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Why is my Retargeting / Lookalike Cost 3x times higher than my Normal Campaign Cost
I’m running some facebook campaigns and i tried using 2 setups :
1) main campaign with interest based targeting – i get about $1 cpm and $5 cpa
2) regargeting and lookalike campaign – where i use a custom audience of people who have watched 95% of a video ad and also a lookalike of the same custom audience – i get $3-5 cpm and $9-15 cpa
What am i doing wrong? I was expecting better conversions and lower cost for retargeting and / or lookalike…
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7 Replies
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It’s a bit weird but I’ve noticed my last retargetjng campaign wasn’t doing what’s it normally does either.. I usually get a steady couple of sales per day when I run them but on my latest audience nothing.
I also noticed my clicks really high but that usually doesn’t bother me as long as sales are coming in.. I was going to reset the audience and test a different creative
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You cannot put together RTG and lookalike (LAL), because LAL strategies are PRS strategies.
It is super normal that you have a higher CPM for the RTG, because the cookie pool is more limited, because you have to re-engage the users who landed but not converted.
You have to spend more for RTG, and you balance the RTG higher cpm with a good low CPM prospecting strategy.
In order to obtain a reasonable average CPM.From the RTG line exclude who already converted. And from the prs and LAL lines exclude who already landed.
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You are targeting a smaller audience with those strategies vs pure interest targeting, hence it’s more expensive to buy against, leading to a higher CPM.
As to why it’s not performing, could be many variables from setup/creative/attribution to name a few. -
What’s your frequency like? Maybe your cookie pool is too low and your budget too high so Facebook starts bidding weirdly.
If that’s the issue try a reach campaign with a frequency cap and max bid set to something reasonable.
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The narrower the targeting in general, the higher the cost.
For prospecting when you target broad audiences, it’s less expensive. Say you’re in California and you are targeting male and female home owners older than 30. There could be 10-15M people in this group.
For lookalikes and more so on retargeting you’re telling the platform that you only want to reach a narrower band of people. For retargeting that could be the 200K site users that the pixel was able to tag.
The reason for the added expense is that like keywords on search, for display based ads (Facebook and display) but you’re bidding on audiences, ie, the eyeballs of the people who have a certain number of impressions as they scroll through fb, IG, banners or whatever it may be. If you tell the platform you ONLY want to reach that 200K number instead of 15M Californians you can do that but it will be more expensive because maybe 10 other advertisers also want those 200K people.
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What’s your ad set geographic targeting?
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You have to track down the funnel performance. For my industry, I’ll gladly pay 1.5x per rtgt lead because I know it’s 2x as likely to become a sale. If your events happen offline, you will need a WY to attribute sales to each ad set.
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