Every performance marketer has different techniques to run their ads. Most professional marketers use a wide range of techniques in order to scale depending on the goals of the campaign. Losing bids is one of the ways to run a profitable campaign.
Losing bid sounds like you’re losing something. But often that isn’t how it works. In fact, losing bid actually means you’re not willing to pay the top dollar for the eyeball. Instead you will bid on whatever audience is left after the auction competition.
This works particularly well for campaigns on a budget. This also works well for campaigns that are not led by the sense of urgency. But it can even work well for campaigns that you really want to scale quickly.
You can run these kind of campaigns by setting a very small daily budget if you are doing automatic bids. Sometimes I run ad-sets for as low as Rs 125 (less than $1) per day. As Facebook is going to evenly distribute your daily budget in a 24 hour period, you will automatically get a lower bid. You can also run such a campaign by setting a low manual-bid with a higher daily budget, which the ad-set may or may not consume.
It is true that you will be getting lesser impressions, clicks or sales compared to higher bids or budgets but at a lower cost which is great when you don’t have the urgency to get your lead or sale, and can wait a few days.
But you can even scale such kinds of campaigns using horizontal scaling methods. To scale, you can duplicate your ad-sets with different targeting for each ad-set while maintaining low budget per ad-set.
We’ve run campaigns with $1000/day budget by using 50 ad-sets spending $20/day each. We obviously avoided paying the premium for the bids as well as were able to spend a large amount of money daily on our campaign reaching the scale we intended.
This kind of strategy definitely works and I encourage you try it if you haven’t already.