• In this video, we talked about bidding strategies, manual or auto. Now, a lot of people start with automatic placements or auto bidding or anything preset to auto because it's the easiest thing to do, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best thing to do in your account. 

• Remember, every account has its personality. Some ads perform better on auto, some perform better with cost caps or bid caps. An account that I manage, where at one point in time, we found that automatic was doing great. And then once we moved to the manual, it was doing better. And we've seen this in multiple accounts, but we've also seen it to where it varies. 

•  How do you know it's auto? There's no cost cap, no cost control, no nothing. When you look at the campaign setup, you can see this is an ABO. It's an ABO it's ad set, budget optimization. And when you look at the individual ad set at the bottom, it's just preset to conversion with nothing else. Compared to a CBO account, same client, different ad account. If you open it up, you could see not only is this a CBO it has a bid cap, which means that when you go to the bottom, you could see that the bid cap is $750 per purchase as the maximum amount willing to spend to acquire a purchase. You could see the purchases were coming in at $92. 

• Now, what's the difference with automatic bidding? What you're doing is you're allowing Facebook to determine the amount you were paying at auction compared to the people also advertising to the same audiences as you. So whether it's lookalikes or interests or broad targeting, it doesn't matter. They determine the cost per impression, the cost per click, the whole deal until they can acquire a purchase, a lead, whatever it is you're optimizing for. 

•  Now, the bid cap is essentially how much we're willing to pay up to outbid companies to acquire that specific purchase. Whereas the cost cap would have been the most that we were willing to spend before we would hit a cap. And we wouldn't want to exceed that whatsoever. You typically, what I tell people to do is to test cost cap and bid cap with the total amount of what a course purchase or a lead or an application would cost to you.

• Sometimes Facebook just delivers a ton of traffic to you. Doesn't always mean it's the best traffic with the auto. Sometimes auto does better than bid caps and cost caps. It depends on what it is you're selling. You just have to test them. 

• You start with automatic, as you have enough purchase or lead data, you can revert to using bid caps or cost caps. And there are other variations, but we use bid caps and cost caps the most. And when we're using something like, optimizing for purchases, we do them in increments of 50. So let's say the course cost $300. We'll start as low as 200 on the bitter cost cap. And we'll incrementally increase it by 50. So we'll also do a campaign at two 50, 300, three 50, even up to 500 that's if you're doing a CBO.

•  If you're doing it as an ABO, so individual ad set budgets, you would do the same thing in increments of 50, but it would be by individual audiences. So if you have 10 lookalike audiences, you're setting costs or bid caps by the individual audience, and you might find that some audiences deliver impressions and clicks and so on, whereas others might not deliver anything until you're at four or 500.

• So that's why you have to make sure that you were testing bid caps and cost caps. If you're doing manual bidding versus your automatic, automatic always deliver. It's just whether or not it's within the range that you are happy with. So make sure you're testing both when you're at a point of scale to find the one that works for you and fits the return on an ad, spend that you're looking for.   

David (00:01):
Hey, everyone. Welcome back. And in this video, we're talking about bidding strategies, manual or auto. Now there's no right answer. Now, a lot of people start off with automatic placements or auto bidding or anything preset to auto because it's the easiest thing to do, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best thing to do in your account. Remember, every account has its own personality. Some ads perform better on auto, some perform better with cost caps or bid caps or maximum Roaz or whatever it may be. So let's look at an example of an account that I manage, where at one point in time, we found that automatic was doing great. And then once we moved to manual, it was doing better. And we've seen this in multiple accounts, but we've also seen it to where it varies. And it just goes back and forth between do we do one or the other?

David (00:46):

So as you can see on your screen, this is an account that we're managing. And you're like, okay, David's just a bunch of purchases. What's the big deal. This entire campaign, there's 17 campaigns. Each have one individual audience per campaign. What you'll see is that each of these are preset to auto. How do you know it's auto? When you scroll to the bottom, it's set the conversion. There's no cost cap, no cost control, no nothing. When you look at the campaign setup, you can see this is an ABO. It's not a CBO. We'll talk about CBS in a moment. It's an ABO it's ad set, budget optimization. It's preset. That just conversion. And when you look at the individual ad set at the bottom, it's just preset to conversion with nothing else. Now, compared to this account, same client, different ad account. If you open it up, you could see not only is this the CBO it's at the bid cap, which means that when you go to the bottom, you could see that the bid cap is $750 per purchase as the maximum amount willing to spend to acquire a purchase.

David (01:43):

But interesting enough, you could see the purchases were coming in at $92. Now what's the difference with automatic bidding? What you're doing is you're allowing Facebook to determine the amount you were paying at auction compared to the people also advertising to the same audiences as you. So whether it's lookalikes or interests or broad targeting, it doesn't matter. They determine the cost per impression, the cost per click, the whole deal all the way through the funnel until they are able to acquire a purchase, a lead, whatever it is you're optimizing for in this case, we're optimizing for purchases through a webinar. So even though this is gathering leads, we've had enough data to revert this, to optimizing for purchases. And in this specific think account bidding on the costs as high as $750 was actually better performing in this account than when we ran it at auto.

David (02:35):

Whereas in the other account, auto performed better even, right? No auto in most cases led to purchases at on average at $200 a plate, a piece. Whereas in this account, you could see that out of five campaigns. I mean, we were getting a purchase for one 24 90 to one 52, one 18, all with bid caps or cost caps. Now bid cap is essentially how much we're willing to pay up to, uh, outbidding companies Titian in order to acquire that specific purchase. Whereas it cost cap would have been the most that we were willing to spend before we would hit a cap. And we wouldn't want to exceed that whatsoever. You typically, what I tell people to do is to test cost cap and bid cap with the total amount of what a course purchase or a lead or an application would cost to you.

David (03:25):

So for example, this course was 500 bucks. At one time, we would set the cost cap or bid cap to $500 to see how it would deploy, but we would also test it at two 5,300, three 50. You don't always want to just bully your way through an audience and outbid everybody. Sometimes Facebook just delivers a ton of traffic to you. Doesn't always mean it's the best traffic with auto that's sort of the case. Cause it's determining the amount of spend and to acquire that data so that it can deliver the traffic to you. Sometimes auto does better than bid caps and cost caps. It depends on what it is you're selling, but in this specific case, when we use the manual bidding specifically with bid caps and we would outbid the competition, we actually got better performance. So there really is no better strategy.

David (04:08):

You just have to test them. You start with automatic, as you have enough purchase or lead data, you can revert to using bid caps or cost caps. And there are other variations, but we use bid caps and cost caps the most. And when we're using something like, uh, optimizing for purchases, we do them in increments of 50. So let's say the, the course cost $300. We'll start as low as 200 on the bitter cost cap. And we'll incrementally increase it by 50. So we'll also do a campaign at two 50, 300, three 50, even all the way up to 500 that's if you're doing a CBO, if you're doing it as an ABO, so individual ad set budgets, you would do the same thing in increments of 50, but it'd be by individual audiences. So if you have 10 lookalike audiences, you're setting costs or bid caps by individual audience, and you might find that some audiences deliver impressions and clicks and so on and so forth at 300, whereas others might not deliver anything until you're at four or 500.

David (05:05):

So that's why you have to make sure that you were testing bid caps, cost caps. If you're doing manual bidding versus your automatic automatic, always deliver. It's just whether or not it's within the range that you are happy with. So make sure you're testing both when you're at a point of scale, you're going to be testing both, but I have been able to scale accounts to five, 10, even $50,000 a day with automatic and be hyper profitable. So make sure you're testing both find the one that works for you and fits the return on ad, spend that you're looking for.