FB Ads For Events - Expert Help Needed

2 replies
  • PPC/SEM
  • |
Hi Folks - am here hoping to find someone who can help me with FB ads.

I've been really lucky and have created a game the people seem to love - whilst I can't talk about it in great detail, what I can say is that we run events where the players all turn up and play on the same day - and we've had some recent Facebook success, creating events that have had 600-1000 "interested" attendees, which turned into a profit of around $5k in ticket sales from a $200 advert spend - sound great right? Hold tight...

Recently, I've been having huge problems getting a consistent "cost per event response" from my ads - whichever town we are targeting, I always use the same customer profile (age, interests, etc) a similar location radius and the same ad copy - some adverts have a cost as low as $0.10 per event response but most fall somewhere in the $0.30 to $0.50 mark - I can still make good money from these. However, I've noticed that after an initial good few days (5-10 days) the cost per event response begins to rise significantly - like up to $1.50 per response and beyond.

So I have some questions for you experts please:

1) Is it normal for an advert to start off great and then suddenly start to see the costs rocket? Can I influence this?

2) Is it normal to see the costs suddenly rocket after a very minor tweak to say the scheduling or budget?

3) If my aim is to get folks to hit the "interested" button on an event, should I simply be targeting "event responses" or should I try "post engagement" too?

It's frustrating currently - I know I can make good money from an event that has just 500-1000 people interest - but the inconsistencies of getting to that figure with ads is driving my insane.

Any help very much appreciated - I realize I'm making this up as I go along and am a FB ads novice so please be gentle :-)

All the best,

Trev
#ads #events #expert #needed
  • Profile picture of the author joshuajdy
    An ad cost begins to increase after sometime. it's normal. you just need create another similar ad maybe with different display picture or/and description.
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  • Here's what I think is happening based on my understanding of what you are selling. You may need to provide more information or clarify things.

    Since you are targeting a small geographic area, after some time the same people are being exposed to your ad. You don't mention click rate but my guess is that the CTR is going down. Those who already said they are going to the event (assuming here need to be physically close but if it's online, still the same idea) will not click the ad, at least they are less likely since they signed on. If they do click, they won't sign on again, thus that click is wasted on them. Those who are seeing your ad over and over and not clicked are not interested. So over time your CTR goes down thus dragging down your ad quality and making it more expensive per click which in turn makes it more expensive per conversion.

    So in a way, the type of product you are selling, an event which is time and location sensitive, chances are that you will get great initial results only to see them drop off over time. I think mostly you have reach the saturation point of those who will attend the event. Changing the budget or scheduling is not going to change that. Changing your targeting might get new people who have not seen your ad yet and get a few more to sign up but you would likely see the same increase in CPS over time.

    What you could do is try to build up over time until the event. Not sure if this strategy would reduce the CPS over the course of your campaign but something to try. You might get less people to click who have already signed on thus saving there. A bigger push closer to the event (act now! just 3 days to go) might help too and get less people to click many times and again reducing the CPS.

    You may want to spread your ad budget to other ad networks, not just Facebook. This partly solves the problem of the same people seeing your ad too many times on one network and clicking multiple times, if that is what is partly happening. You would also target people not using Facebook so maybe you'd get more people to the event.

    In the big scheme of things, you are not doing bad with a great ROI overall. Yes, your CPC increases by 3 to 5 times after a while but your average is not $1.50 per lead, it's $0.50. Another solution seems to just stop the campaign once you get to a cost per lead that you don't like. The downside of course is that you then don't get any more leads.
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