Facebook Advertising Insights

There's been a growing number of discussions lately about Facebook advertising (probably because of the promotion of Perry Marshall's product), so I figured that after managing almost $5 million in just Facebook ad campaign budgets over the past 2 years as part of my bigger lead generation systems development and consulting for offline business clients, I would throw out a few things that I have learned as the result of being able to run so many campaigns. Yes, I've personally bought and managed that much in just Facebook advertising on an agency basis.

Facebook doesn't tell anyone how their ad system works, but from all of my playing around, here's what I observe.

When you create an ad, you get inserted into an ad pool of advertisers that match your specific demographic, geographic, keyword, etc... targeting.

Your suggested bid is based on the current bids of the advertisers in your insertion pool, plus other weighting factors based on the number of filters you add. The most expensive filters are geographic and age.

Then, your pool goes into the live rotation and your impressions start based on their algorithm, which also takes into account your daily budget, the quality (how many likes/dislikes), and other factors.

The algorithm displays ads on a randomized basis while the pool is active.

You can actually get inserted into a really crap pool right from the start, and even have twice the high suggested bid on ad and still not get any substantial impressions. I've actually doubled the suggested bid price and gotten ZERO ad views over the next 24 hours.

When I recreated the ad from scratch, the impressions took off instantly because I was put into a completely different rotation.

It also works the other way... if you create an ad, and set your initial bid at the lowest suggested amount, and then lower it to .01 after you're approved, you will generally still get some impressions over a 24 hour period.

That being said, it's also contingent on the competitive bidding and weighting factors based on your rotation pool.

Hope this helps some of you up and coming Facebook advertisers.

Oh, and please stop spamming Fan Pages and Groups with your affiliate CPA offer links. It's extremely annoying.

Oh, and also, don't friend request strangers, and then start bombarding them with offers the moment they accept. That pisses people off.