This week, Carissa Coles shares some of her experiment test results with us.

Do you like testing Facebook ads?

Testing Facebook ads can help you determine which the most effective ad is so that you can run the right ad and get the most results out of your ad spend.

In this article, I will be sharing some of my results when I ran ads to test the performance between different ad bidding types.

Brief background

The results came from a client who began with a small and limited budget. I wanted to prove that running Facebook ads can help them achieve their goals, namely to promote their latest video to reach their target audiences and increase the number of their fan base.

To do so, I launched two separate campaigns with different ad objectives to address both goals: Page Post Engagement and Page Likes.

Test #1: Page Post Engagement Campaign

The client posted a video featuring the latest airport’s facility on their Facebook page. I used the video post for the page post engagement ad.

Within this campaign, I created two ad sets; one using oCPM and the other using CPM.

• Page Post Engagement - oCPM
• Page Post Engagement - CPM

Within each ad set, I created one identical ad as I only wanted to find out which bidding option would be more effective.

The Test Results #1: oCPM VS CPM

Here are the results so far.

I made use of the post engagement report metrics to focus on the more important things to track and to distinguish which ads I should spend more on.

• Delivery & Spend: Frequency - 4.15 (oCPM) VS 6.35 (CPM)
• Actions: Post Engagement - 2,619 (oCPM) VS 43 (CPM)
• Actions: Post Likes - 275 (oCPM) VS 0 (CPM)
• Actions: Post Comments - 16 (oCPM) VS 0 (CPM)
• Actions: Post Shares - 127 (oCPM) VS 0 (CPM)
• Cost Per Action: Cost Per Post Engagement - 0.45 (oCPM) VS 7.92 (CPM)

Based on the results, oCPM drove more post engagement than CPM.

Take a look at the result based on Frequency: the CPM recorded higher frequency than the oCPM.

If I make a judgement based on this, I prefer lower frequency because I don’t want to annoy my target audience.

For me, the biggest factors are the Actions: Post Engagement, Post Likes, Post Comments, and Post Share. Why? Because I want more audience to see my ad. It’s simple.

Test #2: Page Like Campaign

Aside from promoting their video, the client wants to increase their fan base so I decided to launch a Page Like campaign.

Most marketers would say number of page likes is not a good KPI.

I think that depends. If the people who liked your page are your target market, it would help you in your future marketing efforts whatever your KPI is. It’s a matter of how are you going to utilize your current fan base and engage with them.

So, to start, I created two ad sets in this campaign:

• Page Likes - oCPM
• Page Likes - CPM

Again, I created only one identical ad in each ad set to find out which ad I’d run for a longer period of time.

The Test Results #2: oCPM VS CPM

I followed Jon Loomer’s page likes reporting in which I focus on the metrics which I think are important to measure and monitor. Here are the results:

• Delivery & Spend: Frequency - 2.92 (oCPM) VS 9.18 (CPM)
• Actions: Page Likes - 8 (oCPM) VS 32 (CPM)
• Cost Per Action: Cost Per Page Like - 42.56 (oCPM) VS 35.06 (CPM)

To my surprise, in this campaign, CPM generated more likes than oCPM. There are three reasons that could possibly justify the result:

1. The bid I set per 1,000 impressions is lower than the amount spent for optimised bidding. (This is useful when you have some data on your oCPM)
2. CPM received higher frequency which may lead to more likes.
3. I only have a small sample size so oCPM may not be suitable for this.

Those are just my interpretations. If you can think of anything else, feel free to share it with me in the comments below!

These tests are perfect if I have huge sample size and allocated more budget. But the good thing is I’ve determined the ad I can run and put more money to it.

But of course, I’ll continue tweaking and testing using other bidding options.

Conclusion

Testing Facebook ads is a must. You don’t want to just guess and focus all your efforts in one campaign, ad set or ad. It plays a big role on what you do to become an effective advertiser.

I spent $67 to run these tests. And if I’m going to restart the ads, I want to put more budget and also make some changes to improve the results. I can use CPC as my other bidding strategy or take advantage the Lookalike custom audience.

Overall, the campaigns gathered lower than 1% CTR which is an enough reason for me to closely monitor and optimize my campaigns.

Your Turn

Now it’s your turn to share your experience using these types of ad bidding strategies. What bidding option helps you reach your set KPI?

I’d love hear to what worked for you. Share them with me in the comments below!