How to get 1 cent clicks on Facebook

[CycleGuy]

Something I just caught this week. I boosted a post how I normally do, same type of product, decent creative, same exact audience(or so I thought).

FB automatically selected delivery of ads not just to my facebook audience but also created an Instagram ad for the product.

It was kind of tricky to turn off at first because it couldn't be done in the ad editor. However I simply paused the ad and edited it on the page to turn off the Instagram portion.

I have a separate instagram and would rather keep the promotions separate to better gauge return on investment. Also instagram has not delivered customers into the door as well as facebook.

This post is just to aware people to double check their ads to make sure fb isn't creating instagram ads and charging your fb account for them.

If you have instagram you see these types of ads all the time because they don't link directly to an instagram page. Similar to the stock image issue I mentioned before, I believe people on instagram ignore these sponsored ads simply due to them not having an instagram presence.

I hope this rambling makes sense to some lol.

 

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[MisterBHZ]

Let me share some value with you guys.

For me, using the CTW/Traffic objective has always been Grade A TRASH. Gourmet garbage. Top of the line horse shit. No matter the audience, no matter the budget, no matter if its .60/click or .01/click its all been premium cut a$$.

For some reason FB tends to send me the worst traffic when optimizing for clicks. Starting to believe its just fake/bot clicks. How do I know this? I get horrible engagement when they get to my site.

BTW, I'm unable to use the Conversion objective because of how my site is set up. I'm using a 3rd party store embedded into my site.

Now, what has been working for me is video. Had my best sales month ever in March. I make iPhone 7 quality videos & I use them as ads with a call to action button. I also add a CTA pointing to my link in the copy. I found out when people click this link it is considered direct traffic in google analytics (all my sales come from direct...best kind of traffic in my opinion).

What I've been doing is using Video Views as my objective & optimizing for that. Why? Because video views acts similar to post engagement ads. You get people watching your video, liking it, commenting, sharing it & sending you messages. You reach more people & get super cheap views & clicks to your website & low cpm. When they get to my site, great engagement. Real people are engaged unlike those trash a$$ clicks to website objectives.

When I started doing this, I tested out $1/day ads across 3-5 different audiences. When I'd get sales, I'd hit them up & they'd say..."I saw your shit on FB."

Never ever had this type of result using CTW even when I was doing $100/day. But somehow $1 ads destroy them? Can you say...WTF?

Now I have ads with super high engagement (social proof) that I can leverage to new people.

So guys, if you are using CTW and not having results, try different objectives.

I hope this helps someone.

 

[PaulRobert]

Now, what has been working for me is video.

Same here. Running traffic campaigns with video and have seen conversions go up. What is also an interesting factor is that many times people will google you when seeing your ad and then purchase. So the conversion isn't recorded from Facebook but from Google.
This can also skew your recorded results on FB.

 

[CycleGuy]

Video is great. Does anyone experience a very poor quality upload even when picking "upload in HD" on fb? I hate that the quality suffers from the original to the fb upload.


Also FB success story from the weekend. I have built my niche fb audience to 16k followers and now directly market to them and their friends. It has been very solid for returns lately. Before the audience was that size I had a specific regional group that I marketed to that performed well. No my follower base direct marketing outperforms that group. Which means a better return on advertising.

We had a popular boost that sold a product. We only spent $32 on paid advertising and the profit on the product was just over $1,800. The sale only took a few days as well.



Also side note, if you boost a post and see engagement in likes, you can invite those people who don't already like your page to like it. I do this on another page right now I manager to help build the audience without spending more on "Ads for likes".

 

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[The-J]

Video is the cheapest impression around right now... in my experience. Even a shittily made video to the right audience can result in high returns if it's engaging.

Video is an easy sell to companies, too, for those of us who do more B2B services.

 

[MisterBHZ]

Video is great. Does anyone experience a very poor quality upload even when picking "upload in HD" on fb? I hate that the quality suffers from the original to the fb upload.

Yep...pics do the same thing. I dont like it at all. I wish they'd do something about it.

 

[CycleGuy]

Yep...pics do the same thing. I dont like it at all. I wish they'd do something about it.

It's just extremely frustrating to put together something that looks solid then have the quality look like 2006 when it uploads in fb's "HD".

 

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[AllenCrawley]

It's just extremely frustrating to put together something that looks solid then have the quality look like 2006 when it uploads in fb's "HD".

When uploading a video to FB from my phone I find that if I'm connected to wifi the video will look great. If uploading via LTE it looks like crap. Anyone else?

 

[JAJT]

Anyone else?

I haven't experimented with this but I would suspect if you are experiencing this it means facebook is choosing quality based on connection type to avoid angry customers with high data bills.

Which is probably a huge plus for the "average user" but annoying for anyone else. I wonder if there's a setting you can override this with?

EDIT: could it just be you're viewing it is low quality but the upload was fine? Check out this setting and change it from default to "HD if available":

 

[AllenCrawley]

EDIT: could it just be you're viewing it is low quality but the upload was fine? Check out this setting and change it from default to "HD if available":

Mine was already set to HD if available.

I would suspect if you are experiencing this it means facebook is choosing quality based on connection type to avoid angry customers with high data bills.

Yup. Makes sense.

 

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[theag]

CTW objective is usually horrible for me too. If you need cheap clicks (for whatever reason) and have high CTR ads, PPE objective is mostly the way to go in my experience. On some campaigns I also get good and consistent ROAS with PPE instead of just cheap clicks, even on very broad audiences.

I usually use website conversion objective with standard link ads, but experiment with the event its optimizing for (LP click-through, add to cart, purchase), and of course bidding, targeting and ad copy/image.

Video hasnt worked well for me so far, but since its doing very well for everybody else my videos probably just suck.

I'm running a bit higher budgets though as 100 or 10 per day doesnt really move the needle for me. Usually about 500-1k/adset/day, depending on bidding, with multiple adsets per account and seperate account for each product. Which is still pretty small potatoes compared to some of the mindboggling daily spends I have seen.

Currently running lower to focus on developing better backend/optimizing site/new products, which is where the real money is made... Good FB optimization only gets you so far unfortunately and if you focus too much on it instead of improving your site, developing your backend and creating additional products (for the same "theme") you will stagnate at a certain revenue level and have problems scaling further, as I'm painfully experiencing right now.

Also much less stressful at lower budgets when FB is not F*cking with you all day every day lol..

FB's image/video compression is a real pain in the a$$. For images I found that it helps to create them in 2x the recommended size, so for link ads 2400x1256 instead of 1200x628 and save as uncompressed PNG. Got the best results with that. I'm only uploading ad images via the power editor ad creation though. I think the compression is even more severe when you create the ad on your page via the "Write something..." form.. Maybe the same method works for videos but havent tested it.

 

[CycleGuy]

When uploading a video to FB from my phone I find that if I'm connected to wifi the video will look great. If uploading via LTE it looks like crap. Anyone else?

I don't have the best connection but my wifi upload speed is 5MB and it still looks terrible. It even looks terrible on different devices and always clicking "HD" when viewing.


I'm thinking that my 1080HD filming with gopro and phone isn't going to cut it. I need to film in 4K and upload to FB with a full 4k HD vid.

 

[MisterBHZ]

CTW objective is usually horrible for me too. If you need cheap clicks (for whatever reason) and have high CTR ads, PPE objective is mostly the way to go in my experience. On some campaigns I also get good and consistent ROAS with PPE instead of just cheap clicks, even on very broad audiences.

I usually use website conversion objective with standard link ads, but experiment with the event its optimizing for (LP click-through, add to cart, purchase), and of course bidding, targeting and ad copy/image.

Video hasnt worked well for me so far, but since its doing very well for everybody else my videos probably just suck.

I'm running a bit higher budgets though as 100 or 10 per day doesnt really move the needle for me. Usually about 500-1k/adset/day, depending on bidding, with multiple adsets per account and seperate account for each product. Which is still pretty small potatoes compared to some of the mindboggling daily spends I have seen.

Currently running lower to focus on developing better backend/optimizing site/new products, which is where the real money is made... Good FB optimization only gets you so far unfortunately and if you focus too much on it instead of improving your site, developing your backend and creating additional products (for the same "theme") you will stagnate at a certain revenue level and have problems scaling further, as I'm painfully experiencing right now.

Also much less stressful at lower budgets when FB is not F*cking with you all day every day lol..

FB's image/video compression is a real pain in the a$$. For images I found that it helps to create them in 2x the recommended size, so for link ads 2400x1256 instead of 1200x628 and save as uncompressed PNG. Got the best results with that. I'm only uploading ad images via the power editor ad creation though. I think the compression is even more severe when you create the ad on your page via the "Write something..." form.. Maybe the same method works for videos but havent tested it.

I literally just ran an ad as Ppe minutes after reading your post...already getting sales. More proof to try & use other objectives guys.

 

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[Sanj Modha]

Let me share some value with you guys.

For me, using the CTW/Traffic objective has always been Grade A TRASH. Gourmet garbage. Top of the line horse shit. No matter the audience, no matter the budget, no matter if its .60/click or .01/click its all been premium cut a$$.

For some reason FB tends to send me the worst traffic when optimizing for clicks. Starting to believe its just fake/bot clicks. How do I know this? I get horrible engagement when they get to my site.

BTW, I'm unable to use the Conversion objective because of how my site is set up. I'm using a 3rd party store embedded into my site.

Now, what has been working for me is video. Had my best sales month ever in March. I make iPhone 7 quality videos & I use them as ads with a call to action button. I also add a CTA pointing to my link in the copy. I found out when people click this link it is considered direct traffic in google analytics (all my sales come from direct...best kind of traffic in my opinion).

What I've been doing is using Video Views as my objective & optimizing for that. Why? Because video views acts similar to post engagement ads. You get people watching your video, liking it, commenting, sharing it & sending you messages. You reach more people & get super cheap views & clicks to your website & low cpm. When they get to my site, great engagement. Real people are engaged unlike those trash a$$ clicks to website objectives.

When I started doing this, I tested out $1/day ads across 3-5 different audiences. When I'd get sales, I'd hit them up & they'd say..."I saw your shit on FB."

Never ever had this type of result using CTW even when I was doing $100/day. But somehow $1 ads destroy them? Can you say...WTF?

Now I have ads with super high engagement (social proof) that I can leverage to new people.

So guys, if you are using CTW and not having results, try different objectives.

I hope this helps someone.

Video works well because it's cheap (for now) and it gets much more viral traffic vs the rest. But the best ROI for me has always been WC to banner ads. I still use both.

On the main topic, I always say ask better questions. What do you want your ads to do? It's simple but it's powerful. Let me show you why...

CTW might be garbage if you're using it to make direct sales on an ecommerce store. But let's say you're running an elaborate funnel with plenty of upsells/downsells, follow up sequences? CTW is perfect because you can send of ton of cheap clicks to your store and mop up the visitors with retargeting campaigns.

Also, let's say you're running local ads - a cosmetic surgeon wants more prospects/leads (not sales). Why not use CTW to send them to an opt-in page which captures name/email/phone number? Now FB has rolled out the Lead Gen objective but a few years ago I was using CTW to run lead gens and getting paid $5/email. It was the easiest money I've ever made in my life.

 

[PaulRobert]

Mine was already set to HD if available.


Yup. Makes sense.

Check your Pages App setting:

 

[LPPC]

First off, thank you all for the immense value!

Same here, so I just leave it unchecked. Spends much more reliable.

Of course the prerequisite for all mobile traffic is that your site loads fast (I aim for 100-200ms max). People wont be bothered to wait for sites that are slow as F*ck and especially wont buy from them. If your site is extremely slow (1000ms+) and you send paid mobile traffic to it, you're basically burning money and should fix that first. Especially important for non-wifi traffic.

Do you use Shopify or a similar platform? Because I am unable to make my product page faster than 5 seconds on shopify and a free theme. Please teach me GURU, on how to speed up my site.

 

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[theag]

First off, thank you all for the immense value!



Do you use Shopify or a similar platform? Because I am unable to make my product page faster than 5 seconds on shopify and a free theme. Please teach me GURU, on how to speed up my site.

I'm using Magento 1 with a completely custom frontend that I built from scratch myself. Hosting on AWS with every possible option to increase speed (nginx, PHP7, Varnish cache, CDN, Minify CSS/JS/HTML, optimized images etc). Dont know how it works on Shopify.

 

[MisterBHZ]

What do you want your ads to do?

I do direct selling. I'm unable to run WC because of how my site is setup.

 

[LPPC]

I'm using Magento 1 with a completely custom frontend that I built from scratch myself. Hosting on AWS with every possible option to increase speed (nginx, PHP7, Varnish cache, CDN, Minify CSS/JS/HTML, optimized images etc). Dont know how it works on Shopify.

Thank you very much. I can't build a custom front end myself. I have to figure out whether it's worth it to outsource it at this stage, because I assume that that would be pretty expensive.

 

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[theag]

I do direct selling. I'm unable to run WC because of how my site is setup.

You can set up conversion events for basically every possible action on your site, it doesnt have to be a purchase. Just needs some JavaScript to fire it. Clicking a button, ajax forms, time spent on page, even for scrolling more than x% of the page. Might be worth looking into and try to run WC.

 

[Sanj Modha]

You can set up conversion events for basically every possible action on your site, it doesnt have to be a purchase. Just needs some JavaScript to fire it. Clicking a button, ajax forms, time spent on page, even for scrolling more than x% of the page. Might be worth looking into and try to run WC.

Yep, you can do all this. If you have FB nailed down why don't you run your own ecommerce store? You'll have much more control.

 

[Mac]

What's working for my client is running lead gen ads to different ethnic groups because the competition is so low. We were getting $2.00 leads on a page that's converting at only 5%. Once I optimize the landing page, the cost should drop tremendously. Try getting your site formatted to Spanish and Portugese, Italian, etc.

 

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[MisterBHZ]

You can set up conversion events for basically every possible action on your site, it doesnt have to be a purchase. Just needs some JavaScript to fire it. Clicking a button, ajax forms, time spent on page, even for scrolling more than x% of the page. Might be worth looking into and try to run WC.

Store that Im using added a feature to add FB pixel...gotta get more data on the pixel & then im going to switch to WC.