC and you use a conversion pixel to track conversions, it's possible that FB uses this data to manipulate your ad audience over time. I believe this is a core part of the oCPM system exclusively, but who knows, FB may be testing certain things behind the scenes, not telling us, or planning to do this in the near future.

As for CPA bidding, it's only available for several ad types e.g. external link posts (CPA for clicks, basically CPC...) and mobile app installs (the heavy hitter). Doing CPA for link posts with the A being external pixel conversions is not something I see happening soon, at least without heavy scrutiny. It would open up a lot of gaming of the system since you would control the event that determines a charge by FB and could easily, for example, but a code on your conversion page that only loads the script 50% of the time... and FB will know full well that its what affiliate marketers want.

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