Advanced Facebook Ad Tactics Part 1

September 27, 2010

Facebook ads can be powerful ways of promoting your business, but things can very easily get out of hand.  Sure, you can get your ad displayed to hundreds of thousands of people in a very short amount of time, but it may cost you a small fortune before you realize it and yield dismal results.  So this article series is for helping you tweak your Facebook ad campaigns so you get a great return on investment for your advertising budget.

Have Lots Of Nearly Identical Ads – Once you’ve specified all the demographics of who you want your ads shown to Facebook will suggest the price range for what you should big per click (eg. $1.00 – $1.50).  Presumably the lowest current bid amongst advertisers for your demographic is $1.00 per click, and the highest is $1.50 per click.

This isn’t the case.  In fact, even if you bid far below the minimum suggested bid (eg. 30 – 50 cents) you’ll still get quite a few ad impressions.  The trick is creating a lot of ads at low bid prices.  Doing this will give you lots of ad impressions and cost you much less.  So for example rather than having 5 ads placed at $1.00, $1.05, $1.10, $1.15 and $1.20, place 30 identical ads as follows using pay per click:

10 ads between 30 and 39 cents – ads at 0.30, 0.31, 0.32, 0.33, 0.34, 0.35, 0.36, 0.37, 0.38, and 0.39
10 ads between 40 and 49 cents – ads at 0.40, 0.41, 0.42, 0.43, 0.44, 0.45, 0.46, 0.47, 0.48 and 0.49
10 ads between 50 and 59 cents – ads at 0.50, 0.51, 0.52, 0.53, 0.54, 0.55, 0.56, 0.57, 0.58 and 0.59

Using this approach I’ve found my average cost per click rate gets cut in half vs. bidding at or near the suggested minimum bid price.  The only problem with using the lowball bid per click method is you won’t get nearly as many ad impressions than if your ads are at or near the suggested minimum bid per click.  This is why you want to create loads of lowball ads with slight tweaks to the ad headline, body and the image you use.

In general, if you have ads bid at less than 25% of the suggested minimum bid (eg. 20 cents for a minimum $1 bid) then you’ll find your ads get very few impressions.  Still, it’s worth setting up ads at these lowball prices as you’ll get a few very inexpensive clicks from time to time which will lower your overall Average Cost Per Click significantly.

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