Not many marketers know how powerful ad bidding can be! As a marketer looking to boost your overall campaign performance, it’s crucial to understand and learn everything there is to know about Facebook ad bidding. This blog will help you learn about the 5 Facebook bidding strategies and how you can optimize them to see great results.
The power of Facebook ad bidding is insane. Facebook has a storehouse of user data, and with the help of its algorithm and data tracking, it offers clever data and results for both users and advertisers. As a user, you can browse through and discover a lot of relevant brands. And as an advertiser, you can reach your target audience in a matter of minutes using accurate filters and search queries.
Without a strong bidding strategy, your ideal audience will always be at your fingertips, but just out of reach. And that’s of no use at all, right? With Facebook bidding strategies, you get to reach your target audience and present relevant ads that convert.
The right bid strategy can help you achieve quantifiable business goals, such as increased overall sales, clientele, or brand awareness. It’s crucial to define how your business will gauge success before choosing a bid strategy. Once that is done, you can decide on the strategy that best aligns with your company objectives.
What is Bidding in Facebook Ads?
Facebook’s ad bidding system is basically an auction in which advertisers bid for their ads to be placed in various ad placement locations on Facebook. Though the highest bid typically secures the most ad placements, the value of your bid isn’t the only consideration in how your ad will be delivered. This is where bidding techniques used by Facebook differ from other auction advertising formats.
By providing users with relevant content and allowing advertisers to make money, the auction system aims to strike a balance between the requirements of Facebook’s users and its advertisers.
A bid is the price the advertiser is willing to pay for a specific action, also known as a Campaign Objective. Facebook offers advertisers multiple objectives to choose from. Some of the current Campaign Objectives available to advertisers are- Brand awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, messages, conversions, catalogue sales, and store traffic.
How Important is Your Bidding Strategy?
Meta’s bid strategies help you achieve quantifiable business outcomes such as growing your customer base, brand awareness, or overall sales. Depending on the result you expect from your campaign, it’s essential to choose a bid strategy that best matches your key KPI, or how you’ll evaluate success.
Without a bid strategy, it doesn’t really make sense to pay so much for advertising that will make your ads unprofitable. You can also tend to underspend and miss out on opportunities without the right bid strategy in place.
5 Facebook Bidding Strategies Described: Benefits, Drawbacks, and How to Pick
There are three types of bidding: Spend-based, Goal-based, and Manual.
A). Spend-Based Bidding
Spend-based bidding focuses on using your entire budget to achieve the maximum result or value. There are two strategies for this
1. Highest volume
With the highest volume bidding, Facebook will try to achieve the best outcomes your budget can afford. This is usually the default bidding strategy. You can use this strategy if your ultimate objective is engagement metrics (such as page likes) that are irrelevant to your income.
Benefits
- This is the best strategy if you don’t have a specific CPA (cost per action) goal.
- Go for this if you don’t care about spending your full budget.
Drawback
- The largest volume bid strategy is not CPA-optimized. Though Facebook will deliver you the highest results, your CPA may change.
2. Highest value
This one spends your budget but focuses more on highest-value purchases or conversions, giving this strategy more of an ecommerce/ROAS focus. This emphasizes conversion value rather than volume.
Benefits
- This is a good option if you want to increase your conversion value and not just the volume.
- Better ROAS on conversions
Drawback
- A balanced distribution of values among various items is necessary for this bidding strategy.
B). Goal-based bidding
You can use a goal-based bidding strategy when you have a specific cost or value that you need to achieve. There are two strategies in this
1). Cost per result (cost cap)
This bidding technique aims to keep the average cost per result at your preferred range. Based on the goal amount you specify, Facebook will deliver results, dynamically bidding as high as necessary to maximise outcomes.
Benefit
- Regardless of the market conditions, you can maintain your cost per action (CPA) at a reasonable level.
Drawbacks
- When using the cost-per-result strategy, spending could be slower than when using the highest-volume bid approach.
- Compared to other bid strategies, the learning phase may take longer with cost-per-result objectives.
2). ROAS goal
Return On Ad Spend(ROAS) is a common bidding method for those whose conversions result in a direct amount of income. E-commerce companies often choose this strategy as it allows them to make sure that their advertising remains profitable.
Benefits
- Over the course of the campaign, you should aim to maintain an average return on ad expenditure.
- This is a good option if you want to have more control over the revenue you get from running ads.
Drawbacks
- You can anticipate more ROAS fluctuations during the learning phase.
- If you set your ROAS goal value too high for Facebook to meet, the delivery may occasionally stop, and your budget may not be spent entirely.
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C). Manual bidding
Manual bidding is an old-school strategy that allows you to control how much you bid in ad auctions.
1). Bid Cap
This bidding strategy can set the maximum bid for your ads across auctions. Bid caps are intended for advertisers who understand predicted conversion rates and can calculate the appropriate bid for them.
Benefits
- This bid strategy is useful for advertisers using internal bidding or LTV models.
- You can also go for this if you want to limit how much Facebook can bid in these auctions.
Drawback
- Bid caps do not control the cost per action in reporting and require more frequent bid changes.
How to pick the right bidding strategy for your business?
Most advertisers are well aware of these strategies already. But the issue is that they are unsure which strategy works best for which campaign. And to be honest, there is no one-size-fits-all bidding strategy, even if you follow the same strategy as other businesses in the same industry.
According to Facebook, the more control you have over costs, the more pressure you put on them to identify lower-cost opportunities to achieve your goals.
The best way to pick the right bidding strategy is based on your performance goal. According to Facebook, here’s a guide:
- Maximize results for your budget: Automated bidding
- Maximize conversion value: Highest value
- Control the cost of results: Cost cap
- Control your return on ad spend: Minimum ROAS
- Manually cap how much Meta bids on auctions: Bid cap
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Ways to Optimize your Bidding Strategy
Now that you are familiar with the various Facebook bidding strategies and their pros and cons, it’s time to learn some of the best optimization practices for effective results:
- Start your campaign with a higher bid: The fact that higher bids often result in better engagement (more clicks and higher CTR ratios) is one of the key reasons marketers start with a higher bid.
Your campaign will receive a higher score and have a better chance of being displayed to your target audience, as you will have the edge over your competitors with a high bid.
- Make videos instead of static ad posts: According to a 2021 study, social media videos receive 1200% more shares than text and image content combined. The fact that video views are an inexpensive campaign objective compared to others is an additional benefit.
- Duplicate your existing ad campaigns: As a marketer looking for results, it is considered wise to duplicate an existing campaign and increase your ROI rather than increasing your investment for a whole new ad campaign.
Though Facebook recommends that businesses not use the same audience for many ad campaigns, you’ll receive more reach from a repeat campaign than a reinvestment.
- Make good use of the Inspect tool: If you’re having issues tracking your campaign performance, using the Inspect tool can be a good option. You’ll be able to monitor how ad set delivery is developing, including factors such as audience saturation, audience overlap, bidding competition, and more.
- Use custom audiences: By creating custom audiences based on the unique data you’ve collected (demographics, interests, etc.), you may optimize your strategy accordingly. You can also upload a customer list to Facebook, which is helpful if you want to generate leads or sell products.
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Conclusion
The more campaigns you run, the better your results will be. You’ll begin to sense what works well and what doesn’t. Start with Facebook’s auto-optimization if you are a beginner and are not quite sure about how everything works. You can then shift to manual ad bidding based on the results you get.
It’s crucial to have a solid bidding strategy in place if you want to win auctions and even have the opportunity to present your offer to Facebook users. But winning auctions doesn’t guarantee you’ll also get clients. You must continuously evaluate the efficacy of your Facebook Ads campaign to ensure it is heading in the right direction.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. How do I increase my bids on Facebook Ads?
Go to the Adjust Manual Bid section of the Actions section and select Increase Bid By option. Select the amount you want to add to your bid. Note that you can add either a percentage or a dollar sum.
2. What is the 20% rule on Facebook?
According to Facebook’s 20% rule, your text cannot take up more than 20% of an ad creative. Although it’s still a recommendation today, it’s no longer enforced as a justification for blatantly rejecting ads.
3. What are the 3 typical selection methods for bids?
Competitive bidding, non-competitive negotiation, and competitive negotiation are the three main selection methods for bids.
4. How many keywords should you bid on?
No matter how big or small your campaign is, you must carefully group your keywords into themed ad groups. These ad groups shouldn’t contain more than 3-4 keywords for core ad groups and 10 for miscellaneous or location ad groups.
5. Can I use Facebook ads without bidding?
Your overall Facebook ad strategy includes a significant amount of ad bidding. Your ad campaigns must have an effective ad bidding strategy to be successful. Without it, you could unnecessarily lose money on your campaigns, even if your audience targeting and ad copies are perfect.
