Facebook CPC suggested bid INSANELY high. Why?

[MTF]

Suggested bids are suggestions. Spend some money and you'll get real-world data.

 

[theag]

My suggested bids went up about 50-100% since I last checked them a few days ago. I guess it has to do with the new conversion window option they added 1 or 2 days ago. Every time they change/add something, it F*cks up all bidding.

As for your question: run the ads with automatic bids for a few days to see where you land with CPCs (and give FB some CTR, relevance, etc data). Then pause the campaign, clone it, and let it run with a manual bid for a few days. Adjust bid up and down until you get sth you like, but not too often.

Your bids dont necessarily have to be your "maximums".

For conversion campaigns, I have to bid 2-3x my goal CPA to get any meaningful traffic, but even with the bid 2-3x higher I usually still get the CPA I want (unless FB in in the process of F*cking up again like right now).

 

[Sanj Modha]

It's not your CPC. It's CPM that's high.

We're at the end of the quarter which means agencies will be dumping their budgets. My advice is scale back and regroup during July.

 

[Sanj Modha]

I have a friend who kills ANY ad that doesn't trigger a conversion after 2 days. He doesn't care about CPM, CTR or any of that. Whilst I agree that the sole purpose of FB ads is to take a prospect onto your site - it's not the full picture.

I test most ads for at least 3-7 days. Over time, you will find that they behave differently and that's down to human behaviour (we browse more on the weekends), FB playing up or a bunch of other things (less buyer behaviour on a Monday).

I think a new product/service/niche needs at least 3 days to settle with $30-$50 per ad set. That's how I do it.

 

[theag]

Your ad looks pretty boring and copy is non-existent.

Learn a bit about basic copywriting. The book Cashvertising is a good start.

And dont use boring stock photos. Image could be a badass biker or a half naked hot girl wearing the gloves (half naked hot girls sell everything). Something like that would get you some cheap clicks fo sho

 

[Sanj Modha]

The ad copy makes no difference on FB. I've tested several variations on 100s of campaigns.

It's your landing page that converts the prospect into a customer. Focus on your product page copy.

Prospects want reassurances: How long will delivery take? Is this website safe? Can I talk to someone first?

Answer these questions to improve your conversion rate and make some sales.

 

[eTox]

F*ck F*ck F*ck!!! I love you guys!

F*cking finally!!!! I got it! I got the feeling that I finally realized how this epic ad targeting works!

Shit $0.20 per click. F*ck! I love it. Gone those $3 clicks!

Sorry for the emotions!

 

[Red]

Use the search function in the top right side of the forum & search "Adwords" & read everything you find by @Andy Black.

 

[MisterBHZ]

I would suggest to do automatic bidding and keep your daily spend at $10 or less until the cpc is reasonable.

Last thing you want to do is set daily budget at $100+ and Facebook decides to charge you $4 a click. Happened to me.

 

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[MTF]

Would you say it will be logical to bid manually $1 per click and see where it goes. If I get no clicks, raise to $1.5 and go on?

You can do that. Or just leave it at automatic and see how much it charges you in the end. It shouldn't be that high, unless all of the niches you've researched are things like insurance, surgery, real estate, etc. (super expensive and competitive markets).

 

[Red]

I don't do Facebook ads just yet, but a lot of the posts I've created might still help.

Oops, my apologies, OP. In my haste to help, I mis-read your original thread question/needs. My apologies! But @Andy Black's posts on this forum are still gold!

 

[3things]

Could you please explain in plain English to a chimpanzee? Thank you. :embarrased:

He means reduce the amount you're spending if the price has increased a lot recently, and wait until July when things may quieten down a bit as there are a lot of agencies and corporates who have to spend their budgets at the end of a quarter [or as above in my case at work, its the end of our fiscal year so even worse for the dumping of the budgets]. When everyone piles in trying to spend their money, obviously prices go up for more mainstream audiences due to more competition.

 

[Sanj Modha]

Could you please explain in plain English to a chimpanzee? Thank you. :embarrased:

Scale back ads and run low budgets for +ROI. That's what I'm doing.

Wait for July because that's the start of Q3 when things quieten down. We should see a bullish run until Q4. We did well last summer.

 

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[JoeB]

• I am trying to sell motorcycle gloves I found on Aliexpress
• and I targeted this group: Sport Rider Magazine

I used to ride a motorbike.

I would say without doubt you will struggle to sell 'unknown' motorbike gloves to Sportsbike riders - they are all about the logo and brands, even more so than most other sports.

You may do better targeting 50cc/125cc/learners who don't have the spare cash but even then, they look to experienced riders for advice and recommendations.

As Sanj says above, these people will want reassurances too before buying, but as well as those mentioned above, they will want reassurances of how hardwearing they are, how long they can be dragged along the floor at 30mph without ripping etc.

 

[100k]

Add more targeting... build the audience size at least 200k.

Target your competitors in that niche... i.e other online retailers that sell the same things as you.

Create custom audience from the people that land on your website and the people that visit your checkout page.

Create look a like audience from the people that hit your checkout page (you need at least 100 people to create LL-audience).

Like someone else said, your ad kind looks boring and ad. Try finding a cool biker related picture and add your gloves to picture (added layer).

I'd personally just use a normal link with image ad (instead of carousel ad). And test different images and killing those that have low CTR.

Then test copy and kill those that have low CTR too.

Also, I'd be running a conversions campaign instead of clicks to website.

Auto bid is normally cheaper... though sometimes with manual bid (clicks to website) it can be cheaper bid $0.10+ over the maximum recommended bid.

Also, when ever possible... target just mobiles - they will be much cheaper. But if you can't then only desktop news feed and mobile news feed (never right hand side or audience network).

 

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[theag]

Things are f*cked up again on FB since 2-3 days ago when they changed sth in the bidding algorithm. Ah fun times. Never a dull day when you run fb ads on higher volume.

 

[Mac]

Set it to automatic bidding. If the CPC's are high, that means you're either not targeting the right people and are getting low quality scores... or... your ad copy isn't pulling in any clicks.

Most of my campaigns are getting clicks at around 13 cents with automatic bidding. At first the cost is around $1.00 but within two days it usually plummets fast.

 

[Sanj Modha]

I have some ads on 6 cent CPCs but I don't really care about that.

I use a simple money in vs money out formula. At the end of the day, you're paying for CPM anyway.

 

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[Sanj Modha]

You've said this a few times now. Can you share your testing that led to this oversimplification? If not, you should preface with what you're optimizing for and the funnel you're using to capture that action (cpc = cpm when optimizing for x, to a dropshipped shopify store selling y, etc.)



So... both and neither and also all options are viable, dependent on testing; which doesn't matter because fb always regresses to the mean except when it serves unique results?

Heading to dinner. Will update when I get back. It's not that hard once you build in a process.

 

[eTox]

Use the search function in the top right side of the forum & search "Adwords" & read everything you find by @Andy Black.

Thank you I will get right to it.

 

[eTox]

You can do that. Or just leave it at automatic and see how much it charges you in the end. It shouldn't be that high, unless all of the niches you've researched are things like insurance, surgery, real estate, etc. (super expensive and competitive markets).

Thank you. I will get back when I get results and I will share my findings here.

 

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[Andy Black]

Use the search function in the top right side of the forum & search "Adwords" & read everything you find by @Andy Black.

Thanks @Red


@eTox, I don't do Facebook ads just yet, but a lot of the posts I've created might still help. Check them out in my signature.

Do what @MTF suggested and take the suggested bids with a pinch of salt. Just launch and learn.

 

[Andy Black]

Oh, and check out @eliquid 's thread on the inside. I'm sure there's other Facebook gems strewn about the forum and interwebs too.

 

[nradam123]

Run a lot of ads in parallel. Target differently and use different contents for each.
See which ads are having good ROI.
Stop the rest.

$3 per click is great if you make a sale of $300 in 50 clicks.

 

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[3things]

I've also noticed an increase in both just traffic, and also CPA's the last week or so, particularly the last few days. I'm wondering if it might be something to do with the new text-in-images rules and rankings [no more 20% text limit, now your reach [and price] gets penalized/taxed based on a tiered text rating of none/low/med/high].

Also can confirm, end of quarter [indeed end of fiscal year] at work and the amounts getting pushed at me this month are totally insane so that won't be helping.

Edit: also, for the record i'm exclusively using the auto-optimized cpm bidding, not setting bids manually. Some things are ok, most things the CPA literally doubled in the last week, to the point where if it kept up at this level, i'd want to pull the plug. Lifetime averages and good sized budgets mean I can just ride it out, but it's not pretty the last week or so.

 

[eTox]

He means reduce the amount you're spending if the price has increased a lot recently, and wait until July when things may quieten down a bit as there are a lot of agencies and corporates who have to spend their budgets at the end of a quarter [or as above in my case at work, its the end of our fiscal year so even worse for the dumping of the budgets]. When everyone piles in trying to spend their money, obviously prices go up for more mainstream audiences due to more competition.

Thank you, this is more clear to me now

 

[eTox]

Your ad looks pretty boring and copy is non-existent.

Learn a bit about basic copywriting. The book Cashvertising is a good start.

And dont use boring stock photos. Image could be a badass biker or a half naked hot girl wearing the gloves (half naked hot girls sell everything). Something like that would get you some cheap clicks fo sho

I believe you are right. I need to put more effort into this if I want results.

Fighting my fear and running a test campaign knowing I was going to make no sales and lose money was definitely hard. But I did learn a lot.

Thank you all for the advice

 

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[eTox]

Post screen shots of one of your ads and your targeting and we'll be better able to tell where you are going wrong.

Here are a few screen shots

Spoiler: Screenshots

What I realized is that

• I should improve my facebook sales copy. It seems too salesy and not focusing on the customer need
• I was not focusing on the customer and completely neglected their point of view. I realized as @JoeB mentioned, as a motorcycle fan myself, I would not likely buy these gloves as they do not mention anything about safety, durability, comfort, etc. My ideal customer (biker with some money) would purchase a well known brand for the same money instead of these. But the customers I should be targeting are 3d world countries like india taiwan and russia where there are many riders who aren't particularly worried about brands, they just want something cheap. But then thats a whole different story.
• My website does not look like trustworthy at all. It is all over the place. I my self would not trust one like that. A huge fail. I need to improve that.
• Also, I am not offering any value. I am self focused and care only about my pocket. The shipping is 2-4 weeks. US and Canadian customers aren't used to that. A huge fail there.

There just feels so many wrong things with this. I am struggling to paddle through all of the shit I encountered, however, I am happy I have learned a lot.

Thank you.

 

[illmasterj]

You may find this post helpful (not mine): https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/4q34v3/facebook_ads_audience_cherry_picking_tip/

 

[MisterBHZ]

The ad copy makes no difference on FB. I've tested several variations on 100s of campaigns.

It's your landing page that converts the prospect into a customer. Focus on your product page copy.

Prospects want reassurances: How long will delivery take? Is this website safe? Can I talk to someone first?

Answer these questions to improve your conversion rate and make some sales.

I just refreshed my entire site because of this. Ran several different ads getting significant traffic over the course of 6 months with minimal sales. Couldn't understand. Then realized it was probably my site. Took action and made the change now its time to jump back in the water.

Thanks for the post.