We wanted to keep you in the loop with some of the crazy fluctuations we have seen over the past couple of weeks (Facebook only), although not necessarily in your account so much right now. However it could be turbulent week or so with Facebook until it calms down. The fluctuations are primarily occurring in the CPM (how much it costs to receive 1,000 impressions on Facebook). The CPM is essentially how Facebook charges you for your ads.
Below is an overview of the average CPM across 30 different ad accounts
As you can see, the CPM since the middle of May has been at levels only previously seen during Black Friday of 2020, and has tripled since the end of April and quadrupled since the lowest point this year so far. This is something that everyone is facing worldwide and is not specific to your account, every expert media buyer, agency and member of mastermind that we are in contact with is seeing exactly the same thing right now.
This is almost definitely down to iOS adoption rates (amount of people using the newest IOS update) increasing as there is a strong correlation between CPM increase and iOS adoption.
See here: https://datastudio.google.com
Now this does not mean that it will not come back down, it just means that Facebook is unsure how to handle the change.
A 400% increase in CPM essentially means that if even if the ads still perform the same, the CTR% (amount of people that click your ad) and Conversion Rate (Amount of people that click who end up converting) stay the same, then your CPA (cost per acquisition) will be 400% higher.
Naturally this level of CPM can only last so long and we expect this to settle and reduce over the coming week. Although CPM is primarily controlled by Facebook and factors outside of our control, there are quite a few levers we have at our disposal that we have learnt to manipulate CPMs over our last 5 years spending tens of millions of dollars on Facebook.
Things such as ramping up broad audience testing, bringing back some old best performing creatives with large amounts of social proof, reducing video tests, reducing lookalike tests, consolidating more refined audiences, increasing retargeting audience times and focusing on natural and highly engaging creatives will all make a difference in reducing your individual accounts CPA and we have already been and will be continuing to implement these throughout your account to stand the best chance possible of beating Facebook and restoring usual results.
You can guarantee that we are on top of this, pulling insights from all of our accounts and our network to ensure we are ahead of these fluctuations and that your account is in the very best position to come out of this in the best position possible.
Now more than ever, it is important to be leveraging as many different assets at your disposal as you possibly can do. Making sure that you are consistently emailing with highly engaging, informative and personal emails, making a few extra sales pushes through your email channels than usual, making sure your site speed is super fast, ensuring your mobile user experience is as seamless as it possibly can be, you are testing your sales pages, product pages and checkout pages and you are focusing on how you can increase your average order value with supplementary products, upsells and alternatives.
The final note to mention is attribution. You must keep cross referencing attribution with % of spend to revenue across all platforms. We have seen attribution on FB alone drop to 56% on some accounts. If you need any help with the formulas for this then just let us know!
We will be working with you and advising you on all of these as much as you require us to and are not only going to be important to make this turbulent time as profitable as possible, but also to make the next year the best year it has been.
