To win auctions on Facebook Ads and maximize clicks, you need to choose the right bidding strategy. Aim for cost-per-click (CPC) if you want to directly control the cost of clicks, or use cost-per-impression (CPM) to increase visibility. Here are the steps to win Facebook Ads auctions and get more clicks:
- Set a competitive and sustainable budget.
- Experiment with manual bidding for greater control.
- Constantly monitor performance to optimize the bid.
- Segment the audience to reduce competition and increase chances of winning auctions, thus obtaining more clicks.
If you’re a marketer or an entrepreneur, what you want from your Facebook Ads is a measurable and tangible return on investment. For this, you need to know the bidding strategies in detail, which are essential for maximizing the ROI of your advertising campaigns.
With over 3 billion monthly active users, Facebook remains one of the most powerful advertising tools and, as is logical, one of the most saturated with competitors.
How to come out alive and victorious? By choosing the most effective bids to win advertising auctions! Put like that, it seems very complicated, and in part it is, but I’m here for this, to explain to you the best practices for competition-proof sponsorships. Let’s begin!
What is bidding in Facebook Ads
Bidding is simply the process by which advertisers compete to win advertising auctions on Facebook. To do this, those who invest in ads must establish how much they’re willing to pay to get the desired result, such as a click, a view, or a conversion.
How advertising auctions work on Meta
First, you need to create the campaign specifying your objective among awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion, sales. Once you’ve chosen the objective, Meta will ask you to choose the type of configuration between Recommended Settings and Manual Engagement Campaign.
I recommend clicking on Recommended Settings if you don’t have experience in Facebook campaigns, because Meta will improve the campaign’s potential with the configuration best suited to the selected objective.
Now you need to complete the ad creation by indicating the name, the conversion location where you want to encourage interactions, the performance objective (Maximize the number of conversations or maximize link clicks), indicate the budget and for how long, and select the target audience for the ad.
Have you created your ad? Great, now you’ve officially entered the magical world of auctions! Every time a user enters Facebook, Meta starts an auction to determine which ad to show them among the many. The competition between advertisers happens through bids, or bids, and you too must know how to navigate this perfectly!
Based on what does Meta’s algorithm choose who wins the auction?
If you think it’s enough to offer more in terms of cash, you’re wrong. Meta’s algorithm combines three main factors to determine the winner of the auction:
- Bid (Bid): the amount of money the advertiser is willing to pay.
- Quality score and relevance of the ad, so make way for useful content for the user and no to detestable clickbait trash!
- Probability that the user will interact with the ad.
As you can see, Meta is interested in satisfying the user and not just making money. Always remember this when planning your advertising campaigns, otherwise you’ll waste time and money for nothing.
In the following paragraphs, I’ll explain the various types of offers available through Facebook Ads. Let’s go!
The three types of bidding on Facebook Ads
There are 3 main bidding strategies that Meta offers to advertisers: spend-based, goal-based, and manual. Each has its own peculiarities and serves to achieve different objectives. Let’s look at them in more detail.
Spend-based bids
The best option for you if you want to get the maximum results with a fixed predetermined budget. You can choose between:
- Lowest Cost (Lowest Cost) which is Facebook’s default strategy, with which you can achieve results without setting a maximum bid limit. Facebook will automatically optimize bids to have a lower cost for each result.
- Cost per result (Cost Cap) essential if you want to control the average cost per action (CPA). You need to set the average cost you want, and Facebook will try to keep the cost per result below this threshold.
Goal-based bids
Great if you want to get sales, for example, while maintaining an optimal cost per action. Choose between:
- Target Cost (Target Cost) with which you can set a cost per result. Facebook will try to get results in line with this figure. If you have a budget to respect, it’s an excellent option.
- Minimum Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) (Minimum ROAS), is the bidding strategy where you can set a desired ROAS percentage and Facebook will optimize bids to reach or exceed it.
Manual Bids
If you already have good experience in advertising on Facebook, with manual bids you can set the bid limits you want for each auction. The level of precision offered by this bidding strategy is certainly greater and you can choose between:
- Bid Cap to set a maximum limit that you’re willing to spend for each result and prevent costs from exceeding what you’ve established.
- Manual CPC (Manual CPC) you indicate the maximum cost per click, so you can maximize bids for specific clicks in advertising campaigns that have CPC as the main KPI.
The highest volume bidding strategy
The highest volume strategy (Highest Volume Strategy) allows you to get the most in terms of clicks, views, conversions, with the budget you have, and doesn’t care, for understanding, about the cost per single action.
Choose this bid if you want to maximize the reach of your ad and want to increase your brand awareness, increase traffic to your website, or launch a new product or event, for which you need to quickly reach a wide user base.
What are the main characteristics of the highest volume bid?
Facebook automatically optimizes bids in real-time and spends the budget in the best way to get the maximum number of results. The cost per result can vary because the goal is to maximize the volume of results obtained.
In a nutshell, if you want to get quick visibility and traffic with your ad, this is the bid for you!
Highest value bidding strategy in Facebook Ads
The goal of a campaign is not always to increase the number of conversions, but it can aim to maximize the value of conversions. And the difference is certainly not insignificant! If you want your ad to bring you the maximum economic value for each conversion obtained, then you’re in the right section of this guide, because the Highest Value bidding strategy is the one you should choose.
How the Highest Value bidding strategy works
First of all, you need to clearly establish the current value of conversions through the data you obtain from sales or actions that users complete after clicking on the ad.
To correctly track the conversion values, you must have already configured the Facebook Pixel on the website. When creating a campaign in Facebook Ads, choose “Highest Value” as the bidding objective, so Meta will participate in ad auctions while balancing the cost per conversion with the value that each conversion brings, trying to achieve the highest possible ROI.
Examples of Applying the Highest Value Bid
For example, an online store that wants to focus on customers who purchase high-value products and therefore spend more, or companies that sell software and want to acquire customers more likely to subscribe to expensive subscription plans.
Cost Per Result Objective: Info and How to Configure It
What Is the Cost Cap Objective?
The Cost Per Result Objective (Cost Cap) in Facebook Ads allows you to set a maximum average cost for each result such as clicks, conversions, or app installations. This way, you avoid excessive expenses that you may not be able to afford, or simply don’t want to spend at the moment, and it allows you to have greater control over advertising costs.
How to Configure the Cost Per Result
First of all, check that you have installed the Facebook Pixel on your website. If everything is okay, you can start creating the campaign by following these steps:
- Log in to Facebook Ads Manager and click on “Create”.
- Select the campaign objective (Traffic, Conversions, App Installations, etc.).
- In the Ad settings section, go to
Budget and Schedule
. - In the “Bid Control” section, select “Cost Per Result”.
- Enter the maximum value you want to spend for each result, for example, if you don’t want to pay more than 5 euros for each acquisition, write 5 euros.
It doesn’t end here, remember to always keep the advertising campaign under control and intervene if necessary!
Monitor performance through Facebook Ads Manager, check how the costs per result, CTR (click-through rate), and ROI are doing. Something not satisfying you and not going as you wanted? Optimize, make the necessary changes, and don’t lose heart. A good marketer never gives up and is always on top of things!
Minimum ROAS Objective: What It Is and How to Define the Amount
What Is the ROAS Objective?
ROAS – Return on Ad Spend, is one of the most important indicators in web marketing and you need to know every aspect of it. The metric tells you how much you’re earning for every euro spent on advertising. Now it’s clear why it’s so important to know it well and, above all, to be able to interpret it perfectly!
In Facebook Ads, among the bidding strategies, we find the minimum ROAS objective, which allows you to optimize sponsored content thanks to Meta’s algorithm, which automatically adjusts bids to try to reach the set ROAS objective.
How to Define the Amount of the ROAS Objective
First of all, you need to know what the current ROAS is for your advertising campaigns. Use this simple formula to calculate it:
ROAS = Revenue : Ad Spend
If, for example, by investing 1,000 euros you earned 5,000 euros, your current ROAS is 5 euros, which means that for every euro invested in advertising, you earned 5!
At this point, you need to establish a feasible and realistic minimum ROAS objective that doesn’t deviate too much from the reports you have on hand about the ads history. Taking the ROAS value of 5 that we saw above, you can hope to improve results by aiming for a 6 or 7 as the minimum ROAS amount, but you certainly can’t set a 10 just like that, off the cuff, so to speak.
Configure the ROAS Objective in Facebook Ads
- Access Facebook Ads Manager and create a new campaign.
- Select the campaign objective, for example Sales.
- In the Ad Settings section, go to
Budget and Schedule
. - Under “Bid Control”, select “ROAS Target”.
- Enter the value of your ROAS goal. For example, if you want to get a return of 6 euros for every euro spent, set the ROAS target to 6.
When the campaign is active, always monitor if it’s reaching the minimum ROAS set and, if not, make the necessary changes.
How to Configure the Bid Cap Strategy
With the Bid Cap
strategy, you can set a maximum limit for bids in advertising auctions and keep control of your spending budget, optimizing its performance.
Make sure you have correctly installed and configured the Facebook Pixel on your website to track conversions and collect essential data for campaign optimization, then proceed as follows:
- Log in to Facebook Ads Manager and click on “Create”.
- Select the campaign objective.
- In the Ad Settings section, go to
Budget and Schedule
. - Under
Bid Control
, selectBid Cap
. - Enter the “maximum amount you want to pay for each result, for example, if you don’t want to spend more than 5 euros for each click on the” ad, write 5.
Once the campaign is launched, carefully monitor the performance through Facebook Ads Manager. Check metrics such as cost per result, click-through rate (CTR), and return on investment (ROI). If you see that something is not working in the performance obtained, make the necessary changes. Remember, ignoring issues in advertising is equivalent to a colossal waste of money! Take action and stay on top of things, always!
Budget and Bid Distribution
Distributing the advertising budget correctly and setting the “best bid to maximize the” investment is crucial to achieving, or not, the goals you desire.
For distribution, the Meta platform allows you to choose between Daily Budget and Lifetime Budget. Additionally, you can spend the budget evenly throughout the entire campaign period or spend it quickly, for example, if you need it for short-term promotions or urgent events.
How to Choose the Right Bidding Strategy
To learn, there’s nothing more useful than practical examples, so read these tips I’m about to give you carefully.
Before starting any Facebook Ads, sit down and establish what the objectives are that you want to achieve. Do you want to expand your user base, improve your brand awareness, acquire leads, increase sales, or the number of interactions?
Once you know what the objectives of your sponsored ad are, you can start creating it. Here are 3 examples:
- Let’s say you want to achieve brand awareness and reach objectives, thus giving visibility to the brand. The most suitable bidding strategy is Lowest Cost (Lowest Cost), which aims to get the maximum number of impressions at the lowest possible cost.
- If you have traffic and engagement objectives, choose the Lowest Cost or Bid Cap (Bid Cap) bidding strategy, so you’ll keep the cost per click (CPC) low without exceeding the budget.
- Finally, for conversion and sales objectives, set the Minimum ROAS or Cost Cap strategy, to get the maximum economic return, or keep conversion costs within a specific limit.
I recommend that you also do a detailed analysis of your target audience, whose habits, interests, and needs you must know, so that you, with your great advertising message, can respond promptly and usefully.
Conduct A/B tests to compare different bidding strategies and identify which configurations produce the best results. Never think of Facebook Ads as something finished; monitor performance and make flexibility and adaptability two cornerstones of your professional toolkit.
A suggestion I particularly care about, because I still perceive too much distrust around it, is the enormous advantage of using Meta’s automatic settings and implementations. Facebook’s Ads Manager provides you with automatic rules for bids and budget, so take advantage of them! Who knows the rules of the game better than Facebook’s algorithm?
Conclusions
In this guide, we have explored several effective strategies to optimize advertising campaigns on Facebook and get more clicks on your ad.
If you want to delve deeper into these strategies, or need assistance in optimizing your advertising campaigns, know that the Qreativa team specializes in Facebook Ads and business growth for SMEs and professionals, as demonstrated by our case studies. Don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation!
Contact the Qreativa team for a free consultation today and discover how we can help you explode your business!
Free Facebook Ads Course
If you’re new to Meta advertising, start “getting to grips with ‘the topic’” through our free Facebook Ads course!
Happy advertising!
