Facebook Advertising CPC vs CPM issue

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I have been working on a small campaign with Facebook ads for about a month now. I have multiple issues and was hoping some members could help rectify them.

1. I have created a CPC ad that has a reach of about 600,000 people and gets .4% CTR, from what I understand, this is very good. My minimum bid gets down to about $0.06 per click and I will make my actual bid that, resulting in adequate impressions and an avg. (actual) cpc of about $0.05. This isn't bad but once you consider only 50% of clicks turn into likes, it becomes $0.10/ click for a page that has very low margins. [I know I need to sell a higher $$ item but this is my campaign for learning ].

The real issue >> When I try to take this high ctr campaign (.4%) to cpm, the ctr drops to something like .009% or some garbage like that. And worse yet, I believe my conversion rate from clicks to likes is even worse.

What do I need to adapt to keep ctr high when switching from cpc to cpm? My personal guess is that Facebook normally optimizes for action in my cpc campaign within the settings I have and with cpm they are removing all optimization and pushing all the 'junk' traffic they can. To me that would mean I need to refine my targeting to make junk traffic less likely... which leads me to problem #2.

2. When I look at my responder demographics for my ads. I see a very definite trend, and with over 1500 clicks, the information should be statistically significant.

I am working on a video game and targeting those who have liked other pages about the game. Men 34-44 have .69% ctr and men 45-54 have 1.07% ctr. Women have a similar trend upward with age but lower ctr overall so I will ignore them for now. This information is contrary to the standard demographics of players but I will assume this is just because the older people are more diehard and hopefully without offense, we can assume they are more of the "still living in mother's basement" -type. But when I adjust my ad targeting for this age group, I don't see a significant lift in ctr.

Any ideas why this is? I am hoping to adjust my targeting with methods like this to improve my ctr and thus lower my cpc or cpm cost but the results aren't showing as I figured they would.



Lastly, does anyone have suggestions for where I can get some of the best information on ADVANCED facebook ad targeting? I have read through tons of "advanced" courses and most information is garbage and what I would consider a 'how-to-navigate-through-facebook-ad-pages' rather than real strategy.
#advertising #cpc #cpm #facebook #issue
  • Profile picture of the author arkueckelhan
    Yesterday Facebook added an 'optimized CPM' feature. I got the same ctr as before but it ended up costing FAR more than cpc or cpm have for me. The option didn't even having any bidding range, they figured they would just charge me whatever they want. Waste of money.
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  • Profile picture of the author Streamline
    I am struggling with the same thing here... there's no option to turn off this frigging optimized CPM. For a company that just went public, it feels like their ad system is still in beta mode. What a bunch of morons.
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    • Profile picture of the author SiteSpeculator
      I have run a bunch of PPC ads on FB and they numbers you are getting seem very good for FB PPC - from what I typically get - Congratulations!!

      Are you trying to do something specific by running both PPC and CPM campaigns at the same time or just testing?

      Can you scale the successes you are having with just your PPC strategy and stop the CPM campaign?
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      • Profile picture of the author arkueckelhan
        Originally Posted by SiteSpeculator View Post

        I have run a bunch of PPC ads on FB and they numbers you are getting seem very good for FB PPC - from what I typically get - Congratulations!!

        Are you trying to do something specific by running both PPC and CPM campaigns at the same time or just testing?

        Can you scale the successes you are having with just your PPC strategy and stop the CPM campaign?
        It is scale-able with the current CPC setup, but I was told by several people that if I have a good CTR that I should just make the same ad as CPM and it will make my clicks even cheaper. It really is just for testing purposes but if I could cut my CPC down about 30% I could really scale up my campaign with the cost justification... once again, mostly for learning though.
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        • Profile picture of the author arkueckelhan
          Almost forgot about this thread. I am still having the same issue. With split testing I have been able to 0.6% CTR, which I consider very good, but to clarify for everyone, I am not immediately selling something, I just creating a community on Facebook. This is likely why I can get a rather good CTR.

          Optimized CPM has now been out for a while and I have tested with it, I am able to get fans (my true goal) for about 10 cents each. The CPC is something like 5-7 cents and it successfully turns people into fans for about 10 cents like I said. So optimized CPM really isn't that bad but it MAKES ME RaGe that Facebook won't let me place an actual bid on this. As an analytics guy I know that sometimes I will be getting a fan for $0.01 and other times I will be paying $0.70 for a fan. I want to be able to put an actual bid because I know if it is going to cost me more than a few cents for any particular fan, I don't want to buy it. [this is because I am trying to build a community and not sell stuff very much, I can't afford to pay for expensive fans. Tell me to sell all you want, but that is not my objective here so please don't bother].



          So the issue remains. I'm not getting like 0.6% CTR and a decent price of 10 cents a fan from CPC or optimized CPM, but with such a good CTR (and better with more playing around), I should be able to switch to CPM and save a fortune. I know how to run CPM ads still but is there anyway I can run them without Facebook dropping my CTR to the ridiculous 0.02% or below that I have been getting recently from the exact same ad? Can I somehow prevent my CPM ads from running alongside Farmville and other games/apps that kill CTR?
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  • Profile picture of the author Raj1106
    In my whole life I never use facbook ads...I know other free way to get market value from facebook..
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  • Profile picture of the author ignmmulia
    How come you can get 0.06 bid? How do you create an ads so that you can get 0.4 CTR?
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  • Profile picture of the author Streamline
    Well I learned that for certain destinations you must use optimized CPM, and for others you can use CPC. Really stupid, but that's how it works.
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