What to bid based on Facebook's suggested bid prices (11)
So in my attempt to dive headfirst into facebook marketing, I've gone through pages and pages of Facebook threads to see what a good bid is to start a campaign off on, and I think the consensus, at least from the older threads I have found, is to ignore the suggested bids for cpc and use instead the suggested bids for the cpm standard and then use that price range for cpc.
Does this still apply?
For instance, if I am running a dating offer for females age 40+, the suggested bid under cpc is $1 - $1.65. Under cpm, the suggested bid is .08 - .73. So I place a bid of around .6 or .7 to use under their cpc bidding. Wise or no?
It's going to be influenced by your account history... but yeh, best bet is CPM values > CPC bid. Tbh, your initial bidding strategy is the least of your worries. You could bid low (e.g. $0.45) and then raise by $0.10 every couple of hours until you see the bid floor being surpassed. Then it's up to you to choose some appropriate bid.
If initial bidding strategy is the least of my worries, what's the biggest? Ad images and headlines?
I'm no expert but I'd start higher to get good ad placement and better chance of high ctr out of the gate
What classifies as a high bid? > $1?
Also, how do you know when you've surpassed the bid floor, just when you start seeing traffic roll in?
Yeah when you start seeing volume. It's generally better to start at high bid to get top placements straight away, but if it's a new demo/country sometimes you just have no idea, and the last thing you want is to come back to $1 clicks. So in those circumstances it might be better to test the waters first, even if it means doing so with a dummy campaign with only 1 ad in it.
So if I'm having problems getting a consistent +.1 CTR on a demo such as 40+ females, should I be upping my bid from .5 or .6 to > $1 and retest the same images? Or does the bid not really matter that much for the CTRs? All my experience is on plentyoffish so I'm trying to wrap my head around the FB bidding system.
Like I said in the other thread mate, it's very hard to determine what CPC you should be paying. I'd set a goal every time you upload a new set of ads to drop the bid & see if you get traction.
Day 1: Camp 1 -> $1
Day 1: Camp 2 - 0.90c
Day 2: Camp 1 -> 0.80c
Day 2: Camp 2 -> 0.70c
Once you've found the lowest bid you can get traction on, start every camp at that bid - Make sure you start the camps at the same time every day though as this can effect how much traction you will get!
From there on it's just a battle of finding decent CTR ads that will push your cpc down!
Originally Posted by mscimitar
One thing I have noticed is low budgets tend to garner higher initial CTRs. It doesn't stop ad performance going to hell with volume but I like to think it's a good way to start them. Also, how are you structuring the campaigns? Do you have 1 campaign with say 4 dupes of every image? You would be amazed at the disparity in ad performance between duplicate ads at the same bid. You can play games like running 10 in parallel and upping the bids on the ones that maintain a high CTR for a few clicks, locking down/deleting the crap starters. Can be a way of trying to get an ad to low CPC as fast as possible but in the end it won't save your campaign in the coming days.
Thanks for all the help guys, I really really appreciate it!
I do have some more questions though 
1) Is it unreasonable to expect a good CTR if you are making advertisements for a niche kind of dating, let's say trying to target Black individuals, and not targeting any keywords or anything? Because I imagine the ad might be shown to a lot of people who are not interested, therefore dropping the CTR.
2) If in your testing, you have 2 ads in 2 separate campaigns targeting the same demographic that are now profitable, do you just let them run in those separate campaigns at the same time and not try to combine them into 1 campaign?
1) It depends. If your ads are going to appeal only to a certain type of person then you should try to refine to that demo using keyword targeting. Not doing so is shooting yourself in the foot. If it works well, consider making a second campaign with the same ads but hitting broad.
2) Leave them running on their own. NEVER fuck with an ad that is working. NEVER. Editing it makes it a brand new ad and wipes out all performance history. Making new ads in a new campaign is going to be starting all over again. While it might not affect end performance, if it tanks and you waste money you only have yourself to blame.
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