Advanced observations about PPC ads on Facebook

Okay, I'm running a lot of campaigns for "offline clients" on Facebook. I'm talking about huge budget campaigns as high as 6 figures.

I've noticed something interesting about FB's ads, and wanted to compare my observations with other warriors that are also experienced with PPC on FB.

I see an interesting phenomenon that points to a kind of "batching", where looks like our ads will run in cycle for a while, and then views drop off to literally zero. Not 1 or 15, but none.We bump our bids to even twice as high as the highest suggested bid to simply see what effect this has on visibility, and for a period of a couple hours at a time, the stats literally show zero impressions.

Statistically, even in low traffic periods, to drop to literally zero for a period of time isn't feasible. Sure, maybe drop to even single digits an hour... but not to zero. I can verify the ads aren't displaying because we have accounts established for each of the "demographic profiles" for each campaign to be able to see the ad displaying on the account page. During the blackout period, there's also no rotation on the individual account page.

Then, it's like a rocket ship launch where impressions kick in and we do 1,000 a minute in almost real time. As fast as I can refresh the browser, the number just keeps going.

I've tried to get answers from FB, but they're not real forthcoming with any details about the inner bowel workings of their math - which is not surprising as ad algorithms are proprietary stuff that make a website tick.

I suspect that there's batch "pools" of ads that get cycled, and your bid affects your position against the other ads in that same batch. Then, they activate and cycle the batches with your demographic filtering with other ads in that particular batch.

Anyone got any ideas on this?