Paid Advertising Crash Course

[tmb22]

Hey @eliquid thanks for the thread. I got some questions. I just launched our first FB ads campaign two days ago. I did 1 campaign, 3 ad sets, and 3 ads per ad set. I did the same exact 3 ads, but to a different audience in each ad set. I set a $10 daily budget and did campaign budget optimization.

Is that too low of a budget with 9 ads?
How do you like to go about setting a budget?
Can you recommend some benchmarks for CPC, CPM, CTR, frequency, cost per purchase, etc.? We sell clothes
How long do you let the ads run before making any changes?

Thanks man!

 

[eliquid]

Hey @eliquid

I wonder if you have some advice for a recruiting funnel for local businesses.

We are looking for recent , or soon to be engineering graduates.

I thought about facebook and IG ads ==> dedicated landing Page where its dead simple to apply ==> retargeting for everbody that spent x minutes on the page.

Sorry about the delay. I turned off notifications a while ago from the forum and just realized it also turned off notifications on my own posts.

I think that would work, but it would prob work better if you added in LinkedIn too.

You could also try to hit up job sites and see if you can place ads on their respected pages for that degree/work

 

[JRyan]

@eliquid Thanks so much. Priceless information right here. I would go with @andy course as you have suggested for a newbie

 

[tmb22]

Yeah $10 is way too low I feel.

If this is a legit business ( even if new ), you should easily have $100 to play with for a campaign budget.

Sure, that might end up $700 over 7 days, but you will gain most of the data you need.

FB needs traffic to tweak their pixel for your campaign. You might want to think about having a throwaway budget for the first 60 days in that regard for FB. It's not really throwaway, since it's gathering data and optimizations.

Better yet, what's your target?

Do you have $10 shirts that you can only allow $3 in ad spend before a conversion?

Or do you have $100 shirts that you can allow $60 in ad spend before a conversion?

Based on the above, is how you start to figure out what you can afford to spend and build up a target.

I can run ads to a product I know I get a $61 CPA on. I am profitable on any amount below $61. However, for safety reasons, I want to spend up to $50 so I can make $11 profit per conversion.

Based on that, I'm might be willing to spend 3x the CPA before I make a conversion to consider something a failure somewhere. Either the ad, the targeting, the LP, the checkout funnel, etc.

So I'm gonna let that ad run up to $183 today before I turn it off and investigate. I'll investigate and make changes and do the exact same tomorrow to $183, and again the next day to $183.

If after 3 days of fully running I am still at a 0 conversions, I'd prob give up. - but this is based on me, someone that has been doing this for years and built up a "gut" instinct and picking the best targets and ad copy going into the campaign build. You may have not done this, so maybe you need to allow more.

However, if on day 2 or 3 I start to get conversions... I'll keep tweaking forward into day 4 and 5 and 6 even if I am not profitable yet.

Of note, this is 1 ad we are talking about above.

If you have 9 ads, each of those need their proper time and ad spend and data collection too.

Thanks for the detailed reply. I kinda figured you would say all that. I guess I was just reluctant to start off that high. So, our average order is $67.91, which would make us about $33 on average. And 2 months in, 20.17% of our customers are returning, so I'm cool with breaking even on ads for now.

If I'm spending $100/day, what size potential reach should I be targeting?

 

[geekboy]

Got a question if anyone can help?

Am running some FB lead ads and the CPM is crazy high - like £50 CPM vs about £4 CPM for a similar campaign ran about a year ago. Even though the new campaign actually started off converting better than the old one: 0.35% vs 0.21%

I am targeting a bit more specific than the old one:
Old one: Age over 24 + one interest
New one: Men under 45 + one interest

So yeah I guess targeting a bit more specific would increase CPM but surely not 12x?!

There is also an issue with the guys account I'm running the ads for is getting a message about the account being restricted but saying you can still run ads:

"Advertising restricted - You can still use this ad account to advertise, but there are now restrictions on how much you can spend and the advertising features that you can use'

So maybe this is the issue but it doesn't offer any clear instruction on what the issue is or how to fix it.

Any suggestion appreciated!

 

[geekboy]

Facebook is an engagement and experience engine.

Any CPM over $20 is a signal that something is wrong. Honestly, you could go lower than $20 and say something is wrong, but it depends on several factors so $20 is a good threshold for CPM.

When you niche down, you will get increased CPM.. but $20 is still kinda high for what you have listed unless the interest you targetted has things focused in a ton.

More than likely, your ads are bad, causing less than expected experience, or something 3 clicks past the ad click is causing an experience issue.

If you just want to drop the CPM without doing any work, target the 45+ MEN with no interest and see if the CPMs lower a ton. If not, then you know it's the ads or experience after the ads. Be sure to use the same post ID if you go this route.

I would make sure you are running video ads that have good hook measurement and good view through measurement. If those are off, then you will have CPM issues for sure, but something after the ad click... up to 3 clicks afterward could be causing people to drop off and hurting your CPMs too.

Thanks for your reply. Yeah I understand CPM is tied to engagement but like I said post the conversion rate of the lead form was 70% better than a comparable ad ran last year yet the CPM 12x higher!

Ran again today and had a few more leads and the CPM has dropped 30% down £35. Obviously still way too high but conversion rate also increased to 0.44% which is more than twice as good as the last campaign, so hopefully will keep heading in that direction.

 

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[DW85014]

I was asked to write this for another forum and I got permission to share it here.

But first, I want to give you some background on why I wrote this...

I have been purchasing PPC ads since 1998 and I cut my teeth on both ecommerce and lead generation campaigns for almost a thousand different companies now. You name it, from small mom and pop local shops.. to international Fortune 500 setups.

I even took $1300 of my own money when I got laid off on my birthday, and turned that into 7 figures of NET profit within 6 months on Facebook PPC ads.

When it comes to Adwords, Facebook, and many other PPC platforms... I have more years experience than some have been alive.

I've literally took companies from 90 days until bankruptcy, to making millions in profit within a year.

There is a lot of reformatting I need to do and some of it doesn't transfer over well text wise. Also, there will be several posts on here, so if you don't see them all.. please wait as it takes some time to transfer over


Below is my posting from there
**************************************************************************************

Traditional PPC

PPC, to me it's the holy grail of advertising.

I'm gonna make a lot of people salty with this statement, and many will try to prove me wrong.. but, "I've never met someone that was a multi-millionaire solely from just doing SEO".

Let that sink in for a minute and you will see why I think PPC and paid advertising in general is the best skill you can ever learn. You might find a couple outliers to my statement, but when you compare how many millionaires in our industry were born out of just solely PPC compared to just solely SEO.. well, you'll see where I am coming from.


What is PPC?

Well, it stands for "Pay Per Click" and it's exactly as it sounds, you are paying for visitors to click your ad to come to your site. If you need instant traffic to your site, this is the way to get it.


The Players

The major players in PPC are pretty much Google, Bing/Yahoo ( soon to be split ), and Facebook. Many people do not tie Facebook into traditional PPC, but it's such a large platform that it deserves to be part of the Big 3 that use to be just Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

The only reason Facebook has been traditionally outside of the Big 3 is that Google, Bing, and Yahoo are all "search marketing" platforms, meaning that you have to type in a keyword and then get served ads based on the keyword you typed in to search. This means that the advertiser ( you and mean ) bid on keywords within Google/Bing/Yahoo we think are relevant to our product or service to get customers to see our ads.

With Facebook, there are no keywords you type in to get ads. The ads are just there! This is because with Facebook you are pretty much bidding on demographics and doing "interruption marketing". Meaning, you are having to interrupt what the visitor is doing with your ad to get them to notice you. Instead of bidding on the keyword "RN to BSN degrees" ( As you would for Google ), you would be bidding on females who are 25-40 that live in the Chicago area with interests in Nursing and job titles of RN and showing them your RN to BSN degree ads.

There are a lot of 3rd tier or Premium PPC players that are alternatives to Google, Bing, and Facebook. I am going off memory here, so forgive me if any of these companies have changed or gone out of business...

• 7search
• Bidvertiser
• Adblade
• Pulse360
• BuySellAds
• eZanga
• Adknowledge
• InfoLinks
• SiteScout
• Adbrite
• Outbrain
• mMedia
• Miva
• Twitter
• Pinterest ( although basically Facebook )

There are actually a lot more than the list above, but these are ones I have used to some extent myself and tend to be the higher-end or larger players.

However, if I were to give you some advice.. it would be to stick with Google, Bing/Yahoo, and Facebook. Work with the 80/20 principle here, especially if you are new.

Just running on Google Adwords, Bing/Yahoo, and Facebook alone will pretty much help you reach almost ANY demographic ANYWHERE on the Internet. The ease of use and the fact you know those companies will be here tomorrow should pretty much sway you to just use the Big 3 full time. I mean seriously, who ISN'T using Google or Facebook?

Breaking into international markets tends to lend itself to a few different platforms ( Asian, Russian, and a few others ), but the large play for most of us will still be with Google, Bing, and Facebook.


So what's it take to get started ( Google and Bing/Yahoo ) ?

Almost nothing. You do need to have a credit card handy and a website. You can find vouchers that will give you free money up front like $50 with Bing and $100 for Adwords, but you still need a valid credit card to sign up and get an account. You will also need a website in order to make your ad.


Ok, I'm in. Now what ( Google and Bing/Yahoo ) ?

So essentially there are a few parts to getting started. I am going to assume you have money on a debit/credit card and a website. I am also going to give you a very high level of the steps involved because covering every option is way beyond the scope of this post.

For Google and Bing/Yahoo, you are going to create a campaign and Adgroup where you setup where you want to target and who you want to target.

Let's assume you're a plumber in Chicago and you want to advertise your business in the local area.

You don't want to advertise nationally, so you narrow down the geographic reach to just the Chicago area, maybe you even narrow down to a section of Chicago since you really can't service the West Side as it's too far for you. Once you have that selected, you are going to move on to things like the time of day your ads run.

Advanced Pro Tip: A lot of people just select the geographic area they want to target, like the zip codes of South Side Chicago. However, try the reverse. Select all of Chicagp first and then exclude the zip codes and areas you DON'T want. You might think in your head that this is the same thing and reinventing the wheel, but trust me.. it's not and you may end up with more traffic in the same qualified area.​

Maybe you don't work Tuesdays and you really can't take calls after midnight. If that's the case, you don't really want your ads running those times do you? Of course not, so you make your selections to only show your ads during the times you can work and take leads.

You are also going to decide on your daily budget and also how much you want to pay per person that clicks your ad. This is an important step because if you put in too low of a budget or too low of a per click price, you are more than likely going to miss a lot of potential customers. You also need to account into your budgets for "tire kicker" type customers, competitors clicking your ads, and the fact that not every person that clicks will turn into a lead.


What should my budget and bid be ( Google and Bing/Yahoo ) ?

If I were to give you some generalized advice here, it would be that you want to bid high enough that your ad will be #1 in the SERPs and that you will be able to have enough budget to have that ad run all day long during the times you selected. This is because in order to be successful, you have to have a mindset of "buying data", not immediately converting ad spend into revenue.

If you are not bidding high enough per click ( as in the #1 position ) you might realize that many people are clicking, but not calling you or filling out the form. You very well might realize that no one is clicking. If you didn't bid high enough, you don't really know if the problem is you, Google, or the fact your ad is at position #7 and no one can see it. Maybe the customers are finding who they want to do business with ( your competitors ) at positions #1-6 already and then "just checking you out" at position #7, but in reality they have already made up their mind mentally who they want to spend money with.

If your budget is too low though, you might have the same problems and not realize that maybe people who call plumbers tend to call at night when there is an emergency at home. All day at work they might not know there is an issue and since your budget is so low and it ran out at 1pm, your potential customers don't see your ad when they need you at 7pm.

There are a whole host of other issues and reasons too broad for this post, but please bid into position #1 and have enough budget to run all day long non-stop when starting out. Anything less than that, well you just won't have the right data to make statistically relevant decisions on.

Don't worry though, you won't be bidding into #1 for very long. You are doing this to buy data and to jump start your CTR, which is a major factor in lowering your per bid costs. Once you have enough data, you are going to be making changes in your budget and bidding position.

Edit - someone asked me, and YES I am available for hire as a consultant on PPC matters

.

I've been in the ad game for 5 -6 years now and curious if you would alter or change any of the thoughts here as this post is now 8 years old (if you've already done an update - feel free to link it). Thanks for the post.

 

[DW85014]

Probably not.

Understanding the past and where things came from is extremely important.

It's one reason seasoned professionals are X better than mediocre and beginners.

Would I change the original posts, no. People need to see where these ideas and thoughts came from, how advertising was.

Would I add more to it, to include the things that change as to clarify for how these platforms are different now. Sure.

However, you can learn a lot about something today, knowing how it started and why changes had to happen.

Awesome sir thanks for the response.

 

[Yanezez]

Hello all, great read!

Ive been looking at some Youtube videos, forums, etc on Google Ads. I started a campaign (mostly to learn) but of course I need to improve much more.

What I dont get is the following: I dont understand when they say 'start with 3 campaigns and then see which one is better'.
Lets say I sell a very specific digital product, lets say books from great business owners. After using some keywords for Ad1, what is left for ad2'

 

[eliquid]

Hello all, great read!

Ive been looking at some Youtube videos, forums, etc on Google Ads. I started a campaign (mostly to learn) but of course I need to improve much more.

What I dont get is the following: I dont understand when they say 'start with 3 campaigns and then see which one is better'.
Lets say I sell a very specific digital product, lets say books from great business owners. After using some keywords for Ad1, what is left for ad2'

How about different angles of selling the product?

Different uses?

Testimonials?

Emotional copy?

Alternative keywords?

Much to be thought about here

 

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[eliquid]

Hey, so I haven't updated this thread much....

But I have been posting to Twitter/X a lot under a new account I have.

Mostly online marketing, SaaS, business, and life advice.

If you want to dive deeper into PPC and online marketing, maybe give me a follow and a few likes over at https://twitter.com/scalewithbrown