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FB Campaigns Question For Stackman (Q&A Thread) (58)

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This question could be answered by stackman or anyone that has anything positive to contribute.

How many ad copies do you usually have in one campaign? For example, I usually have around 10-15 images per campaign with the same title and body but I find that FB usually have a hard time distributing ad impressions for all of the ads under one campaign compared to having 2-3 images per campaign with the same image.

I might even try grouping 2-3 images per campaign with different titles and body. Making around 15 campaigns for 15 different images.

Would setting my budget to let's say 10k alleviate the problem with impression distribution for a large campaign?

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Not sure on what other people do but recently I've been starting with 1 ad copy and getting anywhere from 20-50+ images.

Bang them all in 1 campaign and let them go, usually the first ones to begin getting clicks start taking over in terms of impressions so monitor those, check the CTR and CPC to see if it's where you need it to be. As I'm testing more angles within the same niche I tend to know what my CPC needs to be before I make a profit, I often set my bids high in the beginning so that traffic comes in thick and fast, after a bunch of ads have around 100 clicks minimum I then have just been dropping my bid to around what I need the CPC to be - from there my avg cpc just keeps falling and they turn a profit.

In regards to the ads that hardly get the impressions I tend to just leave them for a few days, then go back and look at lifetime stats and see what the CTR is, if it's reasonably high I'll often just leave them in so that any impressions they do get will result in clicks - if not I'll pause them.

I'm not sure if that's the best approach to take, I may be leaving a huge chunk on the table but in my opinion although I might get a drop in impressions - it should improve the longevity of the campaigns on a whole (I hope) and I keep plugging away making more anyway. At the minute I have like 10 running as I've took a little break waiting for my spend limit to increase, I'm in the process of finishing another bunch that I will upload and repeat the above process.

Rinse and repeat and in theory/my numbers alls good

Hope this helps

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Stackman stackman, where are you? :P

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Think he's away for 2 days :P

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But he responded yesterday to another thread :P

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yoohooo, where are youuuuuu (stackman)

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Hey icecreamlover, stackman should be getting back to you soon
but just in case you're not aware, rich, who replied to your
post up there, is doing "pretty" well in FB as well, so you might want
to try his advice while waiting

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^^ Deffo, I wouldn't wait around I tried various methods of attack just to see which worked for me - I'm sure I'm doing something wrong but for the stuff I'm working on it's more like a formula as I have a lot of data on the offer etc.

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@icecream, sorry was gone, just got back.

I do exactly as rich said!

To answer your questions exactly:

I usually test out 2-3 ad titles, 1-2 body copies and anywhere from 50 - 500+ images!

As for getting more impressions to certain ads compared to others, it's just a fault from Facebook. You won't necessarily see the same impressions to all ads when you launch a campaign, which i think is a mistake by Facebook. They should send equal impressions to your ads for the first 10k or something.. anyways they don't so to combat it you want to wait it out and up your budget like you said (just be careful Facebook doesn't randomly spend it!!) Usually with a couple days you'll see enough impressions for you to know if your ad is worth keeping active or not.

If that doesn't do the trick for you, It's annoying but you have to split up ads among campaigns like you said. 15 campaigns for 15 images is a bit overdoing it, but something along those lines is your best way to see fair impressions over all your ads.

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Overdoing split testing? I never heard such a thing

I would say loading a campaign with 500+ images is along the lines of overdoing it too

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Well 500 images is what makes your $1000/day campaign last for more than 2 weeks! Which is why I'm saying you don't want to make a new campaign for each image you have, but if you really want to see a traffic to each ad to determine the CTR of the ad, then it's your call.

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The stackman has spoken.... In terms of budget for a 500 image ad, would setting the overall budget for the day at 10k kill the ctr? or do you suggest using a more constricted budget?

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When doing 500 images, i don't do it at once, usually 50-100 per campaign, then 2 days later I'll gather another 100 or so.

Technically speaking $10k/day budget to one demographic assuming it's around 2mil or under ish will kill your CTR but only because it's being used up fast. Same thing as if you ran it for 10 days at $1000 a day. It's pretty much all relative. I also wouldnt suggest testing 500 ads at the same time in a single campaign.

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Sounds good legit to me. Going to start playing with campaigns with more images and putting up a more tight budget as I think my excessive budgeting is spiking my initial impressions way too fast.

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I think he meant that creating a single campaign for each image etc is overdoing it imagine having 50+ images per campaign - it would mental to manage them in the interface with pages and pages of campaigns.

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Thought I might throw in a questions myself.

How many impressions do you let each ad run for? Right now I have one ad which has 120k impressions, and a 0.09% CTR. This is my best CTR at the moment. CPC is $0.28. Guess I should pause this one? or would there be a chance I could get cheaper clicks by lowering my bids? (I'm bidding $.82 at the moment)
My other ads have not got many impressions at all <5000. Just looking for a rule of thumb of how many impressions/clicks I would need to know if I should ditch an ad or keep it. This far I've spent $40 and made $7.

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@rich
yep, that's what i meant! we are on the same page

@stocks
I'll let each ad run forever or until the CTR goes too low for me to make a profit.
For the ad your bidding .82 on, whats the current suggested bid?

You can ditch an ad usually once it's received 30 clicks. If it has only 4 clicks and 0.00002 CTR, then ditch it, but if your trying to decide whether an ad has potential and it's border-lining good, I'd let it run til 30 at least to decide.

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Suggested Bid is: $0.41 - 0.59 USD

or.. $0.64 - $1.12 depending on where you look within the FB Ads interface lol

I dropped my bids in increments of $0.15 a few times yesterday down to $0.36, and I'm still getting traffic. I was worried I had been too quick. How often, and by how much do you usually drop your bids?
I dropped it by another $0.12 this morning. Let's see how that goes I would need $0.05 clicks to be profitable, and I doubt I'll get that with that ad.

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@ stocks - Lately I've been kinda tying into what Stack said a little higher. I had more angles and dropped bids a little lower so that the traffic doesn't come in too fast but I have lots of angles to build up the spend so in theory I'm hoping that the campaigns in general last a little longer compared to blowing through all the audience within a week then having to start from scratch.

In regards to dropping my bids I tend to start bids fairly high (around 60% of the suggested) then wait til a good bunch of ads have 100 clicks or so then drop the bid to around the price I need for break even which usually ends up paying below it which = profit So far so good but be good to see other peoples approach on dropping bids as I maybe doing things wrong but it's working for now.

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haha

I'll usually start bids like rich said at 60-80% the suggested bid, once 100 clicks or so come in:
I usually drop by 8-9 cents i think every couple hours on a low'ish budget until it's near the click price I'm looking for (has to have good CTR though). I would go approx 20% lower then the recommended bid price and your click prices will be lower and you should still receive the same traffic numbers as bidding 0.82$. If you drop the bids too much you'll start noticing traffic slowing down.

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I will try this approach tomorrow for a new angle because I was just dropping them from like 0.60 or so to like 0.15 :P

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lol, that usually will stop traffic pretty quick unless your dealing with 0.6 CTR ads..

It's always best on any ad platform to drop at a slower rate. For Facebook i know for a fact if you drop to fast, it's not good.

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I've experienced the same during the last two days. I've reduced bids by $0.15 every half an hour, and I stop getting traffic before I even get close to recommended lowest bid.

@stackman: You've probably been asked this question a lot of times already, but how often and by how much do you reduce your bids when you say "slower rate"?

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I'm totally new to the FB ads platform, so I figured I'd throw in a few more questions while I'm at it:

#1 How do you test images. Are you pausing ads if they don't have high enough CTR after 30 clicks? Or do you lower your bids slowly in hope for cheaper clicks that way?
Do you test batches of 10 ads? I tend to see all traffic going to one of my ads only (I read another post in the forum explaining this was due to a bug in Facebook).
When pausing this ad, should I expect that another ad start getting traffic?

#2 One of my ads has a CTR of 0.1%. Suggested bid range for this ad is $0.42 - $1.08. Are there any chance that I will get any traffic if I slowly reduce my bids below
the minimum suggested bid this level?

#3 How do you scale your winning targets?
Let's say you've tested 100 images for a campaign where you target a small demographic. Out of those 100 images you find 2-3 winning images. You now want to scale this campaign by creating a new campaign for a similar demographic (for example another town). Would you then start the whole image testing thing all over with your 100 initial ads, or would you only use you 2-3 winning images for your new campaign? Just curious about how you go about it.

#4 As I said, I'm totally new to the FB ads platform and have never really had any ads with CTR higher than 0.1%. If you get a CTR above lets say 0.3%, will the suggested
bid range indicate how much you will pay for clicks, or will it still show a higher suggested bid range than you could achieve by lowering your bids slowly?

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@stocks

no worries, i'll answer it all

- The rate you drop your bids at is solely based on your CTR. You can drop bids in larger incrments if the CTR is higher. In either case i always drop bids in small increments around 8-9 cents usually. The thing is if you have a low CTR you sometimes can't drop your bids more than 2-3 cents or at all. You also never want to drop your bids before about 30-100 clicks. I know that's a large gap.. but i usually try to wait until 70-100, sometimes ill do it near 30-50 depending on the CTR. Almost everything depends on the CTR, the higher the CTR the more you can do with your ads. Let me know if that didn't completely make sense

#1 I'll wait out for the best CTR, and i'll test tons of images. So usually after 30+ clicks i'll look at the CTR if it's not close to what i want, i'll pause it/delete it. I'll usually do 30+ ads per campaign. Youll notice your traffic going to one ad because it has a high CTR off the bat. If you pause that ad, you should notice traffic flowing better to your next best ads.

#2 If you have over 100 clicks on it then you could prob make it roughly $0.35 bid and see traffic. You'll likely see $0.25-0.29 bids while bidding $0.35. If you don't have that many clicks, then you'll need to keep bids above 0.42 until you see atleast 70 clicks, then you can start playing with bid prices. Your CTR just isn't high enough to fiddle around with the bids if you don't have 70 clicks or so.

#3 If i'm scaling to a new city or state or something not completely different i'd just use the 2-3 ads. Testing all 100 again could be quite stressful and i know for a fact that the same images tend to work well with all audiences (sometimes they'll be discrepancies though). If I'm targeting a whole new demo or new country, I'd try the top 50 CTR ads instead of just the 2-3 previous winners.

#4 Yep, no worries, If you have a CTR of 0.3% your suggested bid range will go down a lot. Then you can bid roughly 20% lower than that min suggested bid, and then you'll probably see clicks 30% lower than what your bidding. So overall you'll get clicks roughly 50% lower than the suggested bid!

Take a look at this guide, it's exactly how i manage to get some very high CTR.

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^^^ very excellent info ^^^

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Thanks a lot for this info stackman. You've just made me a lot wiser
I've realized that I don't know which questions to ask until I've got my feet wet. I first thought I knew the basics of FB after reading a couple of posts, but it's not until you've actually tried it yourself you come up with good questions to ask.

Just one more questions related to this. How often do you reduce your bids by 8-9 cents? (Every hour, every second hour, every 10 minutes?)

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Not able to create a new thread so thought I would ask this question here since theres a bunch of bidding info here.

When I create my ad it will say something like "Suggested Bid 0.72 - 1.05 USD" so I try and create my ad with a bid of around .65 but after I submit the ad and I'm on the next page it says "Suggested Bid 2.50 - 6.00 USD".. any reason why? I'm trying to run dating ads

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I've seen the same. Looks like a bug or something, cause when I check back later it says something else.

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Check this blog post out: http://insight.io/blog/2011/02/the-u...ght.io+blog%29

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When changing your bid price, does your active ads change to pending ? how to avoid this ?

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1. You're not getting any impression at ALL? Only reason I see that can cause this is because your camp is paused... getting no impression is weird, you typically get SOME impression than the ad with low CTR will slowly die out, leaving your higher CTR ads to get most of it.

2. I believe it was mention in a FB thread that you should test the offer out until 10x the payout ($10 payout = $100 testing budget)...if conversion sucks drop it. If you're close to breaking even, start-up another test run different ad image or adcopy or even demo group.

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Are you changing your bids by clicking the "Edit Ad" link?

If so, that's the reason why your ads keeps going to Pending from Active...you can change your bids by clicking the "pencil" icon in the "Bids" column which shouldn't change the status of your ads.

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I accidentally modify the bid at the "Edit Ad" link, which cause my ad pending till now. I recreated the whole campaign, but still pending, what the best way to speed up the ad approval ?

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You just gotta wait...don't be surprise if you wait 12hr+ and your ads are disapproved LOL!

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Don't stare at your monitor and jam the F5 key. It won't get the reviewers to look at your ad any faster. My advice? Go for a walk, play some Call of Duty or take a nap. There's nothing you can do otherwise.

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^ what he said bros.

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At times it just weird, yesterday after I created the campaign, the ad approval is just about 1 or 2 hours

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Sometimes you submit an ad and the reviewers aren't swamped, so they get to it quickly. Sometimes you submit an ad during off hours, or peak hours, and it ends up in the end of a queue and doesn't get looked at until the next day. If you submit your ad on a saturday night, it goes into the queue and monday morning, they're swamped, it gets pushed back, and you don't see approvals until tuesday. Timing when you submit your ads can be as beneficial as timing when you run them, if you don't want to sit around waiting for them to go live. Ben @ PoF just posted something related to this on his blog the other day, he's talking about PoF specifically but it applies to most traffic sources.

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Question: How many clicks could you expect max for example from a 50k demo, there is some kind of pattern you are considering like 0.1%-1%?

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Not totally sure what you mean by that, but there isn't really anyway to determine anything regarding amount of clicks, leads, etc. when just looking at demo size. The amount of time you run the campaign will also be a factor. If your wondering if 50K is too small of a demo consider that if you converted only 5% of the entire demo over time thats still ads up to 2500 leads.

Its always going to vary based on demo, ads, campaign, offers, etc.

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Thanks for the answer.

Yea, I just wanted to see if you guys estimate somehow how much you can get from the demo from the initial tests(knowing CTR, conversion rates and so on) before it dies out.

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Like scotch said there really no way in determining how much you can make/clicks from a demo size. There's way too many variables. Just know that if you have a demo of 50k and your promoting a $1 lead, your campaign probably won't last too long. (Probably still worth running though)

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Is it possible to get lower than 0.10 clicks with an ad having 0.14%CTR after 50 clicks on a 160k demo just by "playing" with bid prices?

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pretty sure you'd need higher than .2% assuming you're advertising in the US

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Yea, I tested and saw. I could get 0.18 but not lower. However, I had ads who had 0.2 at the beginning(after 200 clicks) than when I bid lower to 0.20 cents (suggested was 0.23-0-45) the CTR dropped to 0.11 in just few minutes and I got even 0.15 clicks for about 30 clicks... than it went up to 0.17. Even if I increased the bid to 0.35 I still get 0.16-0.17 clicks...but the CTR still very low..

From this I can assume that Facebook places your ad according to your bid level... happened on 3 different ads, once I lowered the bid from much higher price, if the impressions don't stop, you'll get much lower ctr and fewer clicks.

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two ways that people deal with that is either by not touching the bid price at all and just letting the CTR drop your CPC or by dropping the bid price no lower than your CPC (and not outside the "suggested" range).

I'm sure others can chime in with their tips as well but these have worked for me.

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Stackman!

is there a way to target App pages? instead of fan or product pages?

most of the time, apps have more players/fans than product pages itself...

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I've read somewhere that with FB ads you should start cost per click ads first and then when CPC goes down enough for you to turn a profit you should switch the ads to CPM. My question is, is this correct? If yes how does it work?

Thanks

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It used to be common/easy to test ads on CPC then switch them over to CPM to get a discount on your cost per click. Reason being CPM was cheaper and the higher your CTR the lower your paying per click. Your basically bidding a flat rate for impressions on CPM.

However these days CPM impressions don't seem to be of as high quality as CPC ones. I'm not saying that the technique doesn't work or that CPM ads aren't worth running ( a lot of people still do very well with them and I run some occasional CPM tests.), but I've always found CPC to provide better quality and higher conversions which is why i tend to shoot for high CTR CPC ads and work on driving down my click costs on the CPC model.

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Is anyone doing the math on the "50-100 clicks and then lower the bid" ???

If I have 2 ads with 10 images and clicks are .50 (and that's at the low end of what I see. just saw $1.25-$2.53 suggested CPC for a broad non-targeted ad [targeted ones with small groups are even more expensive!)

that is: 2 x 10 x 50 x .50 = $500

so lets say you have a $1.50 payout. that is 333 conversions to breakeven. Not even profit !

OK, lets say that 30% of your ads did convert on your test with a 1:5 conversion that is a $165 revenue. $500-165=-$335

So you spent $335 for the data or are down $335 depending on how you look at it.

OK

How about 2 ads 50 images 100 clicks before lowering bids. Suggested bid is $1.00-$1.75. You bid .80.

That = $8,000 (2 x 50 x 100 x .80)
So for a offer that pays you $1.50 you need 5333 conversions to make the $8000

ok, lets say you CAN get the bid down to .30 and 30% of your ads convert 1:5 (30ads) and u get 100 clicks a day. = $1650 a day revenue and ur ad cost is $900 so your net = $750. Since you spent $8000 you need 10days to BE and then profit after that. Which $750 a day net is great. IF you have the $8000 to test AND IF you can get the bids to lower AND IF the offer doesn't vanish or FB traffic get denied by the offer (oh, yeah that happens more then you want to know)

OK, lets go back to the other extreme:

1 ad 100 clicks no age no sex no interest: Suggested Bid: 0.63 - 1.01 USD (as of 11:30am 08-10-11 USA)

Ok, it passes the 1000-2000 impression mark and gets a click. GOOD!
then it passes the 10 click mark and gets 0 conversions. Ok, we will let it go farther. 20 clicks 0 conv.
$13 spent (20*.65). If we let it go to 100 clicks = $65.

Let say we are getting conversations every 10 clicks (100clicks/10conv=10leads) So, at 10 conv at $1.50 payout we have $15 revenue BUT we have spent $65 dollars BUT we can now lower the bids. So, We drop down to .55 we get another 100 clicks ($55) and 10 conv ($15)
NET LOSS of $40. I have to break out excel and show you when you finally get to a BE and profitable bid price and even then you still have to make up for all the loss that has occurred to get there.



Now there are some other assumptions that are not brought into the fold. Such as how many conversations a day you are getting and this is important since I have seen few campaigns stay around for a few weeks to a couple months at the most . Even fewer have data that can move from one campaign to another. IE: eternal age doesn't give u the same data as dungeons and dragons. Maybe, similar age/sex break down, but not necessarily.

The rational we are following for letting the ads run to 50-100 clicks is to lower the bid price and make a converting non-profitable ad into a converting profitable ad.

The problem that I see in this is that even with a high CTR ads. FB bidding pricing is so whacked that it does not guarantee the bids will go lower on a high CTR ad (I have had many ads with .5-.8% CTR and the bids were no lower than .10 from the suggested bid and when lowered after another 100 clicks or 1000 traffic stopped.

So does anyone want to talk about the financial management of doing this process or is that going to be another 'elephant in the middle of the room' for IM marketing ?!
and this is NOT just crunching math. This is also going out and spending real money on real ads with real CTR and seeing the REAL RESULTS. Ferris? Ferris ? Bueller... Bueller? Anyone... Anyone ?

Lucrumnet

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Yes, as long as CPC is cheap enough and the profit margin is resonable, you are able to profit without spending so much once your good CTR is established, that when FB rewards you cheaper clicks.

Offer payout do get reduced if the advertiser don't like your lead quality.

If you not able to get the good CTR established, your images/ads/targeting are all wrong, not appealing to the demo you've chosen.

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Eye opening indeed. Good post. Stackman's response?

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i gotta say a lot of assumptions go into those calculations that aren't realistic IMO. it does not take 100 clicks to drop 10 cents. lets say you have a .3 CTR image, even if you're bidding at the suggested of $1.00 after 100 clicks you'd probably be more around the 60-50 cent range, which would cut down your time significantly.

i agree that it sucks I had this happen with a campaign i was running internationally where i could easily get .3's but i had to get down to 5 cent clicks to be profitable and lost a good chunk of cash on the race down. just want to point out that the numbers paint a very extreme case and are not typical.

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I don't understand how people make dating work on FB it seems like there is two different methods

broad targeting

and tight demo targeting (assuming you can scale it later)

what would you define as broad and what would you describe as highly target

sounds obvious but this is my mind thought on what both mean

say the offer is AYI US

Broad: target males 25-60 and space the age out in 5 year increments and don't place anything in interests and likes
don't select anything for education or job

or do you actually make some selections on broad targeting

tight demo targeting: males 25-60 divide every 5yrs

and target people who like to go yeti hunting and then post pics of chicks yeti hunting and make ad copy that says Check out chick that yeti hunt ?

________________

or am I looking at the definitions all wrong? ? ? I haven't even come close to making dating work and don't want to give up on FB dating I know the money is there just can't figure out wat I am screwing up

Thanks!

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@Jonas

Everyone has their own definitions. When I think of broad I think of a 10-20 year age gap, I would target singles of one gender in one country.

With any dating offer they are usually targetted towards a certain demo, I don't know of any that work well for both 25yrs olds and 60 yrs olds.

I see offers in 3 main groups. There are the casual dating offers for people in their 20's. The get married offers for people in their 30's-40's. The mature singles for people 50+.

First step is to figure out which demo your offer preforms best with. Just ask your AM or do some interweb research.

My definition of tight demo targeting is 3 year age gaps. Then I would laser in on their location (state or city) or their interests like you said "yeti hunters".

Offers make a HUGE difference. Try to go direct, it's great to know what your lead quality is like so you can negotiate with the advertiser for higher payouts.

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Someone asked for my response here, and all i can say is i agree with what your saying and your calculations.

This is affiliate marketing, some campaigns you need to spend a lot of $ to test things properly. This happens on a much larger scale with media buys... Other campaigns you don't need to spend a lot to test.

When it comes specifically to facebook and the 50-100 clicks before lowering your bids, that was just how it worked if you wanted to lower your bids without traffic stopping.

6 months ago when i made a Facebook campaign, if i tried to lower my bids too much before 50 clicks, usually the ads would stop showing traffic. This was the Facebook algorithm, and there wasn't much to be done against it.

It's similar now, but it's even more screwedup. I find that i need to upload 10 of every ad before 1 of those 10 ads see's any clicks at all. The upside to this though is i can usually lower my bids before 50 clicks, but i still tend to hold off until 30 at the minimum.

Here's some math of my own for a lot of my campaign when doing initial test:
600 ads uploaded, only about 60 different ones. (usually i upload about 10 of each)

Out of those 600 only 20 will get more than 10 clicks.
I'll let those 20 ads get to 30-50 clicks, then i'll get rid of poor CTR ones, and let the rest run by slowly lowering my bids.

Ends up being a $300 - $600 test depending on the niche.

You can do this at 1/4 of the scale though for testing quicker ideas/ or for newer affiliates. If you see promise, you test more ads and more clicks.

ALSO remember the less people advertising in your demographic the most traffic you'll see to your ads, and the cheaper your clicks will be, and probably higher CTRs too. So the testing phase is cheaper and faster with less competitive demographics (which is why i try to always take angles with campaigns on facebook).

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This. If you get a good angle you can be hitting people who are still in your primary demo but respond more readily to the ad. So you get higher CTRs, lower CPCs and additionally out-compete your competition who are going broad and lack the angle. Faster testing too since the CTRs are higher, so you can evaluate your EPC much much faster.

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