facebook ads - click today gone tomorrow

December 7th, 2007, 8:08 am Michael social networking, PPC

So initially I posted my love for the new facebook PPC platform - but like a $500.00 call girl, its all action in the beginning and she is gone before day break.

So what happened? Initial I ran a campaign that I was able to target single men & single women around the U.S. all over 30 (my current demo. for this lead) this gave me a total of 337,880 people. The CPC was really cheap, around $.25, my exposures were very high, my CTR was at a good percentage & even the conversions were rolling in at a good pace.

I let this campaign run for 2 weeks. Everything seemed to be working fine until one day I received no exposures. So I thought it might have gotten a bit competative so I raised my Max CPC by $0.10 to see if that would do the trick.  Exposures began to trickle in again and a few clicks here and there - no conversions. This continued for a few days - each day getting worse and worse.  Was it possible I had blown through all of my target demo. and shown each of the users my ad once or twice? My total exposures for the 2 weeks were over 600k, had I burned through all 337,880 people on facebook and now the system slowed my ad down because of my high exposures?

This is exactly what it looks like. Because my demo. is not for the entire facebook community & its possible that my ad has already been displayed to  80-90% of my target crowd facebook has pulled the plug on my ad. I recently wrote facebook and email asking this question and there response was to “Try increasing your CPC that should give your ad’s more exposure.” I did, upto another $0.25 and the exposures stayed the same. So I got a bit wacky and I bumped it over a dollar, then the exposures started to roll in again - low CTR, but I had exposures.

I then decided to launch the same campaign in a different account using the original CPC and Bids. Picked the same target crowd, same CPC & exact same ad. It was back like I had just ran it the first time.  Currently it is still up and running (I had started this a week ago) and is showing the same exposure as the original campaign.  Just now are the exposures starting to get a bit less.

So what have we learned from this?  Is it possible that facebook will actually drop your ad if its been sent to your target croud more then once? Is this platform actually weeding out old ads and forcing new ones into circulation via how many exposures you have had? Is the ability to target sets of people actually the greatest downfall to exposure and the life of your ad on the facebook platform? So far it seems yes.

..send this around..