Karen Grace said
Hi John,

I'm just 2 days into a new ad campaign for Regina Spektor fans tyring to get my costs down, but my costs are twice as high as the last static ad I did - clicks are twice as much per click for the same headline/text/image ... I know it's super early, but I'm a little concerned because my experience in the past generally has been that static ads have come in at a certain level and prettty much stayed there ... And after my experience with Bjork fans I'm feeling a bit concerned.

Ads fluctuate wildly from campaign to campaign. You really can't sweat these kinds of things. I often run a campaign and it does bad. Kill it. Duplicate it and start again and it does well.

You have also been running this campaign for a while and may have just hit a saturation point with the current offer, at least for a little while. I'd guess that if you give it a break it will do well again in a few weeks.

I also don't share your experience that static ads don't fluctuate. They do for me, and it is still pretty early.

I'll give you an example of a recent campaign I was running for a female singer songwriter...

I ran an ad for about a week. it did ok, but not awesome. Subscribers were coming in around $2.50. I paused the campaign and created a new one. That new one did even worse so I turned the old one back on because I wasn't ready to create a new one but didn't want traffic to dry up. The new campaign started around the same price and just kept improving over the next week or two until it went down to $1.20, with no changes at all. It's just the imperfectness of Facebook ads. There are so many variables that you can't expect smooth sailing and always need to be comfortable viewing this as a long game.

As I'm writing this I wonder whether I was just lucky in the past as I haven't done that many static ads to compare this to, and maybe my more recent experience of them starting expensive is more the norm, and I was lucky in the past ...

My questions are:

- Is it possible for static ads to get 3 times cheaper after the first couple of days (as that's what I'm hoping for!).

Yes, but that is a bigger drop than is typical.

- should I have used new image? My 'in sea' image has been wildly popular for many, many campaigns. When I used the image last time, it was for the two expensive Bjork campaigns. Maybe I should have uploaded a new one? Same for the url. I think I may have used this url in the past for a campaign that didn't do so well with Regina's audience...

Last I heard on this from Facebook, reuploading the image was best practice. However, I don't think it's a detail that needs to be stressed, and is not likely the issue here.

- I put 3 static ads in same ad set with different text to see which would perform better. Facebook is already selecting a clear winner, but can putting 3 ads in the same ad set confuse things temporarily, keeping prices on the high end as facebook figures things out?

Yes. Often one ad comes out strong, but as it weakens FB starts serving the others more frequently. And sometimes one of those ends up out performing. This is one of the reasons it is typically important to give things time.

- I excluded subscribers, but I wonder whether I should have excluded people who have interacted with my page as I think they will have seen this ad a lot over the months, and maybe they just aren’t the converting type?

Could be, but I don't normally exclude people who have engaged. Reason being that a person who clicked and checked it out but didn't subscribe, becomes more likely to do it with a second or third click. If they are not interested they will not likely click a second time and as such, they won't be factored into the performance of your new ad.

- Have you noticed any difference in patterns with how fb ads are performing/ settling into a price in recent weeks ?

No. I a currently running more ads than ever, for multiple clients, and I am not seeing anything shockingly new. However, do remember that we are going into the Christmas season, which is normally 2 - 3 times more expensive (at least according to FB). I haven't seen any changes like that yet, but it's said to be a factor.

Thanks, and apologies for the slightly panicked email!

Karen  

All good 🙂

Karen Grace said
P.S re: audience size, I'm further confused by the fact that the audience size doesn't seem to change regardless of whether it's on automatic placements, or edited placements.

I've mostly just used fb placements (right column and newsfeed) as I didn't want to throw too many spanners in the works at this point, testing so many different elements as when I did try including everything once, the prices went way up.  

I see this as well. I have always assume it was just because FB is showing you how many people exist in the audience, but are not factoring in how likely they are to see an ad based on placement.