The Complete Guide To Facebook Ads For Restaurants (Part 3)

How to budget your Facebook ads

In this section you need to tell Facebook how much you are willing to spend and how you want to optimize your spend.

Budget

When inserting your budget, you will notice an update in the estimated daily reach. In the previous section, Facebook was estimating the total audience size. Here, it looks at how many persons from that audience are active on Facebook on a daily basis and estimates, based on your budget, how many persons will see your ad, daily. If you need to increase the daily reach, increase the budget. On the other hand, If you plan to spend a big amount for a small audience, two things can happen. Facebook will either increase the frequency of your ad (the number of times is shown to a person in a day) or it will simply not be able to consume the entire amount.

The amount that you spend with the ads should be tightly correlated to the return you are getting from these campaigns. At the beginning you might be testing out different ad types and settings, but ultimately you need to make some calculations of how much money these ads are generating and how much you are affording to spend.

Bidding strategies

Depending on the campaign objective, you have several options of optimizing your spend. Let’s look at the objectives mentioned above:

Optimize for action: It’s the Facebook’s default setting. It means that Facebook will be searching for the users that are most likely to take the desired action. In this setup, Facebook charges by impression, a model called oCPM (optimized CPM). Expect the CPM (cost per one thousand impressions) to be higher in this setup, as naturally, relevant impressions cost more than random impressions. In terms of bidding, you can go with the default setting of letting Facebook get the most actions at the best price, or you can set the amount an action is worth to you.

It’s good to mention that no matter how big your budget is, Facebook will not show the add to your entire audience. It will only focus on a percentage of people most likely to take the action. So increasing your budget won’t necessarily increase the reach. In case of a bigger budget, Facebook will just show the ad more times to the same people. By the way, there is no setting for frequency capping (you cannot set a limit for how many times an ad is shown to one person).

Optimize for daily unique reach: In this setup, Facebook aims to reach the maximum number of persons (within your budget), displaying the ad only once per day to each person. It does not matter at all how likely it is that the person take the desired action, only the reach matters. You will be charged per impression, but expect the CPM to be less than in the previous case. You will need to specify a maximum amount you are willing to spend for one thousand impressions.

Optimize for impressions: This is the standard CPM - your ad will be served to as many persons, as many times possible. You will pay for each impression and the CPM will be the lowest. Remember though that the likelihood of the person taking the action does not matter and you also cannot control the frequency. Just like in the previous case, you need to specify the maximum amount you are willing to spend for one thousand impressions.

Optimize for clicks: This is the standard CPC - you will be paying for each click. An important note however is that click is not necessarily a page like in a Page likes campaign or a click on your promoted link. It can be anything, including random clicks and comments. To make sure you understand what you are spending your money on, take a look at the engagement statistics to see what the clicks really mean.

So... what to optimize for and when?

People are often reluctant to optimize for action due to the higher CPM cost. However, most of the times this has proven to be the best option, as it generated the lower cost per result. The reason is that although the CPM is higher, the number of impressions required for getting the result is lower.

Optimize for daily unique reach when you have a very targeted audience and a message that you want to be seen by everybody, or the likelihood of taking the action is the same for every person in the audience. With the “unique” (vs. the standard CPM), you make sure you don’t waste your money on showing the same message multiple times to the same person.

Optimize for impressions when you want to get as much visibility as possible. Again, the list should be very targeted, otherwise you end up paying for totally useless impressions. The ad will be shown as many times as possible to your audience, so use it wisely. Keep an eye on the reports related to the ad’s frequency and the ad’s relevancy score. A very high ad frequency can be annoying and you might get more negative reaction than positive. Not to mention that you would be paying money to annoy people. The relevancy score will give you an indication of how people perceive your ad. You will notice that as the frequency increases the relevancy score will decrease.

Optimize for clicks if you just want engagement, without focusing on a specific action. This should apply mostly to posts without links in them.

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