The arrival of Facebook’s new v2.4 Marketing API brought with it big changes in the billing and bidding methods of our well-beloved Facebook Adverts. In this post we quickly illustrate to you what these changes consist of, what they imply and how you can benefit from them.
Say goodbye to the old bidding practices: starting from October the old CPM, CPC and oCPM will be no more. In their place, Facebook introduced the new “Optimization Goal” and “Billing Event” in the Ad Set settings.
Optimization goal defines what actions you want the Ad Set to optimize towards. Basically, Facebook will decide which are the most suited persons among your target to see your ads according to the optimization goal you specified for that Ad Set. You will be able to choose among a set of optimization goals pertaining to the objective of your Campaign. If you do not specify an optimization goal, the default one will be the most tightly associated with the Campaign’s objective.
For example, if you selected “Get installs of your App” as objective, the default optimization goal will be “App installs”, and Facebook will show your ads to the users who are more likely to install your app. However, you will still be able to select a different optimization goal.
The Billing Event option lets you choose the way you want to pay for your Ads. For instance, you will be able to decide whether you want to be charged on the basis of the number of installs of your App or on the amount of page likes obtained through your Ads. The available choices for the optimization goals will be limited according to the type of campaign you are creating. The chosen optimization goal will in turn constrain the eligible options of billing events. In general, you would be able to choose among impressions or a specific action-related event pertinent to the selected optimization goal (e.g., if the optimization goal is Video Views, you can select impressions or video views as billing event). To give you a better idea of how billing events work, we report here a more articulated example (credits to Facebook):
Consider a Mobile App Install campaign with an optimization goal of App Installs and bid amount as $10.00. In this case, it will be possible to choose either Impressions or App Installs as the billing event. The results from the two billing event options would be different because of the user action prediction calculated by Facebook and the budget pacing, but for the sake of simplicity we assume to be in an ideal world, where Facebook can estimate the chance of a user to install an app 100% accurately, and the results of the two billing event options are the same. For example, if Facebook system thinks that there is 1% of the chance of install, and your Ad is shown to 1,000 users, your Ad would result in 10 installs, and cost you $100.00 or less. If the billing event is Impressions, each impression costs $0.10 (bid amount * optimization goal probability) or less. If the billing event is App Installs, each installation costs $10.00 or less.
Below here you will find the list of the available choices for optimization goals and billing events:
Hence, there are basically 2 types of billing events: impressions and action-related events (link clicks, app installs, page likes, etc.).
Impressions as billing event works better when you have a budget-constrained campaign, and you want to have the campaign delivered smoothly, with all budget spent at the end of the running period.
Use action-related billing events like App Installs when you have a bid-constrained campaign and your main priority is to keep the cost per action no higher than the bid amount. In these cases your average cost per action will be less than or equal to the bid amount.
In terms of graphical user experience, in the Budget and Schedule section of the campaign creation process you will simply find the old “Bid type” option substituted with the new “Optimize for” and “Billing event”.
This is the old Bid type section:
This is the new Optimize for and Billing event section:
In terms of usage, you will be able to create in an easier way Campaigns optimized ad-hoc to your objectives and pay only for the results you achieve!
We are always updated on the latest news about the Facebook platform, and we constantly work to improve the product and services we offer you.