Why Does Your Facebook Ads Performance Fluctuate so Hard?
If you start your facebook ads path after having experience with google you would be surprised how differently it behaves. Facebook is famous for it’s volatility. You may have $10 CPA one day and $30 CPA the next day. And it always like this. I visited a lot of facebook conferences and it’s always one of the top questions from marketers: how to deal with it. I’ll try to explain it here, based on our experience with Scentbird and Deck Of Scarlet.
First of all, Facebook fluctuates mostly because of 2 factors:
- Lack of data from adset to provide stable results.
- Auction condition — how many companies are bidding the same audience now.
Lack of data:
Essentially, Facebook takes data from your adset (if you run website conversions then it would be conversions) and use it as a data to learn and optimize. If you have just a few conversions per day it means that facebook doesn’t have a lot of data and behaves a bit random. Plus, keep in mind, that on this level of transactions, all your fluctuations are just a statistical error. If you increase your budget to get at least 10–15 conversions per day you will notice that volatility will decrease (it will still be there, but less intense). Another positive effect will be that adset will keep its performance for a longer period without relaunching it.
Auction condition:
This is a tricky one. First of all you don’t have any data about it. Second — you can’t affect it. But you may see that sometimes nothing seems to work and you start thinking that you’re doing something wrong. But quite often the reason is just an auction structure. And you can only wait or you can compete with creatives. If you have a very relevant offer and very catchy/viral creative it helps to decrease auction problems (it will be cheaper, but it will fluctuate). But again — the same perfect offer/creative would work even better when competition will change.
Moreover, there are “day of the week” fluctuation, quarter and seasonal fluctuations, but there is nothing new here compare to other channels.
