moment garden tech talk (facebook ads how to get 1 cent cpc
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Moment Garden -Tech Talk(You'll Like Our Product)
Facebook Ads: How to Get 1 Cent CPC (andwhy you might not want to)
I’ve read more than a few places that it’s possible to get dirt cheap cost per
clicks (CPC) using Facebook advertising. However, my experience until then
had proved otherwise. I had never been able to do better than $0.25 CPC on
Facebook, which simply is not cost effective for a bootstrapped startup like
ours.
But the promise of cheap advertising convinced us to keep trying. A little
research, a little testing, and a lot of patience later has led us to the promise
land:
We achieved the elusive single penny clicks!
Alas, not all that glitters is gold. So I’ll explain how we achieved 1 cent CPC,
how you can do it, and why you might not even want to.
1. Broad demographics, narrow interests
To start, when choosing the target for your Facebook Ad, you are given
numerous geo-targeting options. However, unless you have a product that can
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only be used in a certain state or country, your best approach will be to select
the broadest range of demographics that apply, and then target the ad based
on specific interests.
For demographics, we chose all English speakers over the age of 24 (sorry,
teen moms!).
For interests, we targeted based on any baby or child related term we could:
motherhood, playing with my kids, playing with my sons, children’s books, you
get the idea.
We chose over 100 terms in total, which put our estimated reach at 14 million
people.
2. Photo, photo, photo!
Let’s get started on how to construct an effective ad.
The first and most important aspect (by far!) of your Facebook ad is the photo
you use. But what makes a clickable photo?
All of my research on Facebook ads pointed to the same definition of clickable
photo: “shows cleavage.” It seems rather vacuous that Facebook users don’t
notice the text of an ad much, but both men and women are apt to notice an
attractive woman’s chest.
However, we run a site for parents; showing an inappropriate photo in our ads
would damage our brand. So we had to consider how to create a clickable
photo that was still relevant to our audience. Our idea was to balance
attractiveness with tastefulness by using celebrity moms and their kids. Finding
several celebrity+baby photos, here are the ads we created for our first test:
Quiz time: Can you guess which ad had the best and worst click through rate
(CTR)?
Here are the results:
B - 0.086%
A - 0.055%
C - 0.043%
D - 0.025%
What’s notable here? First, people were clicking on the celebrity’s photos at a
decent rate (average ad on Facebook has 0.051% CTR), but Ad B, which had
the least recognizable celebrity, did significantly better.
Our CPC bid for these ads was $0.30, and our average CPC was $0.25.
Note: until you prove to Facebook your ads perform well, you cannot short-
change them with low CPC bids. Facebook won’t run your ad in widespread
circulation until you prove they can make money off of you!
3. To lower your CPC, raise your CTR
A lot of acronyms, I know. But the big key to getting cheap clicks is this really
simple concept: the better your click through rate (CTR) is, the lower cost per
click (CPC) you can achieve.
The reason is because Facebook is trying to maximize their revenue while also
maximizing their users’ satisfaction. Ads that get clicked on often mean their
users are finding something they like (satisfaction). And if they are clicking
more often, Facebook is making more efficient use of their page views
(revenue), and thus can afford to charge you less per click.
Since our CPC from round 1 was much too high, we needed to lower it by
raising our CTR.
4. More Cowbell!
And by cowbell, I mean clickable-ness. Examining the results of our first round,
and our research of what makes a photo clickable, we experimented with a new
version. This one took our best performing ad (Ad B) from round 1, and
zoomed in further to put more focus on the baby and the, ahem, clickable-ness.
Then we lowered our CPC bid to $0.10. Take a look:
How’d it do? Well, the click through rate doubled to a phenomenal 0.15% (triple
Facebook’s average) and sure enough, the CPC went down to $0.08!
Once you achieve a high CTR, you can start dropping your bid to try to
squeeze a better deal out of Facebook. We found that at a $0.06 bid we were
still getting placement and clicks!
5. Analyze, Rinse, Repeat
We had picked all the low hanging fruit to achieve a very good CPC of 6 cents,
but that was still 6 times more expensive than our goal of a penny per click.
The next step to lowering your CPC is by super targeting. Remember, we
originally targeted broadly on demographics and narrowly on interests. After
running your ad, Facebook provides you demographic data so you can see
which countries, ages, and genders are clicking your ads and at what rate.
That way, you can stop damaging your CTR by not showing your ad to people
who never click. And the higher the CTR, the lower you can get your CPC.
Here’s our demographics report for the “more cowbell” ad:
Fascinating stuff. What we learned:
Old Middle-aged people (over 44) don’t click on the ad at all.
Muslim countries clicked at an incredible rate. Pakistan and Egypt provided
CTRs of 0.23%!
We then ran a new version of the same ad, targeting just muslim countries, and
people aged 18-44. We began our bid at 4 cents, and as we started to earn
impressions and clicks, we dropped it penny… by… penny… until…
1 CENT CPC!!
All that glitters ain’t gold
While we did in fact reach our goal of 1 cent CPC, we realized that we lost sight
of the forest through the trees.
We’re a business, and as such, we want (no, need) to make money.
Our final ad, costing us just 1 cent per click, was not coincidentally targeting
some of the poorest countries in the world. How many people in Pakistan are
going to pay for a Premium Moment Garden account, or buy $50 photo books
of their child, when their average monthly income is just $41?
So while we did indeed find gold in our quest for penny clicks, we quickly
realized we were chasing fools’ gold trying to reach it.
Lessons Learned
We did learn a tremendous amount from our Facebook Ad experimentation.
While you may not be able to get much value out of 1 cent CPC, all the above
techniques can be applied to drive down your CPC within the market you ought
to be targeting. Just be sure you’ve identified who that market is, and aren’t
spending your precious cash showing your ad to people who don’t need, or
can’t afford, your product.
In addition, here are some “secrets” we learned along the way:
Many people recommend switching to cost per impression (CPM) bids once
you drive down your CPC. We tried this as well, but what we found is that it
results in much lower CTR, and subsequently higher CPC. The reason? If
Facebook knows it’s getting your money as long as it shows your ad
(whether or not anybody clicks on it), it’ll show your ad lower on the page.
That way it can milk higher CTR from ads with CPC bids by putting them at
the top of the same page, and still get just as much money from your CPM
bid at the same time. That’s my theory, at least. Sneaky.
Likewise, as we lowered our CPC bid from 3 cents to 2 cents down to 1 cent,
we saw a drop-off in CTR. Why would the same ad perform differently based
on your bid? I’m guessing for the same reason as above - Facebook
decides to put your ad lower on the page to fill inventory, while showing a
more lucrative ad near the top.
Ultimately, what matters from ads is your conversion rate. How many of
those clicks turn into users. We tracked this data and found that for our first
$37 in Facebook Ads, we got 442 clicks and 58 new users from Facebook.
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Jon Lim • 2 years ago
Great post - definitely interesting to see the path you guys
took to get to your $0.01 CPC goal and the outcome of it all.
I hope that you've found a middle ground with an affordable CPC
rate and with people who perhaps are able to afford your service?
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That works out to a 13% conversion rate, and a user acquisition cost of
$0.64.
Not surprisingly, people coming to our site from Facebook were much more
apt to click the Facebook “like” button on our homepage than an average
visitor. Out of those 442 clicks, we got 43 new “likes.”
Step 5 above requires access to your demographics’ CTR data, so you’ll
know which demographics are clicking the most often. While you can access
much of the demographics data via Facebook reports within a day of
starting your ads, the CTR column was missing for us. It took about a week
for that data to show up in the reports! Just keep this in mind if you’re
wondering where that column is, like we were.
We hope you learned a bit from our experiences, and that you can apply some
of this knowledge to your own Facebook Ads.
If you have any questions, leave a comment below.
Reply
Haha, thanks for the read.
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Reply
garbowza • 2 years agoM o d Jon Lim
Thanks! While the experimentation was really
useful, the $0.01 CPC was not very valuable since the
volume was so low. At $0.02, we got much higher volume,
and a fair number of them registered for a Moment Garden
account. However, I doubt many (or any) will convert to
paying customers. But I guess time will tell! At such low
CPC, it's worth the experimenting!
1
Reply
inm • 2 years ago
Interesting analysis. It's sort of disheartening to see that
despite working to optimize ads as much as you have, the CTRs
are still pretty abysmal. I think thats why there are so many
interesting advertising opportunities being created around the
Facebook ecosystem. A lot of businesses are just interested in
boosting up their fan count and there are services like
http://facebook.popularfans.co... to accomplish that. There are all
kinds of interesting analytics and other types of tools that are also
coming out to measure engagement with your audience. I think
Twitter popularized this trend because of their open API. I think
Google CTRs will always be important, but social is also very hot as
well.
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garbowza • 2 years agoM o d inm
You're right, it's kind of sad that our 0.15% CTR is
really good, relative to Facebook's average. But really, all
that matters is your rate compared to other similar ads - if
yours is better, then it will help drive your CPC down. Given
the massive amount of impressions Facebook generates, it
can still be profitable for you and them.
Live58 • 11 days ago
I just stumbled across this article in my search for how to
get low cost likes. I've gotten my cost per like down to $0.02 with a
CTR of .834% (yes you read that right). I'm running it for a poverty
fighting christian organization that is brand new. All the likes are
USA based and I target 21 and up. The potential reach is just over
15MM and so far we've only reached 51k. I just started a day ago
and started with a budget of $10. I just upped it to $50 for the day to
see if I can sustain a $0.01 cost per like. We're also working on
making sure our page engagement rate can remain pretty high with
the influx of ad acquired likes. We don't want to dilute our
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the influx of ad acquired likes. We don't want to dilute our
community. Cheers!
Reply
Anirudh Bahadur • 22 days ago
Awesome Tips
Reply
Jamie • 9 months ago
This was really helpful, thank you :)
Reply
Norman • 10 months ago
Great info... thanks so much for sharing. This all makes
perfect sense and kept me reading right to the end. I nearly bought a
product on the Warrior forum giving details about 2 cent CPC, then
decided to do a google search first, and very glad i did.
After all there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Reply
Dpike33 • a year ago
I got my ctr on one of ads to .17 my cpc is at .36 was
wondering if the rates have gone up that much in 9 months. My ad is
in a campaign that has other ads with not as high of scores? Should
I just run the high ctr ad solo?
Reply
Bret t the Cheap Traffic Guy • a year ago
Thanks for your detailed post, very interesting and easy to
follow. You brought up a fantastic point of getting 1 cent clicks but in
some of the poorest countries in the world.
Reply
Andy Brice • 2 years ago
Interesting, although slightly depressing that the success of
an ad is proportional to the amount of cleavage shown! I had less
success with Facebook ads:
http://successfulsoftware.net/...
Ash • 2 years ago
Thanks for the honest 'real world' post.
A little advice.
While most of your potential customers use FB, you would probably
find better targeting with ads on websites and forums that your
potential customers go to when they have questions about their new
or impending bundles of joy. No need to spam as the majority of
these places are happy to display your ads for reasonable monthly
fees. Contact them and usually, they will take an easy online
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payment like Paypal. Be honest and they will work with you as they
want happy advertisers with products like yours that make their
visitors happy.
The instant gratification of quick stats on FB or Adwords and such
make it very easy to lose track of the importance of focusing on
conversions (as you have obviously learned).
You're doing great and these are lessons that must be learned
before sustained success comes. You will be better off for having
done the work that you posted about.
Cheers and Good Luck to you
Reply
jonathanjaeger • 2 years ago
I run Facebook ads all day at my job and you're definitely
going to have to pay much more for ads in U.S. (over Canada or
anywhere else). In addition, starting your ads at a lower CPC will get
you a lower quality score for your ad -- so even if you get served
initially, the life-span of your ad getting served on Facebook will be
much less. You will then have to reupload and starting spending at a
higher CPC much quicker. Of course if you're a small business,
starting out at a much higher CPC (>$1) and running a lot of initial
volume might not be feasible for most people. You need to start out
with greater than .100% CTR if you want to have the ad sustain for a
long period of time. Running celebrity ads for a short period of time
will work, but you could be looking at C&D at some point if you're
running a huge amount of volume.
Edit: At the end of the day CPC and CTR are useless if you can't
drive enough volume from the ads based on your targeting.
Edit 2: Targeting 30+ women will get you a higher landing page
conversion and CTR (obviously depends on the vertical, but in
general).
Reply
cavezza • 2 years ago
I've gotten down to $0.02 per click in North America only -
it's very feasible.
Reply
jonathanjaeger • 2 years ago cavezza
Nice! I'd like to know the volume you were getting in
terms of clicks and your CTR that made this feasible. Was it
sustained?
garbowza • 2 years agoM o d cavezza
Oh wow, that's impressive! I would love to hear
some tips if you're willing to share. I haven't been able to get
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the low CPC in N. America.
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Rishi Shah • 2 years ago
Would love to see numbers on how many of the 1 cent
CPC actually converted to users/paying customers.
Thanks.
Reply
garbowza • 2 years agoM o d Rishi Shah
To be honest, very few. In fact, once we got down to
$0.01 CPC, the volume was horrible: we just weren't get
many impressions or clicks. At $0.02 we get much more.
Reply
Dev Basu - SEO s ince 2007. • 2 years ago
Super interesting stats - The days of a 1 cent CPC in a
North American market are gone. The lowest we've seen are
around 10 cents for decent clicks and conversions. Thanks for
posting your stats.
Reply
garbowza • 2 years agoM o d Dev Basu - SEO since 2007.
We've definitely come to the same conclusion as
you. Any time we try to target more towards N. America
generally and the U.S. specifically, or CPC rises
dramatically.
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