by I regularly get questions from People about their Facebook ads and most of the time they want to know if they are on the right path or are they simply pouring their money down the toilet. We all know how frustrating Facebook ads can be when you are a beginner. At times it can feel like you are banging your head off the wall as your ads, keep flopping and your bank account leaks more money. In BusterBox we have spent a lot of money over the last few years testing Facebook ads and we have managed to sign up thousands of customers directly from them so it is fair to say we know what works at this point.
In this article I am going to walk you through some of the pieces of data I pay attention to when I am running a campaign in the hope it gives you an idea of what to look out for to make sure you are on the right track. You can load up this data in your ad manager dashboard by clicking on Columns and then Customise Columns.
So let’s go over some of the terms and explain what exactly they mean for your campaign.
1. CPA – Cost Per acquisition
This is the most important thing to look out for and will tell you very quickly if your campaign is going to be profitable or not. This is the cost you are paying per new subscriber. Only you will know your company’s metrics and will know what is an acceptable price to pay which will still work out profitable for you. If you have a decent churn rate and make a good profit on each box you can spend more to acquire each customer. If your CPA is on target my advice to you is simply leave it and don’t mess with the campaign. That is the number one rule of Facebook ads NEVER touch anything that is working.
2. CTR – Link Click-Through Rate
This is one of the first pieces of data I am looking at in a campaign that isn’t performing well. This will let me quickly identify are my ads resonating with the people I am targeting. I am aiming for at least 2% if it’s under 1% then I know it will be difficult to turn it around. A low click-through rate can mean a number of different things.
· Your ad copy is not good enough·
Your video or images simply aren’t good enough.
You are targeting the wrong people.
You can troubleshoot these issues one by one and solve the problem through some testing. Remember though if your CPA is on target. I wouldn’t worry about the CTR.
3. CPC – Cost Per Link Click
This is another piece of data I am studying for a campaign that isn’t performing. I want to know exactly how much it is costing to get somebody over to my website. If the campaign isn’t profitable and I am selling a low ticket subscription and the cost per link click is very expensive I know I am in trouble. Now, what is expensive? This is all relative and I am not going to start throwing numbers out because a one size fits all approach doesn’t work here. This can change drastically depending on your niche and what you are actually selling. Let’s put it this way though. If you are selling a $15 subscription and your cost per link click is $5 you are in trouble. Here’s a tip if you understand what your website is converting at you will be able to work out roughly what would be an acceptable price to pay per link click so you aren’t losing money.
4. CPM – Cost Per Mile
I see a lot of subscription box entrepreneurs overlook this metric. This metric could be one of the main reasons why your ads aren’t profitable. A CPM is a marketing term used to denote the price of 1,000 advertising impressions on your ad. E.G what you are paying to show your ad 1,000 times. If you have a really high CPM and you are selling a low ticket item you could be in trouble. A lot of subscription boxes fall into the category of low ticket so you need to watch out for this. Again, I am not going to get into exact numbers because your CPM price can change dramatically depending on your niche, who you are targeting, the location you are targeting or the time of year. For example, Facebook ads are run through an auction and on the run-up to Christmas there are more advertisers. That means you are competing for eyeballs and this can drastically increase your CPM.
So here’s a tip which can help you lower your CPMs. Every page has a page score which contributes heavily to the CPMs. Facebook loves to see a page put out good content and get good engagement. So you should post frequently and build a solid following. This won’t lower your CPMS overnight, but it can make a massive difference in the long run.
Engagement directly on your ads can also help reduce your CPM. So you can experiment by running the engagement objective on your ads for a bit and see if that brings it down. There are lots of other things you can do such as manual bidding which can help as well and maybe in the future I will dedicate some time to writing a full blog article on this topic if people think it will help them.
5. Frequency.
This is something you look at when a successful campaign has been running a while and suddenly it stops performing and turns to crap. Frequency, as defined by Facebook, is the average number of times your ad was served to each person. As your campaign spends more money and serves more impressions frequency will increase.
Here’s why frequency matters
1. Ad fatigue
As you spend more money your ad will appear on the same people’s Newsfeed over and over again and essentially will become less effective over time. Think about it logically. If the same people keep seeing the same ad over and over again your costs will go up and your conversions will slow down.
2. You will annoy users
The second reason why you should care about Frequency is more practical. Think about. Once you have seen an ad multiple times and you haven’t converted you will get really annoyed seeing the same ad every single day on your Facebook timeline.
This will result in frustrating users, a decrease in performance and a deep dislike of your brand. It can also result in angry comments appearing on your ads asking that you stop advertising to them.
So what frequency is too high?
A recent study revealed the peak ad frequency is shown to be between 1.8 and 4 views on average and as the frequency rises above that so does the CPA. For a BusterBox Campaign, I try to keep it under 3. If it goes above 3 and the CPA is still on target I will leave it, but if it rises above 3 and the CPA starts rising I will investigate the frequency.
How do you solve this problem?
You can solve the problem by rotating your ads and launching new ones. This way potential customers won’t get fatigued by seeing the same ad over and over again. You can also experiment targeting other audiences so different sections of your demographic can be advertised to.
I am going to state this point one more time. If your CPA is on target you don’t really need to worry about anything else. If you are happy with the number of people signing up and the price is ok, just leave it and forget about it. Messing with a working campaign is never a good idea. Only if the CPA is going off budget should you pay attention to these other metrics and start troubleshooting. I could go really really deep on this and write a lot more about other troubleshooting tips, but this should help you for now if you are struggling. I will probably write another article about this in the future.
I have written multiple posts about Facebook ads on this blog all you need to do is search to find them. I hope this article helps and if you have any questions about Facebook ads or Subscription boxes in general, please let me know and I would be delighted to help.
