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Tag: Manual Bids

Identifying The Optimal Manual Bid For Your Ads

I like to scale my Facebook ad campaigns with manual bids. One of the the tough decisions is to identify what is the optimal bid with regards to the best combination of number of sales and profit per sale. In short, getting the best return on ad spend (ROAS).

One manual way that I’ve used in the past is to start my ads by placing a bid that would result in 1.00 ROAS. For example, if the cost of goods sold is $10 and I’m selling the goods for $30, I’d start by placing a manual bid of $20. What this translates into is that I’m willing to break-even to initiate the learning phase for the ad-set.

Then I reduce this bid by 10% everyday until my ROAS keeps getting better and stop when the spend starts going down. This has helped me identify the right manual bid in the past. But there’s one drawback and that is the auctions change everyday and I only run the top down bid-identifying strategy once. So my manual bid may not be the most optimal manual bid everyday in the future.

However, since the launch of campaign budget optimization (CBO), there’s a simple solution to this problem. You can create multiple ad-sets with different manual bids and place them in a CBO. So if you’re selling that $10 product for $30, you can may be create 5 ad-sets in a CBO with a bid of $13, $14, $15, $16 and $17. The CBO will automatically choose the ad-set that’s likely to get the best results and each day a different ad-set with a different bidding may be getting the sales for you.

Why I Use Accelerated Delivery For Facebook Ads

I haven’t met many people who use Facebook’s accelerated delivery for ads. The reason why people don’t use that option, beside the fact that many people don’t even know about it, is that accelerated delivery consumes your daily budget as quickly as it possibly can ignoring to spread it evenly through-out the day.

The problem with this kind of execution is that you’re basically asking Facebook to win all the bids possible in order to serve your ads which means you’re willing to pay as high as possible to get the results. Then why would I or someone else possibly use this option? There’s a very good reason for that and I’ll explain this just in a bit.

I scale a lot of my campaigns with manual bids. For example if a campaign is working well for me @ $100/day ad-spend but suddenly stops working for me at $200/day ad-spend, I can’t possibly scale this campaign using automatic bidding. I’d instead scale this campaign by placing a manual bid of say $20/purchase and setting the budget to $1000. If Facebook can find me $20/purchase, it will spend all $1000. If it can’t get me any purchase in that amount, no budget will be spent. If it can get me a few sales in that cost, the budget will be spent accordingly.

Even with manual bids, Facebook will also attempt to evenly spread my budget through the 24 hour period. However, that may be unnecessary with manual bids. When I’ve provided a cap per result, I would ideally like to spend all my budget even in a 1 minute period as long as the cost per purchase is met. And this is where the accelerated delivery does the job just right.

In summary, I like to run most manual bid campaigns with accelerated delivery in order to steal cheap bids as quickly as possible, even if that means spending day’s budget in an hour.

Not Killing A Dying Product In E-Commerce

When scaling a dropshipping Facebook campaign, you will feel at some point that despite all your optimizations, your cost per purchase is now more than what you can afford to pay to run your ads profitably.

Most people at this point believe that the product has saturated. That the product has already been sold, profitably, to most potential buyers and reaching out more potential buyers will not happen profitably.

I believe that more than product saturation, the cause of higher CPP and decline in sales is ad fatigue. Hence, my first course of action in this situation is to create and try more creatives.

Before the buyer has received the product, the product is only as good as it’s creative. Hence changing creative can reduce some of the ad fatigue and may revive the life of your product. It’s not often product saturation, it’s the creative saturation.

The second course of section, after the first one stops working, is to scale down the campaigns and ad-sets. You might want to see what will happen if you consumed lesser budget, and hence lost more bids. By losing more bids, you can have a winning campaign.

Once the scale down stops working too, and you’re sure it’s time to kill your dying product, you can consider moving to manual bids with accelerated delivery.

You can set the maximum amount you’re willing to pay per purchase. If Facebook is unable to get you a sale under that price, no budget will be spent. By enabling accelerated delivery, you’re asking Facebook to spend your budget ASAP as long as it can do so by maintaining the manual bid. This ensures that as soon as there are cheap bids available in the auction, you want to spend all your budget to get them.

If you’re unable to spend any budget at all on manual bids either, you might consider killing your dying product.

I’m interested to know if there are other, smarter ways to delay the death of a dying product. Please let me know in the comments.