Facebook Campaign PPC Issues

Odd behaviour of Facebook's campaigns when I increased spend

[tenerifejim]

I have been experimenting with FB's campaigns for a month or so now and for a while everything was fine, but I was limited to £35 per day spend. My CPC was set to .40 which was half the initial 'recommended' bid.

Everyday I hit my spend limit of £35 (exactly) but I wanted to increase traffic and therefore requested my daily limit was raised (straight to £250 though I only requested £100).

For the last few days I have barely spent anything on the campaign and I am being told that I need to be bidding £2 per click.

Has anyone else seen this or have any idea as to why this might be?

[AjiNIMC]

FB ads are still in their early stage. Hint to our success on FB "You are not targeting ranking like Google SERP PPC, your are targeting segment, so why have a high end bid" :)

[tenerifejim]

Hi AjiNIMC,

Yes - I am trying to get out of the Adwords thought process and am trying to target based upon specific criteria - which I think is excellent and had been working really well until this week.

What I don't understand is how the 'recommended bid' has shot up 4 times (from 50p to £2). Is it related to the raising of my daily limit from £35 to £250 or is it just coincidence?

I don't see any point in paying more money per click simply to get the same level of traffic that I had previously. Is Facebook really doing something as obvious as just working out the Per Click recommendation based upon your maximum budget and size of the potential audience? I cannot believe my competition has suddenly quadrupled in the space of a day.

Has anyone else experienced similar?

[tenerifejim]

OK, I think I might have figured out what is happening. At the same time I increased the budget I also swapped the Age definition as part of their 'new feature' whereby people 1 or 2 years either side of the main age brackets I set also view the advert.
I think this small change put the advert through for review again and paused the account for a couple of days.

I have just this morning received an email approving an advert which has been running fine for 1 month.

What was odd though was that I still received some impressions and clicks (though much less than before).

The advert is now running and I hope today to find out how many clicks I can now get for my new budget.

While I have been one of the many to bitch and moan about Google, it's only when you start using Adcenter and now Facebook you realise how far ahead Google are in this respect.

[cfx211]

Their recommended bid algo seems a bit wonky to me. I have changed ad copy and seen the recommended bid shoot way up. I have also added some tiny segment to my targeting and seen it move. For now, my approach has been to go low on the recommended bid and increase it day by day until I get the volume I am looking for.

[tenerifejim]

cfx211 - have you found that Facebook has paused your campaign if you have made any changes to to the ad criteria?

[cfx211]

No. I have found that they have pretty liberal ad policies, and do not pause our campaigns.