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Best Way To Start A Campaign? (10)

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Hey guys. I just started running ads in Facebook and setup my first campaign the other day.

I started off by creating a campaign that optimizes for conversions. My offer is a lead gen so I figured this would be the best option?

Right now my CPC is around $2-$3 but I need to get it down to $1 or less. Would Facebook slowly optimize to a lower CPC or should
I start with another campaign and do manual bidding? I read a post here on the forum that talked about doing that for getting a lower CPC.

Also I would like to day part my campaign but only option I saw was to run a lifetime budget. Is it better to run lifetime budget or just pause/unpause
the campaign for the times it can and can't run?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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Hello,

I'm not much into FB myself, but I posted a bunch of videos from Tim Burd, who happens to be a true FB expert... he also lays out a few methods to run FB campaigns, try to watch some of them :

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ethod-Tim-Burd
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...d-2-0-Tim-Burd
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...er-and-Cheaper
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ting-of-FB-Ads
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ok-s-Algorithm

The speeches are from 2019 and 2018 so still highly relevant.

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It would be difficult to troubleshoot why the CPC is so high, without knowing more details about your setup.

Some possible causes:


1)You're not targeting the right audience with the right ad angles. This is the FIRST and MAIN thing we need to get right. Do more research into your audience to find out:

-who they are
-how to target them on FB
-what their pain and pleasure points are
-the jargon they use

The first 2 will help you with audience targeting. The last 2 will help you craft ad angles.

Then come up with a few ad angles (e.g. 3) and test each audience using them, to see which audiences are the most promising, and which angle converts best with each audience.


2)Ad fatigue.

Keep an eye on ad frequency. If the CPC increase is gradual, this may be the reason.

Solution is to simply rotate in more ads, with main focus on the image/video. In the case of video ads, switching up the thumbnail to make them eye-catching can breathe new life into original videos.


3)Competition has increased.

Basically caused by advertisers targeting the same audience(s) as you, which can drive up the price.

Manual bidding is worth testing for sure!


4)FB is penalizing you for some reason.

Are you running blackhat or whitehat?

Have you received account bans under the same BM or other BMs/pages you were associated with?

Have you had a lot of ads rejected?

How transparent and legitimate is your business? Is the account linked to an FB page that looks legit and transparent, linking to a high-quality website?


5)The FB algo is just wonky sometimes. In the recent weeks many advertisers have been experiencing (myself included) a sudden and drastic increase in CPC and/or CPM.

My solution is just to keep "put my best foot forward" by running a single campaign with proven audiences and proven ads, on a low ad spend, and just checking the CPC and CPM every morning, pausing out individual adsets or the entire campaign if numbers don't look good, and keeping the camp running if numbers look normal.

And of course, once everything starts to look more stable (if there's such a thing with FB lol!), I would go back to the usual testing and scaling.



You can try setting campaign rules if you don't want to use lifetime budget. Simply select the campaign(s) you wish to daypart, and click "Rules".



You can make a rule to turn ON the campaign(s) at specific times, and then another rule to turn OFF the campaign(s) at specific times.

Hope that helps!




Amy

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Vortex i stopped running because of your number 5. That wonky algo update/break hit me like a truck. My CPA almost tripled.

Going to start again next week to see if the increased price persists.

Sometimes i think that Mark has a lever in his office that breaks everything while sucking all of our money. I bet the investors would love this idea...

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Just lay low and keep a low spend going. During the worst times I only had a single CBO camp consisting 5 adsets of best ads + best audiences, with a $100 daily budget, just as a way of monitoring the state of things. I was having the same trouble during end of January / most of February. Things seemed to have returned to normal in the past week or so.

Now may be a good time to start diversifying to other traffic types as well, so that your livelihood isn't dependent on a single traffic source. FB is great - when it works.



Amy

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Last year i made a good amount of money on FB during this time of the year. I don't remember having so many "bad" days as of now. Btw if you keep an eye on https://status.fb.com/ads/ you'll always find stuff happening there lol.

I don't use CBO. Did a test last year and went horrible wrong. My FB approach might be different from most people here. Instead of having a CBO with high budget, i have multiple lower budget adsets. That is a problem when scaling to huge numbers but for me was enough. It is very manageable with rules (barely did anything).

Yes. I've been working on the internet for a while and putting all the eggs in one basket it's not a good idea

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Interesting! Never knew they had such a page - thank you!

However, if they're rolling out their secret algo changes, I doubt they'd tell us. Can't blame them though - too many people are trying to game the system.


CBO is about to become mandatory for all new campaigns pretty soon.

When you said your test last year went horrible wrong - were you using CBO to test an unproven audience or unproven creatives? CBO doesn't handle those too well.

I find that CBO works best for proven audiences and creatives that have similar performance.

Otherwise, the underperforming adsets would not even get a chance to perform, due to lack of traffic assigned.

Similar audience sizes would help as well.

For testing audiences+creatives, I find that a good way to exert more control to achieve a better balance, would be to set minimum spend limits on adsets while using CBO. That way, all ad sets will have a chance to perform first, before FB's algo will step in to assign more traffic to the better-performing stuff.

And I would group adsets with similar size and performance in the same CBO, and have multiple CBOs running. That way I avoid the problem of the "lopsided" effect where bigger audience sizes or better performers hogging all the traffic.

And yes - thank God for rules!



Amy

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Btw that FacebookStatus Link does have RSS. You could put it on an APP and have alerts on time when something is happening. That might save a couple of bucks on those big budget campaigns. I also use https://shopifystatus.com/ since most of the aff ecommerce offers use Shopify.

I don't remember the details on my test but i'm going to give it a try. Tim Burd slider method is interesting and i'm also looking forward to test dynamic creatives (never tested it).

Thanks for all the information!

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Several great CBO guides have come out lately - please check out Depesh Mandalia's and Alex Fedotoff's guides if you're interested. Thanks for mentioning Tim Burd's slider method - I'll check that out as well.

Dynamic creatives can outperform non-dynamic (static?) ones, or not, depending on the specific creative element variations. The really good thing though is they can delay ad blindness better than non-dynamic ones. We just need to watch that all the variations are from the same/compatible ad angle(s) so we don't create confusing/non-sensical ads when some combinations/variations are displayed.

As for that app: That's a really great idea! Too bad I'm such a clutz when it comes to tech stuff. Maybe someone will see this idea and run with it - and include other features that can be really beneficial for FB advertisers. I don't know if it's just me, but I can't perform even simple camp maintenance on FB's mobile apps at all. One time I tried to restart a campaign from my phone and ended up restarting another by mistake and lost a few hundred dollars before I caught it later that day. Of course it was my fault for giving campaigns such long names - in such a way that when they get truncated the first part look the same - but I wished that something better was available.

Likewise - thank YOU for sharing! Please feel free to continue our discussion (in this and other threads). Great learning experience for me.



Amy

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I'll check out those guides. The slider method from Tim Burd is on the videos from AWE Barcelona 2019.

Regarding the app, you can just download Feedly (available for both iOS and Android) or any other RSS APP and add this url: https://status.fb.com/ads/outage-events-feed.rss
Now you've an alert when something on their platform goes wrong. Let me tell you, IT IS A MUST HAVE!

I feel your pain about the Facebook Ads App. It isn't very good and most of the time i use the desktop interface on my mobile phone.

Luis

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