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Media buying has been nothing but a nightmare to me.
I feel like Google and Facebook are purposely working against advertisers, small businesses especially. Let me break it down real quick.
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Facebook
Broad targeting works only if you have a large budget to blow away to train the AI. So what’s left to start with for a small business like mine is some form of targeting. Now Interest Stack didn’t work for me, as it’s still too broad and the results are not too great. So I’ve tried narrowing it down, not very much, just a little bit, literally 1 interest narrowed to 1 more. The audience size is still a couple of mil. And then the CTR is very good, around 3-5%. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, facebook decides to throw an 80-120$ CPM for any form of detailed targeting. Not a single instance – but every single time.
So I can’t do targeting – I can’t do broad. What else am I supposed to do?
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Google
Google shopping is the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of ROAS and CPA as we all know it. But Google doesn’t let you target any keywords. “You can add irrelevant keywords to the negatives or try query level bidding” – ah that is a great theory, and I thought for many months that this will work, but unfortunately google comes up with plenty of irrelevant keywords every day, and adding them as broad or exact to the negatives doesn’t make a big difference. The majority of those keywords are completely different from each other, single impressions, so there’s no possible way to prevent google from creating hundreds of new ones every day. I only advertise 6 products btw.
Then I specifically bid higher to get this top IS % to be higher, but then google bids $2 for a keyword that has nothing to do with my product.
Pmax also won’t work for accounts without a lot of data.
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Google and Facebook reps..I don’t think I have to say anything here, we all know how it is.
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And a cherry on top – 70% of card transactions on my website were declined by the customer’s bank – because my company is located outside of the US, and US banks mark it as international – so high-risk payment and just decline…They all pay in USD btw.
I don’t know what to do at this point, I’m hopeless. Just sharing this to maybe comfort someone that they’re not the only ones struggling with the media buying.
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1 Reply
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Google actually became smarter in matching keywords, you just have to help steer the algo, a lot of times if it isnt working it might be your feed or your page’s data (google scans ur page now and take keywords from it) And small budget still works
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Hmm, first of all I would check best converting In Market Segments in Google Analytics and would create something similar in FB interests. You want to make 2-3 ad sets by interests just to check what is working better. Try to narrow it by demographics. Also I would create couple retargeting audiences using website data, for example All Website Users for last 90 days, FB/IG PPE, cart abandomers or whatever. My final ad sets setup in campaign would look like:
1. Interests a, b, c…
2. Interests …d, e, f…
3. Interests …g, h, i…
4. RETA – All website users for last X days
5. RETA – All purchasers for last X daysP.S. Dont forget to exclude retargeting audiences from each other
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sounds like it’s more of a problem with your business than the ad platform themselves.
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Do not use purchase as a goal, you don’t have enough sales. Focus on view content instead, or add to carts.
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Questions or suggestions for you:
1. What type of business you running? E-commerce, dropshipping, course? All these will differ in costs
2. How long have you been running ads for? Fb usually takes a little bit of time to be seasoned
3. If you are selling products, consider making landing pages and collecting emails vs trying to get direct conversion sellls so you can warm up your audience.I run an e-commerce business, CPM is $13 but I’ve been running it for a while. Even when I did dropshipping it required at least $1k in one week to actually get the proper audience and conversion down.
Consider more organic routes if you don’t have the funds for ppc or marketing, or just providing a better offering that makes it more appealing. Copywriting, ad creative and landing pages all play a part
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This declined card thing is a bit of a problem I’m having
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