Basic Questions About Improving Campaign Management

[lumpenfolk]

I have started a small experiment to learn about Facebook page promotion ads.

I am happy with my newly created page. It is in a popular affiliate niche. I am posting quality content each day. I am not promoting any offers yet, but in the future I may build a small connected site for this purpose.

Also, in Facebook ads I am comfortable with the targeting options, testing multiple images, headlines, and text, or at least where I need to go in these areas.

The part I think I need to improve before going forward is basic campaign management.

This is what I have done so far:

I used the 'Create Ads' then 'Page Likes' option in Facebook to get started. I carefully entered my ad copy and targeting options, uploaded 6 different images and clicked 'Remove' by the News Feed ad preview (because it didn't look right with my squarish images, and sounds too advanced to start with).

Q1: Am I losing anything by creating my ads directly in Facebook - Power Editor looked more complicated?

Q2: I used various sizes of images starting from 256 x 256 - basically ignoring the guideline size of 1200 x 627. They look good in the ad preview. Does it matter?

Next I set my budget of $3 per day oCPM and tried to set the campaign duration to 1 day. My 1 day duration turned into 2 days in the settings, but I decided not to worry about that - maybe there is a minimum duration.

And here are my results today:



Looking at this I realised that I need some help. It seems that Facebook has picked an image it likes and virtually ignored the others.

Q3: Should I be creating a separate campaign for every image so that I have more control, or am I missing something?

Q4: What about the 'Sponsored Story' ad which Facebook offered to me - are these worth keeping?

This is my first Dojo Follow Along post - any suggestions about how I could improve it are welcome.

EDIT: I paused the 'image 3' ad just before writing this post, to see what happens.

 

[K]

Having just played around with this myself heres what I will say.

This is my blueprint, lets use the ever so popular "dog" niche.

• Find 6 pictures of cute or likeable dogs
• Set up 6 DIFFERENT campaigns
• Same copy on all
• Same targeting on all
• Different Image per campaign
• $5/daily oCPM
• Run for at least 3 days
• Pick the winner with the highest CTR and lowest CPL
• Scale up the Budget $20/dayR
• Run until the frequency goes to high meaning you need a new audience

Basically - FB doesn't spin your images enough so only run one per campaign just set up multiple campaigns.

Also create clever copy - if its for dogs give them what they want, "Click "Like" if you love dogs" - thats it!

Then i'd HIGHLY recommend using Lukes FPTraffic to schedule daily posts encouraging people to "like" "comment" "share" pictures.

This way you also grow naturally - I'll talk about monetising once you're at that stage but I wouldn't even think about it until 50k+ likes!

 

[lumpenfolk]

Thanks K.

Exactly the sort of tips I was looking for to save me days of work.

I will update this next week and hopefully show an improvement on the status so far:

Spent: $12
Likes: 84

(I spent $6 prior to the above post just exploring)

 

[lumpenfolk]

Six little campaigns created:

• Chose 'ongoing' this time rather than setting an end date
• Same 6 images as before, because I already put some effort into choosing quite different but relevant ones
• Used super-short copy "Click 'Like' if you want dogs." (not really dogs ) & a simple benefit style headline
• Budget $1 per day for each campaign (I figure that I can try again with a bigger budget if this proves to be too low to get enough data)

Luke's FPTraffic is on my shopping list, but I want to establish a baseline without it first.

I definitely would like to see some natural growth, otherwise, even if I can achieve a CPF of $0.02, it will cost me $1,000 for 50K likes.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that approval time was about 8 minutes!

 

[K]

I'd personally go 3-5 budget to start but that's your call - $1 gets you nothing really.

 

[lumpenfolk]

Thanks for the advice K. I will boost the budget to $3 per day for each campaign. I'm wary of spending too much on this until I have a bit more confidence that I will be able to grow my page into a monetizable asset. It is mostly a learning exercise for me.

I have been playing with FB reporting and already it is interesting:



It shows women only because I have chosen to only target them. I already know that >90% of the interest in this niche is from women (from competitor site demographics).

I set the campaign up to simply target age 35+. FB has banded the results automatically, which is nice. I am tempted to start narrowing my targeting already, but I will not, because the results do not make sense - I have no idea why the 45-54 band is less enthusiastic. What I will do is expand my targeting to younger women - ie. change to 25+, because I am surprised to see the 35-44 band is most enthusiastic.

The other interesting result is that with this new setup of 1 ad per campaign I can already see that the image FB originally selected to run with (in my 1st post) is one of the worst performing. The best performing at this early stage is a very generic 256x256 free icon which I almost didn't use.

 

[lumpenfolk]

Hmm. I didn't change the age targeting because I didn't want to trigger another review of my ads...

Question:
I can see that waiting for 3 days is a good idea to get a useful amount of data, but is it more than that - am I waiting for for the FB pricing to 'settle down'? If so, will changing the ad / triggering a new review reset the counter?

 

[K]

Basically the more targeted you go the likely more you will pay per like.

Yes wait a few days to judge your CTR and therefore CPL.....If you can't get them cheaper it MAY be your copy, or image or it may just be competition or lack of audience in your targets.

There's no exact science to it...you just need to test.


Also changing budget will not trigger another review.