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Is Facebook Advertising charging more to ‘mugged profiles’?

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Are Facebook quoting different prices for the same ad based on your profile? Guest contributor Desi Velikova thinks so. In a cross-post from her own blog, she writes how the same ad campaign would have cost her employer 8 times more depending on which user account it was purchased from.

A month ago I needed to set up a Facebook Ad Campaign for web agency eGorilla. We agreed on a budget of $15 per day and the plan was to run it as follows:

  • 1st week CPM (pay by traffic)
  • 2nd week CPC (pay per click) with the same target parameters
  • 3rd week Promoted Post (with specific promotion)
  • 4th week – whatever worked best from the previous weeks.

The bid price I set up for 1000 impressions was $0.25, which was a bit higher than the recommended bid. So far, so good. The first week we generated a click-through rate of 0.005% which was far from great, but considering the essence of the business (web design), we didn’t expect it to be much higher. For us, even a single website order from the 4 campaigns would be success.

Then the second week came, and when I had to run the CPC campaign, I noticed that the price I was given for a click was much higher than the previous week.

It was around $7 – but in the previous week it had been around $1.

We were in a rush to run the new campaign and I didn’t stop to think twice. I discussed it with my teammates and we all agreed that we should run the CPM campaign again instead, because with this quote we would be entitled to only 2 clicks per day, while with the CPM we were getting around 10 daily.

Considering the bad CTR there was nothing to lose: CPM for us was still better. So we changed our initial plan and decided to postpone the CPC campaign until our third week.

When the third week came I checked the bid prices for a click: they were now around $8.

I was suspicious, because I could not imagine how the price could jump by 800% in just over a week.

So, along with one of my teammates, we decided to check it out from his Facebook account. We sat side by side and started setting up the parameters for our Facebook ad (Check the screen shots below).

We chose exactly the same URL, image, copy, target options. Everything was 100% identical.

When we checked the suggested bid, I was offered $8.43 – $17.68 per click, while he was quoted £0.44 – £1.06.

To put those figures into context: at the lower end $8.43 (around £5.19 at today’s exchange rate) is more than 11 times £0.44. At the higher end, $17.68 (around £10.88) is over 10 times £1.06.

Why the difference? The first theory we came up with was that Facebook was quoting me this price based on the performance of my ad so far.

Facebook’s algorithm knew that the CTR this ad achieved last time was not brilliant, so perhaps it assumed that it would have the same performance. To justify the impressions, they might have given me a much higher price for clicks.

And because my mate hadn’t run this ad from his account before, he might have got a much lower price.

This didn’t appear particularly fair, considering that they have a clear algorithm for CPC campaigns, but it still made some sense: had Facebook decided that my ad was a “bad ad” and that I had to pay much more than other people?

We decided to test this theory. The test disproved the ‘bad ad’ theory.

We set up a completely new CPC campaign for another website, with different url, image, etc.

And again, I was given 8 times higher price than my colleague.

My suggested bid was $7.40 – $17.87, while his was £0.47 – £1.14.

Apparently the problem is not a “bad ad” only, but a “bad profile”.

For some reason Facebook has decided to charge me more, whatever campaign I want to run on their website. I am a “bad profile”, or a “rich profile”, or a “mugged profile”.

Every marketer can imagine what a disaster this is for an online professional, considering that I needed to run a couple of campaigns for clients and I was always given consistently higher prices than people around me.

I have a couple of questions here: Can we trust Facebook Advertising? How reliable is the data coming from Facebook? And most importantly – how many people have already been charged in this way?

Since then, I have sent Facebook 3 emails to ask for an explanation without response. I will update this post if they do reply.

Screenshots

Facebook Ad Campaign for eGorilla:

This one is from my profile:

Campaign for eGorilla from my Facebook profile

This one is from my mate’s profile:

Absolutely same campaign parameters from another Facebook profile
Absolutely same campaign parameters from another Facebook profile

New Facebook Ad Campaign for MyBeachWedding.co.uk

This one is from my profile:

Facebook Ad Campaign from my profile

This one is from my mate’s profile:

The same Facebook Ad Campaign from another profile
The same Facebook Ad Campaign from another profile

If anyone has experienced the same issue, please let me know.

*Disclosure: Desi is a graduate of my MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University.


Filed under: Business, social media Tagged: advertising, cpc, cpm, desi velikova, facebook

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