Hey guys, feel free to add your Facebook advertising questions!

Cost per click goes down if you choose less competitive targeting, or get a higher clickthrough rate or both. So you want to test multiple ways to target your prospects, and multiple creatives (images and text). 

Sometimes I use optim.al to do multivariate creative testing, which means testing 6 images combined with 2 or 3 text options, for 12 or 18 ads. The more ads you create and test, the better your results will be.

With targeting, you can try precise interests vs. topic interests (the ones with # signs) vs. categories… workplaces, job titles as interests, etc.

Sponsored posts have a very different function (get more post exposure and engagement, make sure all fans see them, etc.) from fan-growth ads for web traffic ads, so I usually think of them separately.

Great question, and awesome answer: it depends.

If you haven’t tried AdWords keywords that indicate buying intent for your product or service, e.g. “buy trek mountain bike”, you should do that. If your CPC and conversion rate and profit per sale match up, you get positive ROI, and you should get those sales.

If that math didn’t work for you, OR you are selling something people don’t know about enough yet to search for, OR even if AdWords worked but you can’t get enough people in the door from the keywords that have positive ROI, you should consider Facebook ads. First, FB ads will increase the size of the top of your funnel, even if they later buy after clicking an AdWords ad or organic listing. Second, no matter what your AdWords ROI is, if you want to maintain and increase mindshare in your niche, FB is unmatched for awareness and branding at the lowest possible CPM.

Often when you get affordable fans from ads, it’s by targeting something they already like and connecting your brand to that interest. Chances are your prospects are more complicated than just one interest, so you’ll need more than one.

For example, when I worked on fans for the Cowboys & Aliens movie, we targeted people who liked the star actors, people who liked sci fi, and people who liked westerns. Your prospect is probably multi-dimensional too, so use multiple interests.

Over time, since we usually run these ads to people who aren’t fans yet, the pool of people who aren’t fans dwindles, and the ones who haven’t clicked like yet may not be interested, and they stay uninterested, so your CTR goes down and cost per fan goes up. You need to either vary the creative so the non-responders will respond, or try new targeting (interests/topics/categories/workplace/etc) to fish in different ponds.

WHY the heck are my promoted page posts getting likes from people on the other side of the globe… as a local business facebook page – shouldnt facebook promote my LOCAL business to the LOCAL community… last I looked China, India, and Russia arent really my LOCAL NYC community.

Thanks!! One more. Which do you prefer: CPC, CPM, or Optimized CPM? What’s your strategy in choosing which to opt for? Do you mainly stick to just one? Or do you vary and tweak according to an ad’s results?

Ronan, 
My first question there is always: are you continually creating new content in the ads? Most FB ads will stop performing well after a certain point. So it could just be that ad fatigue syndrome and you need new creative. As I said above with fan growth, sometimes entire targeting groups will no longer respond. You may not be able to fish in the same pond forever.

I often hear people say that their FB costs have gone up, and they certainly have overall since 2 years ago, for example, but if it’s a sudden and dramatic cost increase, either your CTR has decreased, or a whole bunch of new competitors are targeting the same way as you, and may be bidding high as well. You can experiment with lower bids or creative that gets a higher CTR.

My experience has been that global ad prices rise slower than you’re describing.

Hi, @briancarter. Thank you for all your help so far. Recently, I have gotten this error message when posting an offer on Facebook: “There was a problem boosting your post”. Have you seen this before? I see the offer on my news feed and it posts on the page without any problem. I’ve attached an image of the message.

Thanks!

Yes, I am referring to the offers specified in the help page you linked to. I’m not referring to a promoted post. The error shows up once I click “post” on the offer. I’ve received great response for my clients using offers but this message is new.   @andrea-vahl, any ideas?
P.S. Why don’t you post offers? 

@andrea-vahl Hmm, it must be a strange bug if you guys don’t have an answer…lol. It’s odd because the post still goes out and people are still claiming it more or less at the same rate as other offers that I haven’t gotten that message for. I guess I’ll have to deal with the fact that Facebook doesn’t want to “boost” anything for me. Figures…lol. Thanks again and to you  @briancarter, as well. Have a great weekend.

I hear you. :/

Great questions- 1. My preference is to export to excel and use sorting and filtering to look at them.2. The ideal for tracking would be to tag the ads, send them into a CRM and track those people through the sale that way- are your salepeople using a CRM? Yes, it’s an issue when people come in by phone, and sales may ask the prospect and enter that manually, but you won’t be able to track everything for sure. 

I find there’s a balance between the trackable KPI’s and your sense of quality- if your targeting makes sense and your ads help to qualify prospects, then looking at cost per lead and lead velocity may be the best you can do.