iamattila facebook lowering cpc guide (ecommerce)

8/16/2019 Iamattila Facebook Lowering Cpc Guide (Ecommerce)

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How to get the cheapest CPCs on Facebook Mobile News Feed

NOTE: This is going to be SUPER detailed, but on the bottom I tell you the 'readers digest, ADHD version if you just want the quick facts' - You will see how me and my team perform controlled tests, logging and writing down every single thing we notice, question we have, or idea we come up with during the process.This method is proven, I actually have a full time R&D guy who is a data analyst junkie who runs tests every single day - that's his job - and that's another story.

Objective: To find the best method to get the cheapest CPCs to our product lander. (in facebook terms: unique link clicks)

Our Product: Physical Product from e commerce store, full transparency.

Due Diligence (Always a very important part no matter what you do!):

In order to get an understanding and learn from others; we apply a method Ialways use - try and get an answer via google from people who might have already done what were trying to do.

Going to google, and typing in How to get the cheapest clicks on Facebook brings up some interesting articles. After reading them the following things jump

out:

Summary of Article #1 -Broad demographics, narrow interests -Picture, Picture, Picture -To Lower CPC -> Increase CTR -Analyze & Rinse & Repeat -Observation1: Switching to CPC to CPM drives down CTR and increases CPC? -Observation2: Lowering CPC Bid drops CTR. Ad performs worse because its positioned lower on page -Observation3: Conversion rate matters the most in the end; how much sales you get.

Summary of Article #2 -Dont put multiple ads in the same adset, instead separate them into their own ad sets with smaller budgets -Targeting people that speak English outside of North America = Cheap clicks -Split test headlines/images

Summary of Article #3 by Mr Green written in 2010! (Holy S***, he still ranks #3 on google for How to get cheap clicks on facebook ads) -Run CPC campaign, segment by age group. -Create 6 images, 3 titles, 2 ad copies for each adset -Find the top 4 ads, then create a CPM camp with these ads - this is where we should see CPCs drop like crazy.

Now that due diligence is all complete; we are a bit more education. We basically asked google the question we seek answers to; and learned a lot based on past experiences of others.

Take aways

-All 3 articles say to split test headlines/images. So we are going to definitely do that. -One of the articles suggests that after finding the highest CTR image and m


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aking a -CPM campaign with it, the CPC's don't drop, they in fact increase - so we will want to test this and see. -We also learned that broad demographic targeting might be the key, so we will test that and compare it with what Mr Green wrote in 2010; to split it rightaway into age groups.

Getting to know your traffic source - Facebook When you run on any traffic source, its very important to know what type of ad formats, methods, objectives they offer. For this case study, when we click Create Ads, facebook brings up this screen

What we want to do is pick the relevant objectives which for a physical product being sold on our ecommerce store would be

-Boost Your Post -Send people to your website -Increase conversions on your website

All the other objectives are either for app installs, lead gen campaigns, events promo, branding, video engagement, or building an audience for fan page - s

o they dont apply to us.

TESTING Phase #1

What we will test and compare in Phase #1

We are going to establish which gives us lowest CPC from the start, if we target broad demographic and no interests vs. if we target broad niche interest +broad demographic. The goal is to figure out which one campaign combination wins and after that to pick the winning method and rinse and repeat using other things to test we learned from our due diligence.

-This test will run for 48 hours before we call a winner.

-Each adset will have a $5 budget.

What we need:

Two (2) Page Post Ads - 1200x1200 Two (2) C2W/WC Ads - 1200x628

We also need an angle written that will go above the image on Facebook, andlink to the URL. This will be the same on all adsets/campaigns.

Once we have all, we want to publish them to our Facebook Fan Page, so in all there should be 4 posts in the end.

Next, we want to create the campaigns. I wont go into detail how to do this because that would be a totally separate guide on its own, lucky for us ZENOs FB guide right here explains setting up camps on FB real well.

Broad Demographic (USA - Women 18-65+) & NO INTEREST

Setup three campaigns where we are not targeting any interest. (one for each objective, targeting CPC where available as default) where we are segmenting by age into multiple adsets. Each adset will contain 2 ads (different pictures) sa


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me headline.

Adsets: F18-24 F25-34 F35-44 F45-54 F55-65 plus

I am naming the campaigns in this format:

Start Date - Interest - Product Reference - Objective Type

Campaign 1 - 12-9-2015 - F18-65+ USA - PPE Bid: Automatic What You Get Charged: Post Engagement

Campaign 2 - 12-9-2015 - F18-65+ USA - C2W Bid: Automatic What You Get Charged: Link Click (CPC)

Campaign 3 - 12-9-2015 - F18-65+ USA - CW Bid: Automatic What You Get Charged: Impressions (NO CPC available!)

Broad Demographic (Women 18-65+) & BROAD INTEREST

Setup three campaigns where we are targeting 1 broad interest for our niche. (one for each objective, targeting CPC where available as default) where we are segmenting by age into multiple adsets. Each adset will contain 2 ads (different pictures) same headline.

Adsets: F18-24 F25-34

F35-44 F45-54 F55-65 plus

Campaign 1 - 12-9-2015 - NICHE - F18-65+ USA - PPE Bid: Automatic What You Get Charged: Post Engagement

Campaign 2 - 12-9-2015 - NICHE - F18-65+ USA - C2W Bid: Automatic What You Get Charged: Link Click (CPC)

Campaign 3 - 12-9-2015 - NICHE - F18-65+ USA - CW

Bid: Automatic What You Get Charged: Impressions (NO CPC available!)

Campaigns launched 12/9/2015 6:43PM CET

Observations after 24 hrs:

-Targeting broad with no interest in PPE got us the cheapest CPCs -Targeting broad with interest in CW got us the cheapest CPCs there


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Here they are:

1. Red Border

2. Arrows pointing to talisman

3. Icons of different horoscopes

4. Yellow background with call to action 1

5. Yellow background with call to action 2

TESTING Phase #3

We are going to be testing variations of images in this phase to find the one that gets us the lowest CPCs. We will run this test for 24 hours and write down our observations at 12 hour intervals.

What we need:

We need to duplicate our adset that did best in our campaign, and create a new dark post ad that has the exact same text, link as our original add, except w

e will change the image.

After we did that, we can duplicate this adset 4x times so we have total 5 variants of our main adset like this:

We have 5 adsets, 1 per variation, all of them have exact same ad in them (same text, same link) except the image - that we change for each. The budget is $5 per day for each adset, and the audience settings are exactly the same.

Here are my ads

1. var 1

2. var 2

3. var 3


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4. var 4

5. var 5

Thats basically it, upload the variations, and let the battle begin for the lowest CPC!

12/15/2015 - 9:31AM

Ive just opened the data and took a look, its amazing what split testing doesfor you. Turns out variation 2 (which if you recall is the one with the arrows KILLED IT, it ended up getting 4.37% CTR 200% better than the next variation which was variation5 with the call to action telling people to PICK YOUR SIGN.

In conclusion, we were able to lower our CPC from 0.60$ to $0.30 by split testing different images.

Testing doesnt end here

There are more places you can take this to further reduce your CPC; for starters you can try these:

1) you can test more headlines/text for the ad 2) you can take your best performing ad, and make variations of it and test

even more.

ADHD Summary

1. Segment adsets into age groups. 2. Start with a broad interest. 3. Run data for 48 hours. 4. Pick the age groups that respond the most. 5. Make variations of the best performing image, and run some more data. 6. Pick the one that had the lowest CPC.

iamattila facebook lowering cpc guide (ecommerce)

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