Facebook CTR Noisedive? (31)
Any insight into why when I get some new ads approved they start off great with 1-3k impressions and a CTR of around .15%+ but when they're at 15k impressions the CTR is like .03%? Is this normal or should the CTR hold steady if it's actually a good creative? I'm using proven winners here basically and they start off strong but don't seem to hold their CTR, any idea why?
Are you increasing your budget when this happens?
Actually yeah that did happen today, does that cause it?
Avoid increasing budget at any time other than at the very start of your advertising day. FB ramps up delivery to get in line with your new budget and they do this by throwing a lot of crappy impressions at your ads which can throw performance way out. Most of the time you will crash your CTRs and wish you had waited.
Damnit. Will they stabilize though now or are they screwed?
Probably a bit screwed for today, but likely fine tomorrow :-)
At what time is it ok to raise budget, i.e. when exactly is the beginning of a new advertising day on Facebook? midnight or 3 am?
It depends what you have your time zone set to.. If you have is set right then it should reset at midnight.
Awesome thanks. Do you know if this happens with changing bid prices? If you raise bid prices will Facebook rush to send you more impressions also? Or does it not matter when/how you change bids?
Changing bids, as far as I know, doesn't give such a dramatic burst in crappy traffic. Increased bid moves you up the auction ladder, probably also increasing placement quality, but doesn't neccessarily 'shock' the facebook delivery system into giving you a lot of (crappier) volume.
Take it with a grain of salt. I think the bid behaviour will depend on demos/performance history/competition/and all that jazz, whereas budget changes almost certainly degrade performance. As faesthetic said, your advertising day depends on the timezone you selected when making the account. Once chosen it can never be changed. You can see it in account settings in the advertising centre.
Yeah there ya go ^
On a side note, how do you go about changing the timezone on an ad account...
^ You rock man thanks.
Dude, everything you are hearing is bull. Your ad copies are fine. The problem is that Valentines Day is coming up so you got advertisers for dating (affiliates + the big guys that spend millions), you got 1-800-flowers with their high budgets and you got tax ads going on (not a big impact though). Your CTRs are dropping because the big guys spending millions are the ones on top getting all the impressions while your ad slowly gets the impressions below them.
Don't leave your budget and NOT change it. you HAVE to change it. You want to blow a few hundred in 30 minutes or do you want to spend it wisely over the whole day? Blasting your budget causes Facebook to deliver your impressions to the same Facebook users multiple times giving you a high frequency rate which will cause you to pay high CPC's.
Originally Posted by mscimitar
Originally Posted by xerocool
Do they celebrate Valentine's Day internationally? If so that might explain it but I thought that was more of a US thing. Doesn't really explain int'l traffic prices/quality
Valentines Day is celebrated internationally as well.
Faesthetic: Prove me wrong on anything i said.
Originally Posted by xerocool
Originally Posted by faesthetic
How do you expect people to control the volume throughout the day?
If what you are saying is the reason his CTR went to shit is true, then it wouldn't have started good in the first place, right? I've been running Facebook for 2 years and have what I'd like to consider a good bit of experience. Anyone that I've ever spoke to who does real volume on facebook sets the budget at midnight when the clock turns over, and lets it run then. If you keep fucking with the budget all day, it's not going to go as smoothly had you not touched it. My CTR's no doubt get fucked up when I just boost the budget in the middle of the day vs letting them run naturally. Hopefully someone else will chime in and further explain.
I run my business 10-5 due to the nature of the offer and can only do it this way (10AM-5PM). I need to equally distribute my traffic every hour so the only way to do this is to up the budget by $100 or $200 or $300 depending on how fast traffic is coming in. If I set it to 3K lets say and activate it at 10AM, FB might send most of my traffic before it even hits 5pm which is what i dont want to do.
I guess we are in 2 different boats since I am running a offer that requires regular business hours.
Originally Posted by xerocool
i've noticed the same thing. if i bump budget from $50 to $500 for example at noon, fb will quickly send me $250 worth of traffic (half way through the day = half of the budget) then slow down to catch up for the day. that $250 is typically poor-converting traffic.
Since I start at $100 usually and up it up to 5k to maintain the traffic (depending on how volume is coming in), i think i may start it at 500 and see how it rolls through.
You ramp up from $100 to $5k in the span of one day? How big are the demos you work with?
To chime in here, upping the budget can sometimes NOT have a detrimental effect depending on the performance of your ads. I have had ads that were performing so well that upping the budget didn't damage them - but in this case, we are talking a large demo, high CTRs, so it's likely the FB ad delivery system happily sent me a lot of quality impressions, helped by the fact the demo was large enough to cope easily, as opposed to what it normally does. There are always exceptions which make people argue.
Good info in here. Another question: does this also happen if you start a campaign in the middle of the day? For example I have some paused right now, are these best kept paused until midnight?
i would wait till midnight unless its low budget or you know the creatives rock
Originally Posted by mscimitar
Going to go ahead and guess it's because 1K-3K is not nearly enough data to determine the CTR of an ad, I mean that's only 1-5 clicks total.
Not sure if this tool is completely accurate in this example (http://www.mccallum-layton.co.uk/sta...oportions.aspx) but I put in a .2% CTR, 6 clicks, 3000 impressions and with those stats you can be 95% confident that your CTR will be between .04% and .36% so it's entirely possible the ad was a dud.
You guys experiencing half ass CTR's since last week?
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