International and Domestic Facebook Bidding Strategies

English Market Bidding Strategies

If you thought that bids for countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are sky high, then you are right. Bids are up over 80% in the last year and it's getting harder to make money - but that means only one thing: the weak affiliates are getting optimized off and the strong ones are surviving. Affiliate campaigns geared towards Facebook are still blowing up with huge traffic, conversion rates, and most importantly ROI's. The only change is that the bidding is not like the old days: you have to adapt and make changes. Facebook bidding now involves keyword bidding together with demographics. This lets people like us to laser target our audience, we get a high CTR, good conversion rates and positive ROI. Here are a few points to consider when you go for keyword bidding:

  • It is always wise to use keyword bidding if you are targeting a bigger market. This does not apply if you are trying to create a market.
  • Researching keywords is useful but it is not always the right way. People search on search engines and people kill time on Facebook. They don't interchange as much - it's still a developing platform for targeted bidding as people don't always list all their likes, fans, activities, etc.
  • When you combine keyword and demographic bidding, you are laser targeting your audience. This takes a lot more time and creativity but you can build some insanely high ROI campaigns that have a lot of longevity: you'll be staying off the radar of most the scrapers.

Coming to the bidding part of it, if you have done Facebook campaigns, you probably know the bid ranges. Look at an example of a niche dating offer that targets men over 40 in the US. The suggested bid range is $0.80-$1.3. Fact is that you won't be paying that much, you will pay somewhere around .70. Start bidding low, Facebook hates it if you bid high and go low, start bidding low and gradually increase in multiples of 2 or maybe even 5. Once you start getting impressions, wait for a while to get a rough estimate of your CTR. Let each ad get around 5000 impressions before you determine the CTR. At that point, if an ad gets anything less than 0.1%, pause it. If it gets a good CTR, switch it to CPM, plus save the images that gave you a good CTR to duplicate it in other demographics or countries.

Your testing phase starts now. Test with different ads; find an ad that has a high CTR and a high conversion rate. By the time you give around 100,000 impressions to your campaign, you will see that you are actually paying much less. You are likely to be bidding around $.50 but your actual rate would be somewhere around $.36-$.40. As your ads age, and no I'm not talking about months, I'm talking about days, probably less than a week; your CPC will drop!

Next is the big question about CPM bids. I ran a test with CPM and CPC. I had an ad in the gaming niche that had a decent CTR of about .2%. I copied the same ad and I was running it on CPM with CPC running side by side. My CPC bids were around $.70 and CPM was around $.40. Although the CTR fluctuated, one thing was clear. CPM bids are cheaper! A .02% CTR meant around $1.4 every 1000 impressions; it was $.40 when I was bidding CPM. Switch to CPM if you know for sure that you will get a high CTR or copied a high CTR CPC ad to CPM; anything else, you probably shouldn't go for CPM!

Facebook Bidding in International Waters

International bidding on Facebook is a somewhat different ball game. You rarely use CPC, you go with CPM, clicks cost pennies and volume rules. CPA rates are normally a few cents, like 20-50 cents, some go higher like the Be2 offers. Clicks are in the range of .2-.5. Anything more and you're doing it all wrong.

I'll give you a small example: There was an IQ offer which paid around $4 per pin submit. I used some crazy fuzzy images, CTR was not that good, I quickly burned $5 for a mere 20 clicks, bidding CPM. I was paying around 40 cent per click where the CPC was less than half of that. The error here was that I choose a very large audience. I was targeting over 1.4 million people, my bad! I got my target down to less than 100,000 and I was targeting them with an angle. Stuff like showing them a nice girl and telling them that she dates people only if they have a high IQ works. Also, keyword targeting helps a lot! With this angle, my CPC was down to an absolute 0. The CPM rate was 0.04 and I was getting around 6-7 clicks per 1000 impressions. A few clicks later, I was in profit mode. Some key points to international bidding:

  • Bid CPM - make sure your ad is good, test a bit with CPC if required.
  • Volume is key - makes up for the low CPA.
  • Conversion rates vary - they are normally lesser than domestic offers, but some convert out of control. The cost of traffic makes up for the difference.
  • Games, Lead Gen and Mobile offers are always solid converters. When running mobile, beware: you may be risking your account.

EWA has tons of international offers in our inventory, in fact, we cover over (210) countries right now. We are breaking into markets that have never seen an affiliate offer in their life: the conversion rates are insane and people are buying these products. Take the risk, run something that you wouldn't normally run, and collect huge profits. Build your adcopies in English then translate them using OneHourTranslation.com - it's a great, reliable source. If you enjoyed this guide remember: the biggest compliment is a referral and we need your help to grow!

This guide has been archived from our network emails. EWA sends out new guides every week explaining how to run certain niches and specific traffic sources.