The Basics
Ok, if you’re new to Facebook or PPC in general, one of the most important terms you need to understand is CPC. This stands for Cost-Per-Click, this is how much you’re paying Facebook for each person that clicks on your ad. Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that if you have a low CPC, this will make your ROI (Return-On-Investment) much higher.
To begin to understand how to get a low CPC, you have to firstly understand that the CPC is a ‘bid’. This means that you are bidding for your ad to be displayed against other advertisers. So if you are bidding $0.10 and another advertiser is bidding $0.11, the higher bidder will always get more impressions.
How to get a lower CPC
There are a couple of ways to decrease your CPC, they’re pretty simple but if you master all of them and do each of the tricks on each of your campaigns, you will see your ROI sky rocket!
Method 1: Test test and more tests!
This is common sense to the veteran PPC advertisers but it is often overlooked by rookie advertisers which results in some cases loss of large amounts of money.
When you begin to set your CPC bid with Facebook, they will give you a suggested bid. This will usually be between $0.50 and $1.50. This is outrageously high for any term in any country but people not testing and just doing what Facebook tells them to do is how Facebook makes their money.
A rule for me with any ad I set up is, I always start my bid at $0.10. This is pretty much the maximum I go to. So I let the ad run for an hour or two, setting my budget to $5. I then see if I am getting any impressions or clicks. If I am getting quite a lot of impressions and clicks, that tells me I can lower my CPC bid (there is usually a column that says Avg.CPC Bid, and displays where abouts your bid should be).
Now, if your ad isn’t getting any impressions you need to up your bid. But then how high is too high? I like to keep it below $0.10 but I mainly advertise email submits that have a lower payout compared to something like a Clickbank product. I think $0.15 is alright for a Clickbank product but don’t go too high.
Method 2: Interests and Likes!
You may not realize it but the Likes and Interests which you pick to target your ads towards are Facebook’s version of keywords. So it’s much like Google Adwords, where the high competition keywords like ‘weight loss’ have more advertisers wanting them so the CPC will be higher. But with Facebook, someone who is over weight is not likely to put weight loss in their likes and interests section are they? That’s where thinking outside the box is important.
The point I am trying to make with the CPC and their likes and interests, is that if you find your CPC being too high to be profitable, don’t just throw the campaign away. Edit the likes and interests you’re targeting. For example, if you are targeting the weight loss niche, it might be a good idea to target television shows right? But maybe the CPC for titles of the shows are too high, so maybe try titles of movies instead.
Method 3: Timing is EVERYTHING!
One of the best tricks I have picked up from working with Facebook Ads is that there are some times in the day when advertisers don’t have their ads up so you can grab a super low CPC with no competition!
Because Facebook has so much traffic and so many active users, if you put in $10 to fund an ad, that will be gone in 20 minutes. So, unless you have a ton of money to invest, you’ll have to pick what times you want your ads to be up.
First I would advise you to put your ad up at the peak times for the country you’re targeting and see what the results are. If the results are great then that means you might have a really low competition niche and you should pursue it. But if you struggle against other advertisers at the peak times, then it may pay to test it in the down times when no one is advertising.
This may seem bizarre to some, but many times I have been ready to trash a campaign until I tried running it in the down times of the country. I have run my ads at 4am in US and have gotten a better conversion rate that at the peak time. The advantages of this is you get tons of clicks and impressions (because there are hardly anyone advertising) and you get them for really cheap! Lower your CPC and see what happens!
