Facebook ad bidding how does it work

Find people more likely to take action based on your goals. For example, to drive people to your website select Optimize for clicks bidding. Get your ads to the right people. Facebook automatically paces your ads based on your budget and schedule, so they deliver evenly throughout the duration of your campaign.

Play Icon. Bidding and budget Before you decide on the right objective for your ad, you'll want to familiarize yourself with bidding and budget:. A bid is how much you're willing to pay for a specific action. Different types of bids include cost per click or cost per impressions CPM.

Your budget is the maximum amount you're willing to spend on your ad over a period of time. Depending on the type of bid you choose, you only pay for clicks or impressions when you run ads.

Your ads will be deployed evenly over time, and you'll never be charged over your budget. Read below to see the right bidding options for your goals, or visit the help center to learn more. Reach more people with page posts Even if people don't click your ad or like your Page, the fact that they've seen your ad can help increase awareness of your business, grow your audience and keep you in mind when they're ready to shop.

One way to keep people interested and aware is by boosting a post:. Find a post you'd like more people to see and click Boost Post , or select Boost your posts in the ads create tool. Select Optimize for Daily unique reach to help it reach as much of your target audience as possible.

Your ads will run on a cost-per-thousand-impressions CPM basis and you'll be charged each time your ad is served. All that being said, however, the bidding system has changed quite a bit over the past few years. Some of these changes are substantial, like the ability to set bid caps or prioritize accelerated placements, while others a simple interface change that still require some new learning.

Have you already experimented with the different types of bidding? Let us know in the comments and remember: While the data shown in this post should apply to most of you, never assume anything. Always test everything!

Save Save. Save Save Save Save. So I assume the goal of your experiment was to get likes. And I assume the goal of likes is to eventually drive revenue. Thus the quality of such likes is important. Like click farms. So a more relevant test, would be to measure how these likes eventually effect your revenue or reach. Counting likes as a goal is pretty fruitless. Notice that frequency is the same, so it simply means 2x the people heard about your company, which is probably a good thing.

Testing something like the sale of an info product, or free trial signup on your website would be a much more appropriate test IMHO and something I would love to see on you end.

Thanks for the feedback, totally agree on the conversions point. Like are a pretty useless metric, we agree with that, it would have been interesting to measure overall engagement on the page for users coming from Adv but the scale of the test was pretty small to measure any reliable data on that side. That was a consideration on the algorithm behavior but of course for the end user receiving 2x the exposure at the same price is totally a good thing!

I agree with you. Just happened that I spoke to a couple of Linkedin representatives about this last week and some of the points were illustrated by Massimo here, so thank you for sharing! Yep, that would be pretty nice. Anyway, Adwords have been around for much longer than FB Ads. We have had success with oCPM driving the cost of page likes below.

I believe that the targeting had a lot to do with it. Letting Facebook decide algorithmic ally who is most like to respond to an ad based on targeting and past user behavior seems like a fine optimization strategy to me! Wanted to say that the quality of the AdEspresso blog has really stepped it up recently. Loving what you guy are putting out.

According to this little experiment CPA could be a bit better as it had nearly the same cost of oCPM but provided more impressions, so more brand awareness. Overall the best solution is always to test everything. Check which one works better for you and keep using that but test everything again after the campaign has been running for long. How Broad is the target? Are you bidding on clicks?

Try increasing it until it starts delivering or check if the potential reach of your target audience is too small! What has your experience been bidding for engagement vs website clicks for promoting blog articles? In the meanwhile, personal opinion not really data driven: I like to optimize per conversion whenever is possible. If your post is really engaging and sharable PPE could generate many shares, likes and overall bring you a lot of free organic traffic.

First off — this article was really great. Very clear and concise. It certainly cleared up some questions I had about the different bid strategies. Or you can use Power Editor and from there you should be able to see the correct bid that Facebook is using.

I would love to see this test repeated except with a more relevant goal such as an external website conversion on a landing page that has an ebook download for example. Now that you have demonstrated oCPM is almost always better, what are your thoughts on automatic bidding vs manual bidding for oCPM website conversions?

Probably lowering the bid in ads that performs very well could be a good strategy, but overall the bid is not that relevant when using oCPM. I thought that was still a relatively high bid.

Is it possible to have AdEspresso optimize the campaign, while setting a manual bid? Great Article. Is the CPA bidding the same thing as Bid for website conversions.

Thanks for this bidding guide. Thank you! I mean these options on the picture in this link. Hey Julia, sorry about that. While the principle of this post are still correct, Facebook changed a lot the disposition of the content and the naming.

This is a great and very informative post, but still kind of concern about how much to set for the bid amount, would it be great to be as low as 0. That really depends on what value a click or a conversion has for you and what reasonable results you can get. Everything is very open with a clear clarification of the challenges. It was truly informative. Your site is very helpful. Thank you for sharing!

Hi, Great post. I have question about opcm. I certainly love reading all that is written on your site. Keep the tips coming. I enjoyed it! When you do bid manually, Facebook is advising you an amount to put. Thank you for this useful information, Massimo. That was really helpful for everyone especially for a beginner who just started.

Further, what could happen if I manually bid differentyl in different ad sets? Any thoughts? Do you ever run into any internet browser compatibility problems? A handful of my blog audience have complained about my website not operating correctly in Explorer but looks great in Chrome. Do you have any advice to help fix this problem? I as well as my guys ended up taking note of the nice items from the website and then suddenly came up with an awful suspicion I never expressed respect to the web blog owner for those techniques.

Instead of setting individual ad set budgets, you set one overarching campaign budget. This budget has flexibility to spend more on ad sets with the best opportunities, and less on underperforming ad sets. It simplifies campaign setup and reduces the number of budgets you have to manage manually.

Which brings me to my next point Do you use lowest cost bidding to let Facebook do the bidding for you or do you choose one of the many cost control options to take advantage of manual bidding? Before beginning your bidding, you should come armed with data. Know your target cost. Start with your customer lifetime value LTV and work backwards.

If you know your LTV paired with your spending and conversion rates along every step of your funnel, you can come up with a value for every KPI. Every marketer is going to have a different opinion here. But you know how they all come to an answer? Which makes them all right. Or does that make them all wrong?

Do your own testing to figure out which works best for you and each campaign. Guarantee you can find message boards that support your conclusion and also some that have a different conclusion. Facebook always sets your bid for you, but it does so in alignment with your bid strategy. They pace both your budget and your bid.

Facebook will adjust your bid or which auctions they enter based on how much budget and time are left for your ad set. It will fluctuate a little bit depending on opportunity. Alternatively, if you cut the campaign down to just three days instead of seven, Facebook will use the rest of the budget. With more direction and more time, the Facebook algorithm will only get better. During the learning phase, Facebook is exploring the best way to deliver your ad set.

This also means that performance is less stable and cost-per-action CPA is usually worse. The learning phase occurs when you create a new ad or ad set or make a significant edit to an existing one. This includes edits to targeting, placement, new creative, bid strategy, bid amount or budget. The Delivery column reads "Learning" when an ad set is in the learning phase. While the delivery system never stops learning about the best way to deliver an ad set, ad sets exit the learning phase as soon as performance stabilizes usually after around 50 optimization events since its last significant edit.

The learning phase is a good thing as long as Facebook has enough budget and conversions or events to be able to optimize where they use your bid. Ideally, Facebook wants those 50 events per week for peak optimization. You might not even be able to exit the learning phase without those 50 successful event conversions. Instead of being perpetually stuck in the learning phase, change your optimization or even the campaign objective to give Facebook a chance.

Work your way up the funnel until you can get a solid amount of event conversions. If you were going for purchases, try adds to cart or adding payment info.

If you were going for conversions, try landing page views. Facebook can then explore all the existing customer data you give it and find similar users using a lookalike audience. Frequency Capping prevents users from seeing your ad too often, which can lead to ad fatigue and audience decay. Ad Fatigue: Since the same people see the same ad over multiple days, their engagement with that ad is likely to drop, leading to higher costs for the advertiser.

If you care more about reaching the maximum amount of people, choose a lower frequency cap of impressions per week. If you care more about reaching a smaller group of people more frequently, choose a higher frequency cap. Generally, large brand advertisers with large market share and high levels of brand awareness have the most success when they focus on reaching more people by choosing a lower frequency cap of ads per week.

Newer brands that have lower market share or are running shorter campaigns may create more memorable impressions by increasing their frequency cap and increasing their average frequency in order to show more ads to a smaller group of people and maximize awareness.

Keep in mind that while increasing average frequency can increase the percentage of people in your target audience who see your ad more than once, it may also decrease the total number of people you reach in your target audience and your CPM cost per 1, impressions may increase or decrease. They also take ad relevance diagnostics into account which includes engagement rate ranking. The existing engagement likes, comments, shares will now be associated with your ad.

The benefits are two-fold:. Video views are pretty cheap and easy to come by compared to other campaign objectives. Those cheap video views show interest and intent, the perfect recipe for retargeting. You can have an all-star bidding strategy, but if your ad creative sucks, your bids wins are really just a loss. You have to optimize more than your copy.

You need eye-catching visuals. Make your bidding strategy work at its full potential. Want to know what we mean? There is no one-size-fits-all approach for any aspect of a bid strategy. Be sure to test all your campaigns to find what works best for you.