smolodoy

I've just setup a campgain with Facebook and anything that I have tried to target had like suggested minimum bid of $2.00. Thats insane I'd rather do search PPC where people are much more likely to purchase.. please share your experience and suggestions, thank you!

jaggyjay

Yes. FB bids can get ridiculous at time. Perhaps you should start with search PPC instead and test and tweak your offer there. Once you have your numbers (ROI, customer acquisition costs, etc.) you can then port the campaign over to FB and see if it's worthwhile.

Best,
- jay

walterstewart1949

Bid 50% less and make sure you are targeting. Do NOT put more than 3 targeted pages per ad.

Matthew NY

3 targeted pages? Why so few. I've done probably well over 15 and gotten a .14 cpc. It really just depends on the demographic.

walterstewart1949

The less the more targeted. If there are 15 pages that equal 2mm fans it would be hard to be able to optimize the campaign to know which to remove/edit. The tighter the campaign and demographics the better. I did a campaign for women 34 years old who like victoria secret and was able to get CTR .32
and a CPC of .04.

Mahmoud Selman

FB is really hard to get and they will keep disappointing you. 1 day your ad is up and running, the 2nd day its rejected. The cost of the clicks is too expensive for the most niches and demographics.

Get Early Bird To My Newest PPC to CPA Course CPA HeadHunters

walterstewart1949

It doesn't work well for affiliate or arbitrage marketing. It is great if you have a product and you are media buying or media buying on others behalf to a facebook page, or website where you capture leads, or generate sales.

Mahmoud Selman

Yes Walter, you are right.

Get Early Bird To My Newest PPC to CPA Course CPA HeadHunters

jeffrey73

He is exactly right. Facebook would LOVE to push out all affiliates if they could. Unfortunately for them, some affiliates are too crafty.

I've seen affiliates go from thousands down to ZERO on Facebook, and much worse.

high_plains_drifter

i think its quite cheap, i never have to pay over 0.03 for a click.

sith005

Facebook isn't as easy as it used to be (from what I've ready, I certainly wasn't doing it in the days of easy .05 clicks, etc). That being said, I don't have problems getting profitible and I rarely have problems with ad approvals anymore. Also, I've only ever had a small handful of ads disapproved AFTER they'd been running for some time.

First off, if you are selling a product then yes, it can be a bit difficult, Facebook users aren't like search users in that regard, they are there to pass time and goof off.

Don't confuse simple with easy. Facebook is pretty simple ultimately, but it can be frustrating as hell. Search PPC isn't necessarily any easier, though it can be just as simple.

Suggested bid is NOT what you pay. It's an auction system, and you have big companies with people who know **** about marketing bidding dollars for ads. Facebook rewards ads with good CTR, plain and simple. If the suggested bid is $1.50-$2.00 you can do a couple things. First, like Walter said, you could bid low and see what impressions you get. If you get none, gradually increase your bid until you get the remnant traffic.

You could also bid just above the minimum, $1.52 or so, and get that initial burst. You won't pay $1.50. If your CTR is good (and it is all about the CTR in terms of cost), you'll see much much lower cpcs.

Try pushing offers that don't require a credit card (CPA offers, etc). If you want to sell, you'll do better using FB as a means of building a list and offer them the sales on the back end.

Facebook is, like other traffic sources, a system that must be learned. Rarely will someone jump in and immediately be successful. It's important to do your homework, treat it like any business, test, and learn.

I've recently started getting into PPV more, and I have a TON to learn. I don't expect to jump in and right away be as successful as I have become with Facebook. That's because I've spent over 6 months doing nothing but Facebook. I know it'll take time for me to learn the tricks and such with PPV marketing.

Sorry for the long post, but I tend to do that Obviously do what you are comfortable with, but I don't want people getting discouraged with FB before giving it a shot. Think of it like this, if you can get a $.70 EPC, and can manage a $.35 CPC (which is NOT hard) you are making 100% positive ROI, and that's direct linking. Yes there are more details, but it can be done, and is done every day.

If you have any questions post em up, I'll answer anything I can, and there are a lot of people here much more knowledgable than me who can help even more.

Good Luck!
Danny

ChrisBa

What was your targeting?

smolodoy

sith005 thanks for the advice, by the way your making pretty good money with FB? How many ads do you create per campgain? If I target for example mortages, dental etc which interested would I target? Thats what I'm having trouble with coming up.. please advice, thank you!

sith005

Hi Smolody,

I do this part time for various reasons, but I make enough to augment my income from my job, which has been my goal. I choose to spend more time with my wife and kids, which I can do now.

In terms of how many ads, this can vary greatly. I usually always start off with about 20 images, 2 headlines and 1 body, depending on the audience size. Starting with 100 ads on 15000 audience will be tough to get enough data across them all. Usually I start with 20-40. Try to keep images somewhat different so you can see which TYPES do better than others and go from there.

Targeting will also depend a bit on you plan on backing out. Are you going to send the visitor to the offer right now (either direct-linked or via an LP) or are you going to capture their info for a list and market to them on the back-end? If it's the latter, you'll find you can target a number of different things. Singles looking for love may ultimately look at dental offers on the back-end, why not? In fact they may on the front-end too. People looking to be more attractive would certainly look for teeth-whitening, etc.

Depending on what kind of mortgage offer you are pushing, you can get more info by looking at Alexa, Quantcast, Yahoo Clues and look at search terms and urls that are related to mortgages, mortgage banks, refis, even credit scores, etc.

For things like financial-related offers, I often prefer to capture the lead and market on the back-end. I can then send mortgage offers, credit-report offers, insurance offers, etc.

When targeting in Facebook, you always have the obvious, but even the obvious can be expanded on. Say you are targeting people who like World of Warcraft, and all WOW-related terms for a free MMO offer. You can go beyond that and find non-WOW fans, there are hundreds of similar games.

This is one of the difficult aspects of Facebook, but it's one that you can get better at with work and time. Use tools like Alexa, Quantcast, Clues, they'll give you a big head start. Also remember what Facebook is and what most people on there are doing. There's a reason dating and games do so well there, as do simple short forms like auto insurance.

smolodoy

Thank you sith005 ones again for all the tips and advises.. I've launched a campgain there with 6 ads, its dental offer and since I didn't know what to target I just targetting cities that google adplanners suggest by checking out other sites and ages, my ads got approved, and I'm guessing that "reach" is the impressions and it looks like I had around 500 impressions for each ads and now its just dead.. no impression no nothing and not single click.. Im bidding have suggest bid which is $0.61.. don't know whats going on.. and why aren't my ads serving... please advise, than you in advance.

jeffrey73

Never heard of Yahoo Clues.. thanks for that Sith!

You can also find more data using this: Google Press Center: Zeitgeist

sith005

@jefferey73 - There is a great WSO on this by Thom Lancaster here: Yahoo! Clues WSO, but yeah a great addition to your demographics research.

@smolodoy - Your reach is the unique vistors that the ad has been shown to while they frequency is how many times on average each visitor has seen the ad. Multiply the reach by the frequency to get impressions (it was much more straightforward before).

If your reach was 500, I'm guessing frequency was at least 2? If you got no clicks during the burst, Facebook will stop giving you impressions. A lot of times, even raising the bid won't help here. You can try to raise the bid in increments until you get impressions, but I've seen ads die like this.

Additionally, if you are seeing 1000+ impressions and no clicks, it's time to pause those ads anyway and get some new ones up. 6 ads to be honest isn't really much. You'll likely need to burn through more to find a winner or two. Make sure your images pop. Make teeth super white and even eyes really bright on faces. Try to sharpen it, maybe mess with the contrast/levels, etc.

Think about what would grab your attention, what would make you click the ad. Targeting the city is a start, you can call that out in your headline (Hey San Francisco?) or body (Learn the secret to cheap, effective tooth whitening in San Francisco...). Those are kind of crappy, but just quick examples.

Depending on what kind of stuff you see with that, you could then try to drill down more if necessary.

ethelphillips

Now I intend to advertise my website with twitter (PPC: Pay Per Click), but I can't find any section on twitter for that.

Aquascoop

efurnitureshowroom

facebook advertising require some patience and little skills of targeting only relevant users and niche, this will lower the over all cost

salikkhan

I agree, FB Ppc has so many variants, targeting large number of pages would be bad idea, still if you want to target large number of pages, you should go for Google AdSence

Fking

Thanks for the super valuable info Sith, it's gold.

Btw, is it true that when you advertise to facebook page, instead of outside URL the CPC tends to be generally cheaper?

Extremely hot WSO:
[PENGUIN FIX] Resurrect your site from PENGUIN DEATH [100% money back guarantee!]

sith005

It certainly can be, this is due to a number of factors, not least of which is the fact that your ad will have a 'Like' button beneath it. This alone allows you to do some unique stuff with your ad, and in most cases will bring much higher CTR.

smolodoy

Thank you sith005 ones again, your helping me out here alot I really appriated, another thing if you don't mind how do I get cheap clicks? Some say that you got to target narrow around 10k audience some say that you got to go wide around 100k, so whats the deal here? How do people get .10 cents a click or less, I'm guessing thats when the CTR kicks in so is everyone starting high? thank you!

Fking

I was experimenting for the last 2 days and also struggling to get cheap clicks

I even tried with the CPM option, (cause read that is the way to get really low CPC) and ended up paying $1.80 per click. I got like only 3 clicks for 10k impressions or so.
My CTR is really poor

Extremely hot WSO:
[PENGUIN FIX] Resurrect your site from PENGUIN DEATH [100% money back guarantee!]

buysell514

Hi guys how much would you pay for someone to take care of you Facebook ads management ?

Montreal Web hosting

sith005

There are multiple factors that contribute to getting a higher CTR and lower CPC. First off you could always try international traffic, as typically you'll see lower CPC with CTRs that don't need to be as high as US targeted ads, depdending. Regarding audience, the size can affect your CTR sure, but it can also affect your longevity, etc. I'd try and find a balance. More important than the size is the targeting. If you target people who like cats, you could get pretty good CTR by putting images of various cats, make the images POP, etc. However, if you target people who like a specific breed, such as Persian cats, and you put images of that breed, you'll usually see a higher CTR (and smaller audience size).

Remember Facebook CTR is really all about the image. Pick images that relate to the offer but stand out. If pointing to a fan page, you'll have a like button. Use this.

Your CTR is .03%, which is too low for CPC OR CPM. The problem with CPM in many cases is the ad placement isn't given as high a priority as CPC. Your ad will show up in spots that are less conspicous, below the fold, through games/apps, etc. It can certainly yeald low-cost results if your ad is A. Targeted well; and B. Using a great image. If your suggested range for CPC is 1.70-2.20 or something in that range, you will get CPCs that are a fraction of that if you can get ~.15-.2% ctr or so.

Don't ever be afraid to test between CPC and CPM, but remember the most important thing is you ad, and your image is about 60-80% of that.

stuzilla

What is your secret?