We have been putting in a surprising amount of focus into social media ads this year. Clients are requesting it more and more, and I am running my own campaigns. So with all the constant testing, I am finally seeing some consistently good results with social media advertising.
Back when I posted my Adwords content network versus Facebook Ads test, I was getting CTRs in the .03 range. Not very good and barely at the level that keeps the ad running. Now I am routinely getting ad click through rates of around .68, which is a 2,166% increase. How?
Nothing fancy, just laser targeting. By simply slicing and dicing the demographic groups down to smaller and smaller groups, then writing ads focused specifically to those groups, I was able to boost CTRs dramatically. That old single ad that had received 35 million impressions and 11,500 clicks is now split into about 55 different ads. The impressions dropped because of targeting so few users, but given the massive CTR boost, overall clicks are now way up. So what took 35 million impressions to get before only takes 1.7 million impressions to receive an equal amount of clicks. Thats the beauty of specific targeting.
How specific to target? I like to use a rule of thumb that ads shouldn’t be targeting more than 200,000 people, in the estimated group size. If you are targeting more than that, break it up smaller and write another ad.
The even better aspect is that with the increased CTR comes decreased click pricing (CPC). The average CPC on the old ad was .55 and now the group of ads averages about .38. Thats a 30% decrease in click pricing.
These kind of improvements can turn previously tested unprofitable niches into profitable ones. Of course the downside to all this is time. It takes a lot of time to write and submit ads, and unfortunately not much of that can be automated. There’s an art to writing ads to appeal to specific groups, and no tool can be as creative as your mind. So with social media ads, just like with pay per click, writing highly targeted ads to specific groups is the key to success.
Holy Hades! Thats a big jump. Did you change the type of targeting like from age based to keywords?
I second that. Was like the first question that came to my mind: Do you only target by sex, age and education or are you using keywords for the tighter targeting?
The original ad was just the whole US and a large age group. They were then split up in specific locations to the city level, sex, small age groups, relationship mostly. A few are to keyword groups but I’m not a huge fan of their keywords.
Great advice. I’ve definitely noticed something similar.
Facebook has perhaps the most advanced demographic targeting of any PPC engine — and fully utilizing it is critical to success.
Awesome stuff!
I still haven’t put much effort into Facebook ads, but I know I need to. This is pretty inspirational and helpful, so hopefully I can get something done by this weekend
38c for a 0.6% ctr on facebook seems pretty high. is there any reason you’re paying so high? i’ve paid less than 5c for 0.5% ctr.
Do you think that tighter targeting means having to pay more for clicks?
Tighter targeting does seem to raise bid prices a bit, from what I’ve seen.
Maybe FB figures since they’ll be sending you less traffic they need to make it up with a higher CPC.
Not that that makes sense if you’ve got a good CTR.
I can atest to targeting. I was running an offer for my tutorials site in the US and UK. Because of a better title and fewer targeted people, the FB ad received 100% higher CTR in the UK than the US. I have nearly 3 times as many UK subscribers because of this. When you first start out, more people sounds like more clicks, but it’s actually the opposite. Great post, Chad. I like your 200k max rule.
That´s a quite big raise.It pays to use social media sites even though the traffic is not that targeted.
[...] Networks – Increasing Facebook ads CTR by 2,166% SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Facebook Advertising Tips & Resources”, url: [...]
Targeting specific niches is definitely a great way to advertise and an even better way to grow business. You achieved a huge jump with facebook using this tactic! Out of curiousity, has there been an immense change in profitability thus far? Does it rival the increase in CTR? Thanks!
How about if you want to target south america, it seems that only keywords are being shown for USA…
Good comments and helpful on the facebook adds. Thanks very much
I’m glad I came across this… I just got Facebook Ad Power and in it they say that 2% CTR is what you need and that seems next to impossible on Facebook… 0.6 is really great too.. but not quite as insane.
My question is: Why not switch to to CPM once you get CTR this high? Wouldn’t that be a much better deal?
I did my first FB ad for a friend today. Targeted 400,000 people in 5 U.S. states and had 83,000 impressions with 24 clicks for a 0.029% CTR. I was ecstatic and so was my friend! However, I was curious and googled “good CTR Facebook” to see how I fared. Not too bad for my first venture in this. I like this thread and the info contained here. Thanks Chad! It is kind of funny because at one point in the process I was down to about 220,000 target group and thought that was way to low. It is a very small budget. We are doing a $15/day limit for 10 days at a FB suggested CPC bid of $0.91 and our actual cost was $0.61 per click. I am based in Hawaii and what I seemed to notice was that as Pacific time grew later, we paid less CPC. Thanks to this thread, I will be refining the ad and will let you know what I can get CTR up to.
I had .029% CTR from a 400,000 target for my first FB ad or any ad ever for that matter. Did it for a friend. Good thread. Will let you know what I can pump it up to.