How to reasonably bid for Facebook ads?

Jakeson Christopher
Plus Marketing
Published in
4 min readDec 7, 2020

Bidding is a concern for many advertisers. If you bid too high, you are worried about losing money; if you bid too low, you are afraid of missed opportunities.

Facebook’s ad auction system is highly fair, as long as you bid at the actual value, no speculation is required.

The bid is the highest price the advertiser is willing to offer, not the final bid in the system.

Choose the right bidding mode according to the advertising goals

Facebook provides four ad auction models to facilitate advertisers to get what they need according to their goals.

1. CPC (Cost per click)

  • Clicks include different types of interactions such as likes, comments, sharing, and link clicks.
  • Suitable for audience size: 50,000 to 1 million
  • Suitable for advertising goals: Advertisers who want to attract users to click or interact, only need to pay for effective clicks, which can avoid meaningless advertising expenditures.

2. CPM (cost per thousand impressions)

  • Suitable for audience size: 0 to 1 million
  • Suitable for advertising goals: This model can ensure advertising coverage and is suitable for advertisers who want to increase brand awareness.

3. OCPM (optimize cost per thousand impressions)

  • Show ads to users who are more likely to perform actions that advertisers expect (such as downloading, clicking links, etc.).
  • Suitable for audience size: more than 1 million
  • Suitable for advertising goals: Advertisers who want to ensure the coverage of their ads, but also want the ads to guide users to actual operations or conversions.

4. CPA (cost per operation)

  • The operations that can be selected include homepage likes, discounts, and mobile application installation.
  • Suitable for audience size: 200,000 or more
  • Suitable for advertising goals: Advertisers who want to attract users to take specific actions, especially app downloads.

Choose the right payment method to better control the budget

In addition to choosing the right bidding model according to your advertising goals, the actual bidding price is also very important, allowing you to more accurately control your budget. Advertise on Facebook, you can choose between automatic bidding and manual bidding. Today we mainly introduce manual bidding, including the following two payment methods.

1. Average cost bidding
That is, you pay for the average cost per performance you expect. If you use this type of bidding, Facebook will try to help you get as much results as possible while keeping the average cost per performance not higher than the expected average cost. The cost of a specific individual performance may be higher or lower than this average cost bid, but in the end, the average cost of each performance will be equal to or lower than the average cost bid you set.

For example, suppose your budget is $50 and the average cost bid is set to $10. As shown in the figure below, you ended up spending $48 to get 6 results. The lowest single installation cost is only $2, the highest is $12, and the average cost is $8 each time, which is lower than your setting The average cost.

During this process, you can pay attention to the average cost. The average CPC, CPM, and CPA can be queried through the Facebook ads cost analysis tool-ADCostly. The following is the average cost of Instagram in 2020.

2. Maximum cost bidding
This is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for each performance. If you use this type of auction, we will try to help you get as much results as possible at a cost equal to or lower than the auction price.

For example, the budget is also set to $50, and the maximum cost bid is set to $10. As shown in the figure below, because the cost of some placement opportunities is higher than the maximum cost you set, and the placement fails, you only get 4 results at the end, costing $24, and the average cost of each effect is $6, which is less than the average Compared with the cost bidding, the single cost is lower, but the chance of placement is also less.

Summary

If you are more concerned about getting the maximum delivery volume and conversion volume with the average cost amount, you should use average cost bidding

If you are more concerned about optimizing each result obtained at a cost that does not exceed a certain amount, you should use the maximum cost bidding. In this process, you should often use some calculators to quickly understand your advertising situation.

CPC & CPM & CPA Calculator

ROI & Roas Calculator

Finally, I want to emphasize that Facebook’s advertising auction system is not the traditional high price winner, but a high degree of fairness. In order to win the auction, in addition to the right price, the quality and relevance of the advertisement are also important considerations.

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