Proper Facebook Ad Testing

Basically, if you set up one campaign with a large amount of ads (25+) in a CPC campaign, and one of your ads gets an early click, the Facebook Ad’s system will prioritize impressions only to that ad and basically say “forget you, other ads. This is the obvious winner.” As a marketer, we obviously want to test all the angles, ad copies and images that we can, but this system can make it fairly difficult.

To get around this, your first step is to Increase your CPC bids. But, in many cases this just isn’t enough. You’ll have to keep bumping the CPC, sometimes over $1 your original bid before you start getting any impressions. In some case, it doesn’t work at all. This isn’t a reliable method of sharing impressions across all your ads.

Another thing we can do – switch to CPM. CPM has its downfalls. Actually, that seems to be all CPM has going for itself. Facebook has even said “run CPM if you don’t want clicks on your ads.” CPM clicks generally cost more CPC-wise, and have a very low CTR. The quality of those that do click is also a fair bit lower than its CPC bidding clickers. What it is good for is getting a general idea of what is working, though. The ads will share a greater portion of views across more ads, however we still aren’t perfect. In many cases, you might find only 5 – 10 ads get any impressions and we fall into the same problem you had before.

Another idea is to resubmit ads not getting impressions. Simple remake the ad, stick it in the same campaign and delete the original. I think Facebook gives a little priority to new ads to give them a small test. If you remake all 50 ads though, you’ll run into the same problem, but this shows us something. Less ads in one campaign gives a fairer share of impressions.

So a more true solution is to break up your many ads into multiple campaigns. 3 – 10 ads per campaign will ensure a better share ratio. 1 ad per campaign almost insures you will get impressions on the ad. It’s a lot of extra work to set that up, but if you have a large variety of ads that need testing, this might be the only solution left for you if all others fail to perform.