Facebook Bid Calculator
Posted on November 24th, 2007 in Facebook
Wondering what you should bid for your facebook ad? Wonder no longer. Enter your CTR % below and Nickycakes’s special bid calculator tool will estimate the lowest amount you will have to bid in order to get impressions. Remember that facebook rounds to the nearest .01%, so if you want to be more exact, take your total # of clicks, divide by total # of impressions and then multiply by 100 to find your exact CTR. Enjoy!
*Please note that this is only an estimate as the actual amount you will have to bid will fluctuate based on how much others are bidding, but it should be fairly accurate.
Published by nickycakes
November 25th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Hey Nick -
What do you recommend starting bids at? Also, how long before you start seeing some activity with your ads? I started up a campaign about an hour ago with a .25c bid and haven’t had any impressions yet (no hits on my site either from dev.facebook to verify my ad, though…)
November 25th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
I start my bids at 15 cents. Bid what you’re willing to spend per click, that’s my recommendation.
November 26th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Nick -
Alright thats what I figured…the offers I am running are high payout so I don’t mind bidding a little more, but from my experiments it doesn’t seem to make a different in the time it takes for the ad to start up. Also, have you noticed that if you are away from your computer (ie. not raping the facebook ad manager with refreshes), then you get less impressions? I don’t know if its just me but I’ve found that they will serve my ad more if they ‘know’ im watching….kinda weird…
November 26th, 2007 at 11:37 am
I’ve heard people report the same with getting more impressions while refreshing their stats more often, however, I have not found it to be true for me. It could be that I’m doing something different.
But to respond to what you said about initial bid, the initial bid should NOT do anything to change the time it takes for your ad to be approved. Facebook will front you 5k or so impressions in the beginning, regardless of your bid, just to test and see if your ad gets clicks or not. That’s the reason people were initially spamming the facebook flyers with hundreds of new accounts, so they could bid 1 cent and get tons of cheap clicks before facebook realized that their ctr sucked and stopped showing their ad (by which time they’d have already started 50 more identical ads on different accounts, etc).
November 27th, 2007 at 12:18 am
Nicky -
ALright good info. How about targeting? If you target super-specific, will that allow you to have a lower bid and still get impressions as opposed to showing your ad to everyone?
November 27th, 2007 at 10:52 am
The only thing that allows you to have a lower bid is your CTR. If your ad is designed well for your targeted audience, then that will likely get you a better CTR and allow you to drop your bid and still get impressions. I’ve heard of CTR over 1% with super-targeted ads, however, if the audience is too small and you’re only getting 10 impressions per day, then it’s sort of a waste, so you have to find the right balance.
November 27th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
I see…makes sense. Alright, last question I promise (sorry for the lengthy exchange bytheway…you’re one of the few people who is open about discussing AM with Fb
… I just ran an offer that targeted 18-25 yo Females, with keyword Shopping and it said less than ~20 people fit this match. This seems absurdly inaccurate (I know over 40 girls from my own college that have this keyword in their profile). Is there anyway to get an accurate measurement of the targeting with keywords other than just watching the numbers?
November 27th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
From what I hear, the targeting is bugged and shows an inaccurate number when you’re setting it up, but when you run the ad it will work fine.
December 3rd, 2007 at 10:28 am
Hey Nicky - the tool seems to be down. Gives $0.00 regardless of the CTR entered.
December 3rd, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Seems to be working fine for me stan, try entering something like .1 and see what happens.