22 Jul 3 Important Things to Consider when bidding by Facebook CPC
Facebook recently announced the way their ad platform calculates cost-per-click (CPC) is changing. The new CPC calculation only includes link clicks instead of all click actions (e.g. likes, comments, shares). Here are three things to consider when analyzing your content after bidding by CPC:
1. Don’t ignore the other metrics
Taking into account the other available social metrics, especially when following the Organish™ approach to social content, is important even when bidding by CPC. Your primary KPIs should be cost-per-click, click-through rate, and traffic quality on your website. That said, do not toss away your engagement metrics. Shares are a good indicator of content quality and they generate extra viral impressions for your post; leading to even more traffic. Let social actions be your guide for content creation. Break the rules, create a cost-per-share metric from the available data and look for the intersection of where CPC and your crafted “CPS” are lowest.
2. Test and learn with each campaign
When working with clients, we analyze content performance in a variety of ways. One approach is a comparison of content groupings by Cost per Engagement (CPE). As expected, engagement-focused content will typically rank more efficiently while click-objective posts will have a higher CPE. But just because one content series you run has a high CPE doesn’t mean it has to be as high! Do these 3 things to keep everything in check. For one, make sure your promoted posts are using language consistent with the brand voice and feature not only clear objectives, but content that further captures the attention of your audience. In addition, if you’re constantly pushing a sales message on social media channels, your audience will start developing “banner blindness”, making it harder to get those clicks in the future. Finally, once you think you have a formula that works, don’t get too comfortable. Keep an eye on your performance and always continue to adjust, adapt, and optimize. Keep it Organish™.
3. Focus on efficiency
The final thing to consider is why all of this is important in the first place: efficient use of your social dollars. Say you have one post that’s generating a CPC of $0.50 and another post that’s generating a CPC of $0.20; each with a spend of $1k. You’ll want to analyze both pieces of content to get to the bottom of good performance versus sub-optimal content. Aiming for a lower CPC is obvious, but make sure you always keep it in mind and don’t lose focus. To get the same number of engagements as the $0.20 post (5k) with a $0.50 CPC, you need to spend $2.5k. When you’re boosting content ten times per month, that number scales to $25k. If all posts performed at $0.20, you’d gain an efficiency of $15k in your budget to spend on future promoted posts.
To sum it all up, when analyzing Facebook ad performance by CPC: let the other metrics guide you, create and analyze your content strategically, and free up that dough to do it some mo’.
