Facebook ad note

[Demesnedenoir]

So, there is this adage: narrow your audience down for the most cost effective advertising. Yeah, that sounds great, but I discovered something yesterday one should keep an eye out for, LOL.

I ran a new ad and must've fine-tuned this sucker down to a popular group: Brandon Sanderson fans, women, 35-65+. The ad started off with like, 3 clicks in the first few impressions and I was like woohoo! I had it set for a $5 budget to see what happened.

Later in the day I stop back in and I glance straight to the Cost per Click... Holy Crap! It's $0.42! What the hell happened to my ad? I look over... 6 clicks, 64 impressions, damned close to a click per 10 people seeing the ad. That's real good, even with a small sample. With that fine-tuned target group I was paying right around $0.04 per Impression... that just crazy, even in the US market, where my ads tend to run between 1 and 2 cents per impression.

So, by broadening my target group (but its still tight and pricey per impression compared to others) this morning I'm running 7 clicks in 66 impressions ($0.20 per click) and $0.0214 per impression.

I never paid close attention to the per impression cost because they all seemed relatively stable... Not any more! In particular when dialing into a tight target audience, pay attention.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Another devil of a FB ad note to watch out for. I've experienced this twice now, but yesterday told me it was not a fluke.

Two days ago I ran a brand new ad, CTR was about 10%, CPC round about $0.20, CPM $20 or so.
Yesterday (when it ran) it was under 2% CTR, CPC over a dollar, and CPM over $50!

And this was just the most obvious anomaly. Every damned ad I had was barely serving, and when it did serve it was charging me a fortune and not getting clicks. After wasting a couple hours trying to figure it out, I shut everything down. Long story short, it wasn't until well into evening that things started running okay again.

As a comparison, that same ad this morning is running at: 13% CTR, CPC $0.13, and CPM of $17.50.

Everybody I listened to basically said... sure... let FB handle your bidding... no more! LOL. I am now using a bid limit. Most of the time letting FB do the driving works, but when it doesn't, holy shit. No idea if someone targeting those same markets had a huge push, or what seems more likely, FB went berserk. But it sucked.

Also, it might have started the night before when FB jacked the rates.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

As a "holy smokes" aside... that ad, which is the first one I ever had nail the 18-35 women demographic, is still running a CTR of 13% and $0.13 CPC. I do have an ad that's run a lot longer... more than 4500 impressions at an average of 0.18, but its CTR was close to 6% and serving at CPM $10.65. So, this new ad is running cheaper in a more expensive CPM... kind of crazy. 34 clicks in 249 impressions... And of course! because of Kindle Unlimited no real way to see what those clicks are generating, LOL. But at least people are checking the book out.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

The holy smokes ad, yesterday, ran at $0.08 CPC, Relevance rating of 10, 118 clicks for $9.76. Not a single ad I ran yesterday, went for more $0.13 CPC, those that ran enough impressions for Relevance,were 9's or the afore mentioned 10.

The FB ad "gurus" I've seen, make some mistakes, and encourage people to make them too... just like FB encourages us to make mistakes. FB encourages us (and even uses psychological games) in order to do what's best for FB, not necessarily us small-timers.

Now, these rose-tinted #'s may not last, I mean, 0.08 is friggin nuts! On a Saturday no less! It's running at $0.11 today, but those are still half the price of my best previous and good ads. Ooohh, to think of the dollars and clicks wasted... but live and learn. I'll be curious to put the new strategies to work on the next major promo. Good grief.