I'm a huge fan of only using FB for retargeting. You know you aren't targeting spammers, and there's some sort of legitimate interest there. The only risk here is some cannibalization and duplication, but if you use some higher end analytics and pay attention to it that shouldn't be too much of an issue.
Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
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Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
#92Within the last week I performed a similar "experiment" for newly created facebook.com/AmeriStartup. I created two FB mobile advertisements to direct traffic to the website, though the website is more eCommerce/service than any type of sign up. Budget $50 over 3 days reach was ~20,000+; the click through rate was .5% and .4% for the 2 ads; just under 100 clicks to the website with none resulting in conversion. More d…
Can I ask how you saw who liked your page? Was this a feature of the Ad campaign? As a page manager, there is no way I can see who liked my page who isn't a friend. This makes me sad as I believe I'm getting spam likes which lower your "engagement quotient" and make it harder for me to get content to actual people.
When on the page as an admin at the top it tells you the most recent activity for the page. Example: John Doe and 10 others liked your page and you can click John Doe or the 10 others and it will show you a page of those people.
Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair point. As the adverts are sold in an auction, shouldn't the cost per click reflect the proportion of fraud? E.g. if value of true click is $1 and 50% of clicks are fraudulent then CPC should surely approach $0.50?
So long as the fraud is uniformly distributed, that is true. But more significant is the fact that you really can't estimate your costs and benefits correctly when the vendor (Facebook) is giving you incorrect or fraudulent data.
I agree with what you say about the estimation of costs.
The benefits to site owners normally take place outside of Facebook and so should be measurable regardless of what Facebook do.
In the case where the benefit is within Facebook then the buyer is purchasing likes or similar and then they are in for a world of hurt (in my experience) because of the difficulty in valuing what is being bought.
In this case the advertiser presumably knows the value of what is bought. Then valuing a click involves working back from that towards a CPC bid based on the conversion rate of the traffic source.
As you say, things get interesting when value is not evenly distributed and are complicated further when incrementality is taken into account. But who said it was meant to be easy?
Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
#94> Google also lets me target only Desktop users. If Facebook would allow this same control, I could run this test again with more confidence. FB do let you set a Desktop Only audience for ads. You need to use Power Editor (Google Chrome only) and select Desktop under Placements. I'd like to see a re-run with Desktop targeting only. Edit: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/targe...
You don't have to use power editor, you just have to update the Targeting to desktop only.
Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
#95How much of Facebook's traffic is mobile these days? I personally prefer the desktop version, but I spend unhealthy amounts of time at the computer anyway. I know that my mom uses FB almost primarily through her iPad since she got it. If FB's traffic is almost or even largely from mobile devices, paying to show ads for a non-mobile site to that traffic seems just silly. The site is downright hostile to mobile users;…
A recurring complaint in most of the post is the inability to separate desktop users from mobile users. This makes it very difficult to optimize their advertising strategy.
I find it hard to believe that Facebook is not capable of separating mobile (smartphones, wearables and tablets) and desktop traffic in a reliable fashion. I don't know if that's intentional, or why it takes so long to address this problem. But it's hard to deny that right now the only beneficiary of this foggy situation is Facebook.
Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
#96Running an ad on mobile for a site that's not optimized for mobile is a HUGE red flag, not some afterthought that should be mentioned in the conclusion. I'd wager anything most of Facebook's traffic comes from smartphones and tablets nowadays.
The interesting thing to note is that he has different results for people that come from Google - maybe people have different expectations about the website depending on whether they're looking for it on Google or just sitting in an app like Facebook?
Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
#97For my travel startup DealScoopr, we saw similar similar results from Facebook CPC Ads - low conversion rates, mostly Android traffic. Google Adwords turned out to be much more effective.
Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
#98Like others have said, it really depends on what you're selling and who you're targetting. Our example (country specific mobile app for doctors), spent 100 € on AdWords, end result was literally 0 app installs, 0 sign-ups, 0 everything. Medical keywords are expensive, no chance of sending them directly to the App Store/Play Store (that we saw at least), and no other useful targetting. Here come Facebook mobile instal…
I don't know if you're doing it already, but in the interest targeting you can include professions too and it will target people who have it set to their "work" on FB; plus adding hospitals to workplace targeting you can quickly close the gap And as another handy tool, you can use the FB ads api without authentication to perform certain types of search: http://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adworkplace&q=hospital...…
Thanks for the tip! Were professions added recently? "Doctor of Medicine" wasn't on the list at the time we put up the ads a month ago.
For workplace targetting, it looks like none of the hospitals in our current markets (Balkans) are in the system, so it's not as useful. We had a similar problem when trying to target people with "Medical School" as education and got something like 10 people total, seems education as an attribute is counted only for US-based users.
Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
#99> Google also lets me target only Desktop users. If Facebook would allow this same control, I could run this test again with more confidence. FB do let you set a Desktop Only audience for ads. You need to use Power Editor (Google Chrome only) and select Desktop under Placements. I'd like to see a re-run with Desktop targeting only. Edit: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/targe...
You don't have to use power editor, you just have to update the Targeting to desktop only.
I could not find this option anywhere, but I think I see how to do it now, going to give it a try, thanks!
Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if you're doing it already, but in the interest targeting you can include professions too and it will target people who have it set to their "work" on FB; plus adding hospitals to workplace targeting you can quickly close the gap And as another handy tool, you can use the FB ads api without authentication to perform certain types of search: http://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adworkplace&q=hospital...…
Thanks for the tip! Were professions added recently? "Doctor of Medicine" wasn't on the list at the time we put up the ads a month ago. For workplace targetting, it looks like none of the hospitals in our current markets (Balkans) are in the system, so it's not as useful. We had a similar problem when trying to target people with "Medical School" as education and got something like 10 people total, seems education as…
You've been able to target professions as interests for a very long time, but it wasn't obvious in the UI, glad it helped :)
And yeah, I imagine some countries will be under-represented, sadly