Facebook Suggested Bid Spiral Effect Part II

Posted in General, Pay Per Click, Social Media by redembermarketing on July 10th, 2009

DON’T CHASE YOUR TAIL
So I got my response from Facebook, and there are some good and some bad parts. The good news is I have a new strategy to try, the bad news is that not only is it extra work, there are implications for people that have different offers targeting the same audience. Let’s start with Facebook’s response:

“I’ve checked your ads and they seem to be functioning well. However, I’ve also noticed that your ads are targeting the same target audience. Please note that for any given ad unit, our ad auction system selects the best ad to run based on the ads’ maximum bids and ad performance. If you have two or more ads in your account, targeting the same audience they will compete against each other in the auction. If one of the ads performs better than the other, it will have more chances of winning the auction while the other ad may get less impressions as a result. Since the bid is influenced by the performance of the ad, this may increase the suggested bid for this ad.”

So I was chasing my own tail? I hadn’t thought of my ads as “competing with each other,” particularly since they are in the same campaign, and like most marketers, I’d like to be able to test the performance of more than one ad, preferably against the same audience. Apparently, that’s not really possible unless you run them exclusively, at different times. Suggestion to Facebook: let advertisers display ads evenly to expedite the process that identifies the best performing ads. Who wants to compete with themselves? I hope this makes its way up the development track for fixing.

Well, I did say there was good news, and it’s that there’s a new approach to try. It’s actually Facebook’s idea:

“We recommend separating your ads to target different states. You can then create ads that are more targeted to each of your audiences. This will ensure that your ads are not only not competing with each other but also that they are more relevant and accurate.”

Since my ads target specific states, but the same demographics in each state, so I guess I could create state-specific ads, but seriously, up to 50 different ads just so they don’t compete with each other?  Yeah, they’ll be more relevant, but perhaps not enough to justify the extra effort of managing so many more ads (and aggregating the data from each for reporting).