RileyPool.com » Facebook

Case Study: Facebook Ads – CPC versus CPM ($2163.08 spent)

Riley — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 22:37:18 +0000

First off, I must apologize to everybody for my post a couple months ago about dayparting on Facebook. I saw the new campaign lifetime feature on Facebook and mistook it for day parting. I hurriedly made a post and then realized my mistake. So, if you came to my blog hoping for dayparting, I’m sorry for leading everybody on. I just got super excited and wanted to be the first to blog about it.

I also must tell you I was quite pissed because I had done a lot of testing for this particular case study to see how CPC compared to CPM and right in the middle of my testing Facebook started displaying a fourth advertisement, so I had to throw that data away.

When I originally started advertising on Facebook all I did was bid CPC as there was less risk and bid prices were cheap. I stuck with that method for months and never tried CPM. Shortly after ASE 2009 I moved over to only CPM bidding and never looked back. Earlier this year I moved onto other traffic sources and quit paying attention to Facebook. Here recently I’ve gotten back into advertising on Facebook. I noticed the suggested bid prices for CPC and CPM were both outrageous. I did remember a big hoopla from Facebook earlier this year during my exodus about how you should bid CPC for better positions and all that. The last 4-6 weeks I’ve been noticing some people suggesting bidding CPC for best results. I never really saw any definitive information or statistics backing either side so I decided to turn this into a case study.

There are two main bidding types when advertising. They are known as CPC or cost per click and CPM or cost per thousand impressions. There are advantages and disadvantages to each type. Below is a synopsis of both bidding types. Choose what you feel is appropriate for your particular campaign or do a split test to see what does best for your needs.

Cost Per Click – CPC

When you choose the CPC bid type, you’ll be charged every time someone clicks on your ad. This option is less risky, especially if you’re entering a new niche and aren’t sure how well your ads and especially images will perform. I’ve found if you can get a high enough CTR, preferably below your EPC, you can bid this type and should be able to see some longevity with your campaign.

Cost Per Impressions – CPM

When you choose the CPM bid type, you’ll be charged for every one thousand impressions your ad receives. This is an especially good option if you’re a branding advertiser. If you’ve been advertising in your niche and know what kind of ad copy and images work well, this may be your preferred bid type. A general rule of thumb is if you can get a CTR above 0.10%, choose this bid type because your CPC will be cheaper this way. You’ll want the highest possible CTR when bidding CPM. The higher your CTR, the cheaper your CPC will be. However, when bidding CPM, you will need to constantly monitor your ads to make sure your CPC is still below your EPC.

The stats for each campaign is below. I’m not going to reveal the actual campaigns and exact targeting because these are two of my super stable campaigns that have done very well for me in the past and continue to do so. However, I will tell you that that Campaigns 1-4 are a niche US dating offer and Campaign 5 is a broad dating offer in Canada. I ran the same set of ads in each campaign and I bid the highest CPC and CPM suggested by Facebook.

Campaign	Bid Type	Impressions	Clicks	Campaign CTR	Avg. CPC	Conversion Ratio
Campaign 1a	CPC	547,223	519	0.095%	$0.49	13.46%
Campaign 1b	CPM	1,753,513	518	0.030%	$0.49	9.24%
Campaign 2a	CPC	484,541	474	0.098%	$0.54	11.49%
Campaign 2b	CPM	1,508,219	442	0.029%	$0.57	8.98%
Campaign 3a	CPC	205,580	649	0.316%	$0.34	17.3%
Campaign 3b	CPM	786,554	488	0.062%	$0.40	17.06%
Campaign 4a	CPC	198,230	476	0.240%	$0.46	14.48%
Campaign 4b	CPM	717,830	479	0.067%	$0.42	15.53%
Campaign 5a	CPC	750,237	1281	0.171%	$0.16	8.35%
Campaign 5b	CPM	1,758,765	524	0.030%	$0.21	5.47%

Conclusion
As you can see from the results, CPC was the way to go in each test except for one. I’ve done countless other CPC versus CPM tests and 95% of the time CPC comes out on top. I know the bids are extremely high, but just try it out. With CPC, you’ll notice your CTR is way higher and conversions are typically better. Bidding CPC will also be beneficial to you because your target demographic will be less prone to banner blindness. CPC bidding will add longevity to your campaigns, while you will need to continually monitor your CPM campaigns. I’m not sure why conversions are better. I didn’t check my Prosper202 logs to see if most of my CPC traffic came from Facebook or if it was application traffic. Because of these results, I do believe that CPC ads are placed in the top 1 or 2 spots and that CPM traffic goes mostly to the bottom spots. There is a CTR apex where it will be more beneficial to run CPM instead of CPC, but I haven’t yet figured that out because you’ll need to also factor in CPC and EPC for each ad.

Really Facebook? Really?

Riley — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 20:28:11 +0000

So I tried changing my primary funding source in Facebook last night and it won’t let me. Okay, no problem, let me email affiliates@facebook.com. Upon doing so, I received the lovely reply below.

Thank you for contacting Facebook. You’ve reached an email address that no longer accepts inquiries and we will not be able to respond to your message. If you have questions about creating an ad, inquiries regarding ad policy, or any other specific questions related to Facebook Ads, please visit the Ads Help Center at:

http://www.facebook.com/adshelp

For other Facebook product questions, please visit our general Help Center:

http://www.facebook.com/help

-The Facebook Team

Wonderful.

Anybody know how to contact Facebook?

Exploring untapped micro-niches in dating equals money in the bank!

Riley — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 01:27:34 +0000

A couple weeks ago the campaigns I was running all happened to die out on me, were paused or whatever. Regardless of what happened, all my daily income was wiped out and I wasn’t too excited about it. So I went to Azoogle looking for some niche dating offers because I’ve had success doing this in the past. What I stumbled onto was an absolute gem and a few extra hundred dollars in the bank for very little work.

I came across a campaign called EligibleGreeks.com. It was a dating offer aimed at singles in Cyprus and the payout was a measly $1.45. So I went over to Facebook to check out the size of the demo. Unfortunately there are only 15,100 men who are 18 and older, are single and are interested in women. The highest suggested CPM bid was only 12c and that’s what I bid. I thought to myself, if this demo converts it’ll be golden, so I threw up a few ads.

Due to the demo being so small, I setup two campaigns. One targeting men who were 18-24 and only spoke English. Within this campaign I only setup 3 ads because the demo was now down to 10,100. The other campaign targeted men who were 18-24 and spoke Greek. I need some ad copy translated so I headed over to OneHourTranslation.com and had two ad copies translated. This campaign only had a demo of 3,900, but I still setup 6 ads total with 3 images for each ad copy.

After the first day of testing, the English campaign had a CTR of 0.482% and the Greek campaign had a CTR 0.825% with 1 image having a 1.046% CTR and the worst image having a CTR of 0.749%. Between the two campaigns I had an overall conversion ratio of 29.33%. So I immediately scaled out the campaigns to the rest of the males and tried out the females aged 18-24.

I just let these existing ads ride out for a few of days. I didn’t rotate in any new images or ad copy. Since this campaign required no maintenance and I needed income, I moved on to getting some other campaigns up. I let this campaign run for only 5 days because my offers came back live and I needed to concentrate on those as they were providing a much larger income for me.

There was a newer affiliate I had been chatting with every once in awhile lately and I knew he was really trying to get some stuff going. I knew he was making a few bucks, but nothing to write home about so I decided to give him this campaign. I took screenshots of my ads to show him the exact targeting for the campaign, including the ad copy. Since he wasn’t already an affiliate at Azoogle, I told him to sign up under me so I could make a couple bucks off his revenue and told him to use his own images. I knew he was into dating so I figured he had a few of his own that were good.

Since you’re all wondering how the campaign turned out, I spent a total of $55.29 and the revenue was $469.80, equating to a 749.70% return on my investment. Not bad, eh? The overall conversion ratio was 19.43% and the EPC was 29c. I let the affiliate I turned the campaign over to let me know when he was done running the offer because I was going to make the post you’re currently reading, and out the campaign. He also netted a couple hundred bucks off the campaign as well.

Unfortunately, the offer has been drastically changed in the past few days. I think they changed lander, but I’m not 100% sure of this, they will only credit you for individuals of Greek heritage now and the payout was nearly cut in half to 75c.

Finding these untapped micro-niches can pay off so go find one!

Are Facebook’s Ad Revenues in decline?

Riley — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:53:28 +0000

I have no factual evidence or anything, but their advertisement, which I’ve included below, leads me to think that. Also in support of this is my rare notice of any affiliate advertisements. Anyways, I felt I needed to make a post. Now that I’m a full time affiliate I’ll have more time to blog and give you all some good reading material.

Edit: Sorry guys, I don’t know why the picture looks like crap on the preview. Just click the image and it’ll be fine.

No related posts.

Best Facebook Ad, EVAR!

Riley — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 05:57:04 +0000

Period. Discuss.

How-To: Facebook Conversion Tracking

Riley — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:09:31 +0000

We all knew it was coming. I, for one, will not be using this. They say it’s in beta now so I’m not sure how many others have access to it. They even tell me to click the Tracking link in the left navigation menu and guess what… There’s no link. Great job, Facebook!

I’ve attached a .pdf file for you guys to read over. Download Facebook’s Conversion Tracking Guide.

I’ve included a few excerpts below.

Your tracking tag is specific to your Facebook advertising account. To generate a new tag, simply go to your Ads Manager and click on the “Tracking” link in the left hand navigation. That will take you to the Tag Management page. From here, you can create a new tracking tag. Before your tag is generated, you have an opportunity to name the tag, choose the type of conversion event that you’ll track on your website and specify a value associated with the conversion. After you hit the “Save” button, you’ll be able to copy and paste the tag into your website code.
Implementing your Facebook tracking tag is as simple as copying and pasting your tag into your website code. Facebook will record a conversion every time a tracking tag is loaded. A tag is loaded when a person initiates the conversion event as defined by you and where you put the code on your site. There are a number of different places you could insert your tag(s) depending on the action on your website that you would like to track.
By generating a conversion tracking tag on Facebook and copying and pasting it into the appropriate code on your website, you can track things like individual page views, purchases, registrations or downloads. You could even track a series of page views to determine the path someone takes to these conversion events.

Do you want a half-naked dating ad approved on Facebook?

Riley — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:55:31 +0000

Have you always wondered how guys on Facebook get those pictures of half-naked girls approved on their ads? So have I! The only hypothesis I’ve come up with after submitting tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of ads is that they hide it in a submission of ads.

I’ve found that if I lead off with some scantily clad women all the ads will be disapproved, regardless of what the ads look like. If the first picture the Facebook Ad Reviewer sees is a really provocative picture, you can kiss the rest of your submissions goodbye. They will all be disapproved.

One method I like to use is to throw up 10 images at a time. What I suggest is take 50 decent pictures, throw those ads up first and make sure they’re good to go. Then for your last 2 or 3 images throw up some that wouldn’t normally get approved. I’ve seen this work a number of times for myself. You might also want to mix these 2 or 3 in the middle of these 50 ads.

Try it out and let me know if you have any luck!

Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 3

Riley — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:45:27 +0000

This is a follow-up to Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1 and Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 2.

After having 2 sets of images have their CTR die out on me I got lazy and tested out another another ad copy and saw my conversions tank by 54% so I figure the ad copy had to be misleading. So I decided I wanted to try out 5 completely different sets of ad copy and see the difference between their conversion rates. I tried to relate each ad title with the description. I used the same images as my first go around so I know they can perform decently and since I haven’t ran them in awhile their CTR should at least be respectable now.

Here are the stats for the last 7 days according to Prosper.

Ad Copy 1 (Original): 8280 Clicks, 438 Conversions, 5.29% Conversion Ratio
Ad Copy 2: 12612 Clicks, 498 Conversions, 3.95% Conversation Ratio
Ad Copy 3: 441 Clicks, 9 Conversions, 2.04% Conversion Ratio
Ad Copy 4: 323 Clicks, 10 Conversions, 3.1% Conversion Ratio
Ad Copy 5: 721 Clicks, 34 Conversions, 4.72% Conversion Ratio

I found it pretty crazy that my original ad copy converted best for me after the split testing I did.

So here’s concrete proof that split testing makes a huge difference! If you’ve never split tested your ad copy, DO IT NOW! I’ve never done much split testing of ad copy until I ran this campaign and have finally came to an amazing revelation, even though I should’ve known it.

On Facebook your CTR depends on the image you use in your ad copy. Your conversion ratio depends on the text in your ad copy! It is imperative to split test both!

Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 2

Riley — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:23:28 +0000

This is a follow-up to Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1.

Okay so the CTR began to die out on the images I found in Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1. I was still making some pretty good money off this campaign and decided I needed to switch up the ad copy. Me being pretty lazy I went to the merchant’s landing page and used some of the lines that caught my attention in my ad copy and mind you since I was lazy I only used one variation and scaled this out to every demographic. After about 5 days of continually submitting ads I finally got my ads past the review team at Facebook. I just knew I was going to kill it again for a few days and wasn’t sure what I was going to do after that, probably try a different ad copy.

So I threw up this one ad copy using those images I used in the first go round. I figure they haven’t been shown in a couple weeks, they should have some juice left in them. Plus with some new ad copy I should be sitting pretty.

I ran it for a couple days and lost a nice chunk of change, mainly because my conversion ratio had tanked by 54%. I’ve included screenshots below. And that amount of data was more than enough to be statistically relevant. My first concern was since I haven’t ran this offer in a few days maybe the advertiser was up to no good so I hit up my affiliate manager and asked him if the conversion rate for the network as a whole changed and he said nope. So I was thinking since the only thing that had changed was the ad copy, maybe the ad copy was now a bit misleading because it did include that the user could win money.

Part 3 I will be split testing 5 different sets of ad copy to determine how it affects my conversion ratio.

Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1

Riley — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:13:09 +0000

So here I was dominating this niche on Facebook so I scaled it out to different demographics and was doing great with this offer. I was effing pumped and got kinda lazy for a few days and I knew my CTR would die out eventually. I thought no problem, I’ll find some more images that are similar to the ones I’m using now and just make a few more ads and keep banking on this offer.

I finally figured out something I could search for that would bring up similar images on Google image search and I found a couple I thought were going to kill it so I saved them. I was talking to a friend about needing some more images and he told me to use Bing’s image search. I checked it out and oh my god! Bing’s image search is killer! Try it out sometime if you haven’t already.

So I found 88 images I thought might work well and I used the same exact ad copy. The only thing I did was change the picture. I knew to be profitable in this particular demographic for this offer I would need a 0.10% CTR or higher with the amount I was bidding, so that’s what I was looking for. If you’ll look at the screenshots below you’ll see I found a handful of keepers.

On the next part of this case study I’ll switch up the ad copy and see how well the ads perform.