Messing Facebook Social Ads - Take 2

Alright … its been over a month since my last post on Facebook Social Ads, and in that time, I’ve been spending a lot of time scaling up my facebook campaigns and really getting to know their system. I’ve picked up a few more tidbits of knowhow that anyone getting started with advertising on facebook should know. Anyways, here are a couple more pointers to help you out if your struggling to make sense of fb (these are aimed at people who are just getting started, so if you’ve been in the game for a while, no flaming

Facebook spaces out your ad spend throughout the day

For some reason, it took me the longest time to realize that Facebook spreads out your adspend (and with that, your impressions/clicks) throughout over a 24 hour period. So if you have a daily budget of $250 (you can find out your current budget by clicking on the Billing tab in the Ad Manager), their system will serve your ad impressions at intervals throughout the day with your very last batch of impressions coming around 11-11:30 at night … this assumes, of course, that you have a campaign that is ‘good’ enough to deplete your budget. The fact that Facebook does this can be used in your favor: for example, I have a campaign running that converts best from around 3:00pm to 8:00pm, while only performing so-so the rest of the time. So if I pause my campaign until 3 and then resume it, Facebook will serve my ads at an increased rate so as to get it back on track with the daily spend. This allows me to get a much better campaign ROI while still being able to deplete my budget.

Campaign Budgets take 24 hours to update

I think nickycakes told me about this a while ago, but for some reason it slipped my mind until just the other day when I was tuning a new campaign. When you create a new campaign, it asks you to set the maximum you are willing to spend on that campaign. Most people will set their budget really low when first launching a campaign so they can see whether or not it is a winner. However, if the campaign does turn out to have potential and you want to scale up your spend, the changes won’t kick in til 24 hours from when you set it. Nothing magic here…just something that may save you some headache if your trying to figure out why the impressions stopped on your golden campaign. O yeah, and campaign budgets are spread out through the day just like daily budgets are

You’re Ads are going to get Jacked…Deal with it

Because of how easy it is to fire up new campaigns and ads, there are tons of people out there who are constantly checking the ad board and looking for prospective offers to run. In less than 5 minutes, they can copy your picture, ad text, title and offer and submit a dozen variations or copies of your ad. This is just how it works on Facebook…not much you can do about it other than squeezing the most you can out of your campaigns before they become saturated. And targeting different demographics and countries doesn’t help…especially when you got guys like concord cycling through proxies and profiles all day scraping the adboard.

Aim to get a $1,000 Account

Because of the way that Facebook distributes your impressions, its very important that you get your account maxed out especially if you find yourself a killer campaign. Facebook will increment your account around 2 days after (at least on my accounts…may be different on other accounts) you reach your budget. The increments go from $250 to $350 to $500 to $750 to $1000. Counting the time between updates, itll take you around 2-3 weeks to max out a newly minted account. Its also important to have a high limit campaign because of the above reason (competitor’s stealing your ads).

Think outside the Box

I’ve chatted with a handful of people who contacted me after reading my first post and its amazing how many of them are trying to promote offers targeting the same ol demographic. I think people assume that facebook = college students and are solely trying to appeal to this crowd. Play around with the targeting to see the wide demographics you can hit (theres 1.3 million women over 30 on fb, for example). There are tons of offers that work outside of dating, scholarships and free iphones.

Hope that helps some of you. In the words of Diorex (who’s blog is back up), your mileage may vary.