My Facebook Adventure

C

Carpaccio

New member
Oct 2, 2009
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Hey all, I've decided to share my newb experience with Facebook. Hopefully this will help keep me motivated.

Basic details of my second (current) campaign:
1. Dating
2. Created about 20 ads, going after three different groups.
3. Males looking for females. Didn't change much else.
4. I used keywords to do most of the targeting. Group 'A' has an audience of about 30,000, Group 'B' about 400,000 and Group 'C' about 450,000.
5. Chose CPM and bid at the top range of the suggestions.
6. Max spend of $20/day.
7. Ads have amateurish pics of girls, as sexy as possible without getting denied. I also threw in pics that were somewhat related to the keywords I targeted. Headline were a mix of questions, somewhat generic statements, and things that were related to the keywords.

Results after one day:
I divided the aforementioned groups up in the image.



I got one conversion off of the ad with a CTR of 0.011%. Yikes.

I'm considering the following:
1. Create separate campaigns for each group. I assume that a low CTR on one of them will hurt the others. I was really disappointed to get so few impressions with Group 'A.'
2. Switch to CPC until I find ads that are getting clicks. My concern is that I won't get many impressions by using this method.
3. Further split the groups with location targeting (currently a whole country), although I imagine this would be extremely time consuming (P202 portion of the work flow slows things down so much).
4. Further split up the groups by age ranges. Right now I'm just doing 18+.
5. Adding more photos and more headlines, based on the ads that got a CTR of over 0.04%.

I'm debating if I should keep that one ad around that got the conversion. I assume it was just a fluke, but it break my heart to turn off the tap on the only one that brought in money. Also, as you can see above I've paused a lot of the ads. I'm not sure if I actually have sufficient data, but I'm assuming that the winners will show a far better CTR than what I have right now.

Any suggestions are welcome and appreciated.
 


dude, always go CPC first. don't even think of CPM until you can get your CTR up to at least 0.1%. if you're worried about not getting impressions, just bid above the suggested price, you'll get plenty of impressions there. then when you find out which ads give the best CTR, then start bidding CPM.
 
juntao65 said:
dude, always go CPC first. don't even think of CPM until you can get your CTR up to at least 0.1%. if you're worried about not getting impressions, just bid above the suggested price, you'll get plenty of impressions there. then when you find out which ads give the best CTR, then start bidding CPM.
Click to expand...

Awesome, thanks! :)
 
Carpaccio - Come back and share what you learn. I've got my first FB ad up right now that is sucking badly.
 
Carpaccio said:
1. Create separate campaigns for each group. I assume that a low CTR on one of them will hurt the others. I was really disappointed to get so few impressions with Group 'A.'
2. Switch to CPC until I find ads that are getting clicks. My concern is that I won't get many impressions by using this method.
3. Further split the groups with location targeting (currently a whole country), although I imagine this would be extremely time consuming (P202 portion of the work flow slows things down so much).
4. Further split up the groups by age ranges. Right now I'm just doing 18+.
5. Adding more photos and more headlines, based on the ads that got a CTR of over 0.04%.
Click to expand...

1. This isn't true. But it might be worth it to separate them just for organization.
2. This can be a pain in the ass, yes.
3. To expedite this, don't bother creating individual ads in p202. Just use the "kw=" variable to segment the cities, like append "philadelphia" to the p202 link and then, when you check for conversions, sort by keyword instead of by text ad. Without this I would've lost my mind or written a script to create ads in p202 which would've been retarded.
4. Doing 18+ poses the more difficult problem of running dating offers which allow those ages. Most (and seemingly best converting) dating offers are 25+ only. Which means you'd need separate ads for 18-24, or even 18-20 AND 21-24, since some offers even ask for 21+. My advice here is just target 25+ with offers accepting 25+, then when you get comfortable try doing 18-24 ads.
5. Be careful about testing too many variables at once. Remember the images are the most important here by far.


I'm debating if I should keep that one ad around that got the conversion. I assume it was just a fluke, but it break my heart to turn off the tap on the only one that brought in money. Also, as you can see above I've paused a lot of the ads. I'm not sure if I actually have sufficient data, but I'm assuming that the winners will show a far better CTR than what I have right now.
Click to expand...

Probably is a fluke, but try leaving it on for a bit to find out. I've had experiences where a certain, different ad had just as horrible CTR but significantly better conversion rate. It doesn't happen often but it does happen. Also, that looks like sufficient data.
 
i dont mean to thread jack, but I have a related question so I thought I would post in here.

I recently started my first facebook campaign and managed to get one of my ads over .1% CTR on cpc over 30kish impressions. I switched it to cpm and the exact same ad dropped to .05% CTR over 100k impressions. any idea why this happens?

also, my offer was converting at nearly 5% 2 days ago, yesterday it dropped to about 1% with about the same number of clicks a day.

ive actually done better than I thoguht so far, spent about 30 bucks and made back 10.
 
Rooby said:

1. This isn't true. But it might be worth it to separate them just for organization.
2. This can be a pain in the ass, yes.
3. To expedite this, don't bother creating individual ads in p202. Just use the "kw=" variable to segment the cities, like append "philadelphia" to the p202 link and then, when you check for conversions, sort by keyword instead of by text ad. Without this I would've lost my mind or written a script to create ads in p202 which would've been retarded.
4. Doing 18+ poses the more difficult problem of running dating offers which allow those ages. Most (and seemingly best converting) dating offers are 25+ only. Which means you'd need separate ads for 18-24, or even 18-20 AND 21-24, since some offers even ask for 21+. My advice here is just target 25+ with offers accepting 25+, then when you get comfortable try doing 18-24 ads.
5. Be careful about testing too many variables at once. Remember the images are the most important here by far.
Click to expand...

Huge thanks! That P202 tip is going to save me a ridiculous amount of time. I was in the process of splitting up the age groups, but I will proceed with your advice in mind.
 
Day Two
I paused the campaign so that I could make the adjustments. Switching to CPC, adding more pictures, and I'm dividing up the campaigns.
 
Something funky is going on with FB today for me as well. I launched 9 campaigns. All have been approved. All have amounts on the higher end if not higher than the recommended CPC and nothing - I mean nothing - is pushing the ads into view mode. Not one impression or click or anything. And it's been over 8 hrs since my ads were approved. My avg. CPC is 35 cents too.

Either someone is playing with my emotions OR Facebook is probably getting another Facelift. G-d help us. Can't FB just leave things alone.
 
snaps said:
I recently started my first facebook campaign and managed to get one of my ads over .1% CTR on cpc over 30kish impressions. I switched it to cpm and the exact same ad dropped to .05% CTR over 100k impressions. any idea why this happens?
Click to expand...

Are you targeting a smaller group of people? But actually this has happened to me too and I can't really say why. I THINK I was targeting by keyword so I think it's just that so much of the audience saw it quickly. But try running the CPC one again.


Something funky is going on with FB today for me as well. I launched 9 campaigns. All have been approved. All have amounts on the higher end if not higher than the recommended CPC and nothing - I mean nothing - is pushing the ads into view mode. Not one impression or click or anything. And it's been over 8 hrs since my ads were approved. My avg. CPC is 35 cents too.
Click to expand...

CPC just plain needs to be higher for the first few clicks. Recommended CPC has never been accurate for me. Try putting the cpc up to 0.49 and set the budget to $2, then once it gets a click or two lower the CPC. Either repeat this for every one or just use CPM.

hav fun dudz
 
Well, it took 19 hours and then all of a sudden a massive wind came at my campaigns. 21,239 impressions but 2 clicks. I mean great for the impressions but I really do think there is something wrong with the reporting because I have never had a less than 0.01% conversion. Usually I am in a 2-3%. Oh well - Facebook is having a growing pain I guess.
 
dragonhawk28 said:
Welcome to FB my friend. You probably got an intern that was just dumped by his g/f and is hating the world.
Click to expand...

intern.facebook.com = internal.facebook.com

Has nothing to do with intern.

OP, I wouldn't do Dating on FB, especially with such a low budget. You need to do a a lot of split testing, which requires a decent amount of money. Just my suggestion.
 
Alright, so I haven't quite given up on my current campaigns, but I decided to start another one via CPC.

I'm targeting an audience of about 15,000. Daily budget of $25. I got over 50 ads approved and I'm bidding at the top end (or slightly above) of the suggested bid. It's going really slowly... after about 5 hours, I have about 5000 impressions total (each ad getting anywhere between 10 and 180) with zero clicks.

mGrunin said:
OP, I wouldn't do Dating on FB, especially with such a low budget. You need to do a a lot of split testing, which requires a decent amount of money. Just my suggestion.
Click to expand...

I can probably push the budget if necessary, but I am being more cautious (I burned a lot of money in PPV). What's a decent budget for this?

Any suggestions besides dating?
 
snaps said:
I recently started my first facebook campaign and managed to get one of my ads over .1% CTR on cpc over 30kish impressions. I switched it to cpm and the exact same ad dropped to .05% CTR over 100k impressions. any idea why this happens?
Click to expand...

Any follow-up on this? Did your CTR ever go back up?
 
snaps said:
i dont mean to thread jack, but I have a related question so I thought I would post in here.

I recently started my first facebook campaign and managed to get one of my ads over .1% CTR on cpc over 30kish impressions. I switched it to cpm and the exact same ad dropped to .05% CTR over 100k impressions. any idea why this happens?

also, my offer was converting at nearly 5% 2 days ago, yesterday it dropped to about 1% with about the same number of clicks a day.
.
Click to expand...

30K impressions is not very many to start with, until you have about 40ish clicks you wont know shit, then get it to about 200 clicks, then if your ctr is still stable, and conversions you can "ramp it up" confidently if your ROI is decent.

Let it loose but watch it closing, b/c when FB open you up to more traffic, youll getdifferent ares of the Country...do your CTR and convertions may go up or down!

Now im talking going real wide, you seem to be targeting like under 100K demos...might be different with that.
 
After running CPC for a couple of days, I'm having some luck with a couple ads that are getting about 0.15% CTR, but with only 4000 impressions each.

Here's the problem... my audience is only about 15,000. If I spend too much time and money on testing then I worry that the conversions will dry up by the time my campaign is fully optimized. I can't turn a profit using CPC so I will probably start moving the better performing ads over to CPM.

With all that said, what's the smallest audience size you guys target to ensure a dating campaign is worthwhile?
 
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