Bunch of Facebook Questions (Traffic/Bidding Related) (17)
I created a new Facebook account about 7-10 days ago after only having very limited experience with advertising on my first account, which got banned for no real good reason.
I've been reading a lot of the past threads here, trying to soak up as many tips and information as I can, but I would like some clarification and further explanation on some of the things I've read but don't quite understand.
A quick history of my new account: I've created campaigns so far, with my first one being my main one which does most of the volume, and was lucky enough to be profitable right out of the gate. I've created a total of around 40-50 ads spread throughout my campaigns, and have had 100% ad approval rate, with the majority of them being instant approvals. I'm currently capped at $350/day but should be bumped to $500/day either today or tomorrow.
Here are my questions! I apologize in advance for any n00b ones 
1. I am astounded by how high you guys get your CTR's. My average CTR is around 0.05% and my bids are usually "high" - in the upper range of the recommended bid. My targeting is related, and I've certainly been split-testing images. My question is, how many ads, on average, do you have to go through before you find a CTR of 0.10%-0.15%?
2. I've read on here several times how some people slowly lower their bids over time, by a few cents at a time, to get lower bids. I don't really understand this. Is the idea that once you have established a decent CTR and good rate that Facebook will keep your volume up and your rate low if you lower your bids a bit a time? Or is the idea to keep your volume up and just lower your bids until you start to see a drop in traffic?
3. You know the pie chart located on the upper left of your campaign screen? When the circle is completely full of green, that is, your reach is hitting all of your audience, should that be an indicator of anything? Perhaps an indicator that I should lower bids and expand my targets?
Thanks guys!
Hey man, what type of vert/niches do you run? Also, show us a few ads that get you that low ctr.... I have no idea how your ctr is so low....that's like insane low.
I'm running gaming, and actually... 0.05% are my better performing ads... I said average in my first post, but actually average is a bit lower, around 0.04%...
Wow how can you even make any profit with CTR down to .05% :O
I guess your offers convert like crazy
That's the thing... I can't understand how you guys can get CTR up to 0.15% :P On the one campaign, I have 0.05% and was making 200% ROI at one point, although that has lowered a bit now.
If I could average 0.10% CTR on my other campaigns, that would make them all profitable. I'm trying playing around with no keyword targets now, and also some at title split testing, as previously I only split test banners.
Strange. So my non-targeting ad has been running for several hours now, and has a good CTR (for me) of 0.081% and is converting. It's not converting as well as my other targeted ads, of course, but is still converting and is already profiting. The ad targets 90 million users so if I can get my CTR up, there's a lot of potential here...
Getting 200% ROI on a 0.05% CTR ad is a great achievement dude - Images are undoubtedly the most important factor in CTR but being able to make creatives that overall give +ROI is a better skill to have than being able to make good images. If your ads are low CTR but profiting then you should scale them first and slowly add in more images over time. Profit is profit.
You have an ad targeting 90 million users?! Are you just targeting the entire US, because that's insane! If that non-targeted ad is profiting when that broad then split your campaigns down to gender and age brackets and let the good times roll.
Well, as much as I'd love to attribute that to skill, the fact is that it's just a good converting offer on Facebook, I believe.
Yeah, I'm basically just targeting US on that one ad, with an age range of 13-35. I actually expanded it to other countries now, so it's actually targeting 111 million.
I believe I have a bit of an advantage in that my payouts are a fair bit higher than street. For example, on this particular offer, I'm getting literally 3x street (literally 3x minus 5 cents). I do a bit of volume using other traffic sources so my affiliate manager works out deals with the advertisers direct to get me as high a possible payout as possible as he knows I have the potential to scale things.
Since I got a good starting payout on this particular offer, I believe that is why it's profiting right out of the gate.
That being said, I'm still new to Facebook so really have a lot to learn on this platform. BTW, I'd still love it if somebody could answer my questions I posted in the original post of this thread :-)
BTW, on that new 90-million broad "untargeted" ad, I'm currently at 213 clicks at $0.38 CPC with a $1.07 CPC bid, which is converting to a $0.55 EPC, so I'm making $0.17 for every click from Facebook at the moment.
I guess I will now need to spread that across various age ranges and genders to split test... although what I have been doing up to now has been using broad targets and split-testing images to find a high CTR, and then taking the highest CTR after a while and THEN split testing ages and genders... is that a bad order to do it?
Plenty of Facebook spytools out there so you can see what some of the top performing ads are. You should analyze them and ask yourself, what is it about the ads that make people click on them?
a) angle. Angle's the approach you take towards the offer. With a gaming offer you can do like challenging them to beat their friends, challenge them to get the high score today, compare the game to a more popular game..."This is better than farmville", etc.
b) image. divide the images up by angles. One thing I've learned from FB is "you never know." An ad you'd never expect could end up being a monster ad. Also don't forget to test out borders and other CTR tricks with the image.
c) headlines / bodytext
d) targeting. age / gender / country / keyword targeting
e) day parting. Some days and some times will do better than others. By running only during primetime, you get the highest ctr/convr and the best ROI.
Your CTR is .05%, with no targeting, and you're profiting? Sometimes you gotta realize when you're lucky. The best part is you're only gonna go up from here. Learn the fundamentals and you can turn an ok campaign into amazing.
So how do people get high CTR? It's just a combination of experience, rigorous testing, and knowing a lot of "tricks"
Generally you'd want to go in the reverse order since different genders/ages will respond to different images differently. In other words you may be eliminating images that perform poorly in the broad sense but could be gold for a specific demo, e.g. Female 26-35. Additionally if you have granular targeting like this you will find demos that don't convert well early on and can straight up drop them (at least with current angle) and focus on those that do convert.
To address your questions:
1. I can't speak for people doing dating who may go through 100's of images but in my gaming campaigns I usually find the angle either works or it doesn't, and I might deal with maybe 5-30 images before finding something that works and moving from there, otherwise I would probably drop the angle or type of image/approach I'm using. You have to realise that sometimes searching for the right image is not what is going to save the campaign.
2. Say you bid high to start. An ad shows decent CTR, starts getting volume and FB automatically lowers the CPC over time. It will bottom out and then generally starts to creep back up again, since ad CTR generally drops slowly over time. FB is greedy - they want money - so they will slowly raise CPC since you are bidding high = willing to pay more. The idea in dropping bid slowly is to compress that effect of CPC creeping back up whilst not sacrificing volume too much. At some point volume will be affected, but when you find the sweet spot you can get volume balanced with a CPC roof. E.g. at $0.29 bid FB might give you clicks for $0.14 with 100% volume. You compress bid down to 0.21 and now you're getting 80% the volume but paying $0.12 CPC, ROI might pop up a little. It's all just a game against the system to get FB to give you clicks for less by appearing unwilling to pay as much as they are willing to charge you!
3. The circular diagram shows audience size and reach. When the inner circle reaches the outer then every person in that audience has seen your ad in whatever timeframe you currently have specified. It doesn't necessarily mean anything on it's own. When you've hit the entire audience multiple times (e.g. full reach and frequency of ads >5 for last 7 days) then you are probably not going to get a huge amount of new clicks from them. If you can't seem to hit the entire demo over an extended time period it's because a) lots of them never come online b) you need to bid higher c) you need to budget higher d) your ads suck and FB doesn't want to deliver them.
Originally Posted by modulus
Also, the advertiser might not like the quality of certain demos (likely 13-17) and separating them out can help you control volume in each demo to maintain higher lead quality.
Thanks dr_ngo - yeah, I've been contemplating trying out LotsOfAds, but am waiting to hear more reviews from them first as they're pretty pricey...
a) I'll admit that I haven't tried many angles yet, so that's something I need to work on.
b) I've recently been using CrazyCTR and have been slowly split testing all their variations... still have a lot more to try though.
c) I'm just now starting to play with the ad title, but haven't changed my ad body yet. Do you know a rough breakdown by percentage for CTR importance for Image/Title/Copy? I'm assuming it's something like 70/25/5?
d) I have definitely noticed changes due to dayparting. However, I read here that pausing your campaigns/ads a lot can have negative affects so I haven't been doing this. Your thoughts?
Zeno - Thanks a lot!
Razzbot - Yeah, I'm slowly starting to expand those targets up now. I set up that broad age range because I just wanted to quickly get an idea if using no targets would work at all, as I didn't think it would!
Another question guys: Do you generally keep the "Exact Age Match" box unchecked?
The description says "Uncheck the box if you want Facebook to show your ad or sponsored story to people slightly outside the target age range you've selected. Doing this may get you more impressions and clicks." but just how much is "slightly outside"? 1 year? 2 years? 3 years?
So far, I have kept this unchecked for every single ad I've created, as it creates a dramatic drop in target audience, but I guess the price I'm paying is less specific targeting...
Originally Posted by modulus
EDIT-don't delete those broad campaigns yet; you can still get some data from them. In a few days go to reports and select the demographic report. It will give you some useful stats about which ages/genders/geos had higher or lower CTRs on each ad. Geo prolly won't be statistically significant but you'll definitely get some useful data on gender and possibly ages.
Geez, 5 years is a lot. What a spread... thanks a bunch - I will play with exact match now as well. Appreciate it.
Originally Posted by modulus
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