Tia Fung

by Tia Fung | Social Advertising

CPC, CPM, CPA, oCPM … choosing the right bid strategy for your Facebook campaign can be a dizzying process. We’ve provided a simplified guide to Facebook bidding to make effective bidding your Facebook campaigns easier than ever.

Broad Audience Targeting & Prospecting – oCPM

For broad audience targeting, it’s important to have a bid strategy that will effectively work to narrow in on the most qualified users within that audience. In most cases, this means bidding oCPM, or optimized cost per thousand impressions.

oCPM optimizes Facebook delivery of ads to users who will complete your selected conversion event while you pay per thousand impressions.

This is the go-to bid strategy for conversion-based bidding. In order to run oCPM bidding, consider the following to help make this strategy even more effective.

  • Pixel – this one’s a requirement. You’ll need to have the Facebook pixel installed to track page views and the desired conversion event in order for Facebook to learn from conversions data and optimize towards other users most likely to convert.
  • 100k minimum audience size – you want to make sure your audience is large enough so that narrowing down to those most likely to convert doesn’t restrict the audience too much
  • Minimum of 3 conversion events per day – Facebook requires a certain number of events in order to gather enough learnings to start optimizing delivery. While Facebook now says they recommend 50 events/week (~7/day) to exit the learning phase, we’ve seen for a majority of accounts that 3/day allows Facebook enough data to optimize effectively.

    • If you find that you can’t get enough purchase events to reach the minimum target, you have the option of running oCPM on Add To Cart or oCPM on Landing Page Views. The latter is especially great for audiences that are more qualified, such as an all site visitor retargeting pool, where the main objective is to get the user back to site.

    Remarketing & Known Audiences – CPC & oCPM

    As mentioned above, for qualified audiences with the objective of driving users back to site, oCPM for Landing Page Views is tried and true. Another option for retargeting users who have already been to your site (for example, all site visitors or users who have added-to-cart) and therefore more likely to convert is CPC bidding. The best way to determine which of the two to utilize is by evaluating CTRs. If you have a low CTR, then it’ll be more cost efficient to pay only for your clicks by bidding CPC. If you have a high CTR, then it’ll be cheaper to bid oCPM in Landing Page View as you’re paying for impressions rather than clicks.

    Strategies for CPM Bidding

    Very specific circumstances call for selecting CPM as your bid type when your campaign objective is conversions. Bidding CPM would lead to delivery to any user in your audience, so the ideal target audience here would be those closest to the conversion event without having converted (initiate checkout audience, for example).

    Conclusion

    Selecting your bid strategy can be pretty simple once you take into consideration how qualified your audience is. For more top-of-funnel, high-volume audiences, bid oCPM on Conversions or Landing Page Views. For more bottom-of-funnel, targeted audiences, bid oCPM on Clicks or CPC depending on your CTR. Implement these bidding strategies today to boost your Facebook advertising performance! Contact us if you’re interested in learning more.

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