Facebook Bidding Strategy
Why does EWA love Fridays? Because if your as addicted to money as us, we are inside on the grind and there are less people bothering us. We don't have time to go out and party, we need to get our money first and get that couple hour advantage over the next affiliate. Every Friday, we help our affiliates with a new aspect of affiliate marketing. This week, we wanted to go over bidding strategy on Facebook Ads, one of EWA's personal favorites platforms. We started with Facebook Ads predecessor, Facebook Flyers. Ahh... those were the days: they allowed big boobs, no targeting, and the average clicks were between .05c and .10c. As Facebook evolved, the process got more and more obnoxious, and money got harder and hard to make. As the competition got stronger, the bids got higher...
But, even though others are paying more and more for their clicks, why do you need to? I get asked all the time about how to set bidding on new campaigns on Facebook, and it's pretty basic. If you're doing CPC ads, I suggest you start low (maybe towards the bottom of the suggest bid, or even less). If you start high, then need to decrease your bids, you will stunt the amount of impressions your ads will get.
The easiest way to see if your ads are doing good is to see the CTR. Wait for at least 7500 impressions to determine if the ad is a dud or a successful. If your ad has below .08, delete it or pause it. If you leave bad ads running, it will damage your entire campaign and you will lose ROI quick.
So, what about this crazy CPM thing? This is the best way to get the cheapest clicks - and most volume. Facebook's ad engine automatically optimizes for maximum CPM - it even converts ads that you bid CPC into a CPM. So, if you can guarantee Facebook a straight CPM - they will prioritize your ad over others (because CPC ads CTR can vary, and Facebook may end up losing by displaying the ad). When you bid CPM you need to go for the most clicks possible - and they don't need to be "super" targeted like CPC ads. When you bid CPC, you need to have high quality clicks because your paying for each one. When your bidding CPM, you just want to get as many clicks possible per 1000 impressions. My highest ROI ads are the most deceptive ones, but I'm not suggesting being deceptive =).
The easiest way to test out CPM is to transfer over your CPC ads with a .12 CTR or above, and try them in CPM bidding. When you do CPM bidding, you need to use a subid with each adcopy - because sometimes they convert so differently from each other from just a picture or one word difference. I put an ad live, wait 30-45 minutes, and come back to see if it's profitable. When you start doing CPM testing, you can really run though insane amounts of money quick - so watch your bids. We are here to help our affiliates as much as we possibly can, because we are also full time affiliates.
