How to get the cheapest CPCs on Facebook Mobile News Feed

NOTE: This is going to be SUPER detailed, but on the bottom I tell you the '
readers digest, ADHD version if you just want the quick facts' - You will see ho
w me and my team perform controlled tests, logging and writing down every single
thing we notice, question we have, or idea we come up with during the process.
This method is proven, I actually have a full time R&D guy who is a data analyst
junkie who runs tests every single day - that's his job - and that's another st
ory.
Objective: To find the best method to get the cheapest CPCs to our product l
ander. (in facebook terms: unique link clicks)
Our Product: Physical Product from e commerce store, full transparency.
Due Diligence (Always a very important part no matter what you do!):
In order to get an understanding and learn from others; we apply a method I
always use - try and get an answer via google from people who might have already
done what we re trying to do.
Going to google, and typing in How to get the cheapest clicks on Facebook br
ings up some interesting articles. After reading them the following things jump
out:
Summary of Article #1
-Broad demographics, narrow interests
-Picture, Picture, Picture
-To Lower CPC -> Increase CTR
-Analyze & Rinse & Repeat
-Observation1: Switching to CPC to CPM drives down CTR and increases CPC?
-Observation2: Lowering CPC Bid drops CTR. Ad performs worse because its pos
itioned lower on page
-Observation3: Conversion rate matters the most in the end; how much sales y
ou get.
Summary of Article #2
-Don t put multiple ads in the same adset, instead separate them into their ow
n ad sets with smaller budgets
-Targeting people that speak English outside of North America = Cheap clicks
-Split test headlines/images
Summary of Article #3 by Mr Green written in 2010! (Holy S***, he still rank
s #3 on google for How to get cheap clicks on facebook ads)
-Run CPC campaign, segment by age group.
-Create 6 images, 3 titles, 2 ad copies for each adset
-Find the top 4 ads, then create a CPM camp with these ads - this is where w
e should see CPCs drop like crazy.
Now that due diligence is all complete; we are a bit more education. We basi
cally asked google the question we seek answers to; and learned a lot based on p
ast experiences of others.
Take aways
-All 3 articles say to split test headlines/images. So we are going to defin
itely do that.
-One of the articles suggests that after finding the highest CTR image and m

aking a
-CPM campaign with it, the CPC's don't drop, they in fact increase - so we w
ill want to test this and see.
-We also learned that broad demographic targeting might be the key, so we wi
ll test that and compare it with what Mr Green wrote in 2010; to split it right
away into age groups.
Getting to know your traffic source - Facebook
When you run on any traffic source, it s very important to know what type of a
d formats, methods, objectives they offer. For this case study, when we click Cr
eate Ads, facebook brings up this screen

What we want to do is pick the relevant objectives which for a physical prod
uct being sold on our ecommerce store would be
-Boost Your Post
-Send people to your website
-Increase conversions on your website
All the other objectives are either for app installs, lead gen campaigns, ev
ents promo, branding, video engagement, or building an audience for fan page - s
o they don t apply to us.
TESTING Phase #1
What we will test and compare in Phase #1
We are going to establish which gives us lowest CPC from the start, if we ta
rget broad demographic and no interests vs. if we target broad niche interest +
broad demographic. The goal is to figure out which one campaign combination wins
and after that to pick the winning method and rinse and repeat using other thin
gs to test we learned from our due diligence.
-This test will run for 48 hours before we call a winner.
-Each adset will have a $5 budget.
What we need:
Two (2) Page Post Ads - 1200x1200
Two (2) C2W/WC Ads - 1200x628
We also need an angle written that will go above the image on Facebook, and
link to the URL. This will be the same on all adsets/campaigns.
Once we have all, we want to publish them to our Facebook Fan Page, so in al
l there should be 4 posts in the end.
Next, we want to create the campaigns. I won t go into detail how to do this b
ecause that would be a totally separate guide on its own, lucky for us ZENO s FB g
uide right here explains setting up camps on FB real well.
Broad Demographic (USA - Women 18-65+) & NO INTEREST
Setup three campaigns where we are not targeting any interest. (one for each
objective, targeting CPC where available as default) where we are segmenting by
age into multiple adsets. Each adset will contain 2 ads (different pictures) sa

me headline.
Adsets:
F18-24
F25-34
F35-44
F45-54
F55-65 plus
I am naming the campaigns in this format:
Start Date - Interest - Product Reference - Objective Type
Campaign 1 - 12-9-2015 - F18-65+ USA - PPE
Bid: Automatic
What You Get Charged: Post Engagement
Campaign 2 - 12-9-2015 - F18-65+ USA - C2W
Bid: Automatic
What You Get Charged: Link Click (CPC)
Campaign 3 - 12-9-2015 - F18-65+ USA - CW
Bid: Automatic
What You Get Charged: Impressions (NO CPC available!)
Broad Demographic (Women 18-65+) & BROAD INTEREST
Setup three campaigns where we are targeting 1 broad interest for our niche.
(one for each objective, targeting CPC where available as default) where we are
segmenting by age into multiple adsets. Each adset will contain 2 ads (differen
t pictures) same headline.
Adsets:
F18-24
F25-34
F35-44
F45-54
F55-65 plus
Campaign 1 - 12-9-2015 - NICHE - F18-65+ USA - PPE
Bid: Automatic
What You Get Charged: Post Engagement
Campaign 2 - 12-9-2015 - NICHE - F18-65+ USA - C2W
Bid: Automatic
What You Get Charged: Link Click (CPC)
Campaign 3 - 12-9-2015 - NICHE - F18-65+ USA - CW
Bid: Automatic
What You Get Charged: Impressions (NO CPC available!)
Campaigns launched 12/9/2015 6:43PM CET
Observations after 24 hrs:
-Targeting broad with no interest in PPE got us the cheapest CPC s
-Targeting broad with interest in CW got us the cheapest CPC s there

-The C2W Campaigns (pay for Click) didn t run in both cases - we will observe
and see what happens
Observations after 36 hours:
-PPE Broad had lowest CPC s from day one until completion of test.
-CW Niche had the lowest CPC s from day one until completion of test.
-C2W Campaigns didn t run - my guess is because we selected CPC and not pay pe
r impression.
How this correlates with our due diligence and what we learned from googling
.
-Targeting broad to attain cheapest CPC s only works in PPE campaign
-Targeting broad however when doing Conversions objective campaigns does not
yield the lowest CPCs
-Age groups perform differently, so segmenting is very important from the st
art when your demo is HUGE.
Final Result for lowest CPCs:
-PPE - Broad
-CW - Niche
TESTING Phase #2 - Picking the best ad
What we will test and compare in Phase #2
We are going to pause everything and only leave the PPE Broad and the CW Nic
he campaign running because they gave us the lowest CPCs overall.
We are then going to open each campaign in a new tab so we can see the adset
s (which are there for age segmentation purpose)
NOTE: I will continue only with the CW campaign, because I am looking for co
nversions not engagement; but make sure you try both methods - some swear by PPE
campaigns; I prefer CW campaigns.
What we want to do is pick the best age group adset with the lowest CPC as f
ollows:
12-9-2015 - NICHE - F18-65+ USA - CW

Note: Make sure you are looking at the CPC for Link Click, not for the ad it
self We want people to come to our landing page for the offer.
After we pick the lowest CPC adset, we will then go into it and pick the bes
t ad (since we started with two remember) based again on CPC for Link Clicks.
This ad was the winner in the 12-9-2015 - NICHE - F18-65+ USA - CW campaign
:

Great now we know that we need to make variations of this ad.

The variations I am going to be testing are these; I asked the designer @ Ba
nnersLanders for make the variations for me. (You can also whip out photoshop an
d get it done if you prefer doing it yourself)

Here they are:

1. Red Border

2. Arrows pointing to talisman

3. Icons of different horoscopes

4. Yellow background with call to action 1

5. Yellow background with call to action 2

TESTING Phase #3
We are going to be testing variations of images in this phase to find the on
e that gets us the lowest CPC s. We will run this test for 24 hours and write down
our observations at 12 hour intervals.
What we need:
We need to duplicate our adset that did best in our campaign, and create a n
ew dark post ad that has the exact same text, link as our original add, except w
e will change the image.
After we did that, we can duplicate this adset 4x times so we have total 5 v
ariants of our main adset like this:

We have 5 adsets, 1 per variation, all of them have exact same ad in them (s
ame text, same link) except the image - that we change for each. The budget is $
5 per day for each adset, and the audience settings are exactly the same.
Here are my ads
1. var 1

2. var 2

3. var 3

4. var 4

5. var 5

That s basically it, upload the variations, and let the battle begin for the l
owest CPC!
12/15/2015 - 9:31AM
I ve just opened the data and took a look, it s amazing what split testing does
for you. Turns out variation 2 (which if you recall is the one with the arrows K
ILLED IT, it ended up getting 4.37% CTR 200% better than the next variation whic
h was variation5 with the call to action telling people to PICK YOUR SIGN.

In conclusion, we were able to lower our CPC from 0.60$ to $0.30 by split te
sting different images.
Testing doesn t end here
There are more places you can take this to further reduce your CPC; for star
ters you can try these:
1) you can test more headlines/text for the ad
2) you can take your best performing ad, and make variations of it and test
even more.
ADHD Summary
1.
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Segment adsets into age groups.

Start with a broad interest.
Run data for 48 hours.
Pick the age groups that respond the most.
Make variations of the best performing image, and run some more data.
Pick the one that had the lowest CPC.