Impressions/Clicks/CTR/CPC

1. The first few hours of a new ad will pretty much determine the performance of
your ad going forward. If you have a low click through rate, your ads will start to see
less and less impressions until they stop receiving impressions all together. If your
ad has less than 0.01% click through rate, you really need to work on creating a
better ad.
2. Your click through rate is one of the most important factors for the entire
campaign. The higher your CTR, the cheaper your cost per click will be. The image
and title have the biggest impact on your CTR so as you begin to test, focus MOSTLY
only those two items.
3. So you don’t blow a ton of money, start your facebook ads with a low daily budget
and using the CPC (cost per click) price model. Only after you have a successful ad
campaign do you switch to CPM bidding… at least when you’re first starting out.
4. Split up your ads into groups based on who you want to target (age ranges,
male/female etc.). This means smaller volume but the ability to target better. By
having more specific targets, you will be able to find specific demographics that
make more profit (and you can bid more on) and certain demographics that make
less money.
5. Once you find an ad that works well, make sure to try to find another variation.
(Read more about the WHY you need multiple ads in the section called Banner
Blindness below)
Bidding:
Facebook allows you to do both CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per 1000
impressions) advertising. The major difference here is obviously the CPM model does
not guarantee that your ad gets any clicks and yet you still have to pay. The upside
to the CPM model is that you can get clicks for cheaper if you have an ad with a good
click through rate.
A good way to get a starting place for your bids (specially if you are direct linking) is
to ask your affiliate manager or affiliate contact what the EPC of an offer is. This EPC
(earnings per click) is the estimated revenue you make for each visitor to the page.
If an offer has an EPC of 45 cents, you might start your cost per click bids at 20
cents or so.
Important: Facebook really doesn’t like you to lower your ad bids. In fact most of
the time that you lower bids you end up getting 0 impressions on that ad. Therefore
you should always start your ad bids low and move up.
Scaling Your Facebook Ad Campaigns To The 6 Figure Per Month Mark:
Here are some really helpful tips on scaling your Facebook campaigns up to the six
figure per month mark like I have:
1. More Ads – Making more ads with little changes can have a big impact. With
Facebook, you can run literally hundreds of very similar ads at the same time,
going to the same offer. This can really help to get more traffic to successful
campaigns.
2. Targeting – Targeting on Facebook is where you need to be creative. In fact,
if you’ve found a small profiting campaign, chances are, your targeting is
actually pretty broad.
In my experience, most newbies target very little. So, target more specific
things.
Remember, people in one place in life might convert differently than another.
People at one workplace might convert differently than another. Test them
all… ages, geographical location, sexual preference, etc. People at x might
convert different than Y.
Most people group them all into one large lump of demographic targeting. If
the ad is not profitable, you kill entire sub-sections, which might have been
profitable.
This might take time, but it’s worth the effort. You can put a small budget on
each test to maximize your testing efforts. (See the tool below for making
these ads more efficiently)
3. Images – Images are well known as the main factor in producing a
maximum click through rate. The higher your click through rate, (usually) the
more frequent your ads get shown.
It’s simple enough to know that you should be testing multiple images. If you
find a new image that has a much higher click through rate, you’ve instantly
scaled your campaign.
Test as many images as you can afford. Some images are so odd but work
amazingly well. Some images you think would work great, yet perform poorly.
I find images that look like a “facebook friend” would have taken perform
well. Professional photos generally perform not as well.
4. CPM bidding –Think about it… Facebook is trying to maximize revenue. If
they can get an advertiser to promise to pay a set amount regardless of clicks
for 1000 impressions, they have just reduced a lot of risk on their part.
Therefore, if you have a good ad, switching to CPM based models really can
help you increase your traffic flow. Facebook favors the lower risk ads.
Daily Budgets:
Your account will start with a small daily limit (around $50). If you are constantly
hitting your daily budget, facebook will raise your allowed spend up to $1000 per day
automatically in increments of $250 or so.
This is only a maximum spend limit, so don’t worry that you’ll have to spend $1000
per day every day to keep a good limit.
If you need more than $1000 per day in spend, this can be raised after a little
history and an email to affiliates@facebook.com. Building history to your facebook
account is important so you might not be able to get a big raise in daily budget until
you have a bit of history with the company.
With a good account history, you can have an extremely high limit per day. My limit,
for example, is $50,000 per day.
My Secret Weapon To Facebook Ads: Facebook Ads Manager Tool
I’m always looking for ways to make the most of my time. Whenever a process can
be sped up or automated, I’m all for it.
Facebook’s ad system can be very tedious, and to resolve that problem, I have been
using a tool called Facebook Ads Manger extension for Firefox. You can view my
review of this tool here. (http://www.jonathanvolk.com/facebook-ads/facebook-adsmanager-
tool-review.html)
I’ve used this tool over the past year or so and it has literally redefined how I look at
facebook as an advertising platform and has helped me to make hundreds of
thousands of dollars.
Facebook Ads Manager allows you to automate much of the tedious ad submission
process saving you an innumerable amount of time. You can setup the toolbar to
make 1000’s of ads and leave it running all night. Come back in the morning and
you’re set!
To find out more about this ads manager tool please go to my blog post about the
tool. Or you can check it out on the Facebook Ads Manager website.
(http://bit.ly/cOmk9J)