How to Set Your Facebook Ads Bid for the Best Results

In online marketing, setting ad bids matters a lot for controlling cost and keeping a campaign effective. Knowing how to set Facebook bids sensibly is a must-have skill for advertisers. Today MONA Media walks you through the details of the best way to set Facebook ad bids in the article below.

What is a Facebook ad bid?

An ad bid is the maximum amount you are willing to pay per interaction, per 1,000 impressions, or per conversion of your ad. Facebook does not always charge your full bid. If competition in the market is low, Facebook may charge you less.

Setting Facebook ad bids high can give your ad a better chance of being shown, but Facebook also considers other factors such as competition, relevance and ad quality. On the other hand, if you set your Facebook ad bid too low, your ad may not be shown because Facebook will favor other advertisers.

So choose a suitable bid amount to make sure your ad strategy is effective and saves the most cost.

How many ways are there to set a Facebook ad bid?

Facebook currently offers advertisers 3 ways to set bids are as follows:

Automatic bidding

With this type, the advertiser does almost nothing, and Facebook optimizes the bid for you. If you are just starting your ad campaigns or lack bidding skills, you can try it. However, this way of setting bids is quite risky, because every time you raise the budget, the bid also rises noticeably on its own.

Manual bidding

Manual bidding is a more advanced type and suits people with experience. It lets advertisers freely edit and control prices according to their plan. It is also fairly complex, and mistakes can stop your ads from being delivered.

Semi-manual bidding

This type combines automatic and manual bidding. Facebook still sets bids automatically, but within the price limit you choose. The advantage is that you can control your ad budget and find quality auctions. It also takes a lot of technique and expertise, and you may need to test many price levels to find the best bid.

Why do you need a sound Facebook bidding strategy?

Choosing the right Facebook Ads bidding strategy helps you reach your business goals such as increasing total sales, attracting more customers or growing brand reach. A suitable bidding method also optimizes campaign performance, raises ad ROI and increases your chances of profit.

To judge which bidding strategy is best for your campaign, define your overall goal on the Meta platform and your main KPI. For example, if your goal is to grow sales at low cost, you can choose cost per purchase as your KPI. If you want to maximize the value of each purchase, you can choose return on ad spend as your KPI. The KPI you pick determines which bidding strategy suits you best.

Factors that affect Facebook ad bids

When you decide to do Facebook Ads campaigns, you are entering a fight for potential customers, and to win you need to understand the factors that affect the Facebook ad bidding process.

Bid amount

The bid decides whether your ad gets shown. Facebook treats your bid as the amount you are willing to pay.

For example, if you bid 2,000 VND per interaction, Facebook understands you are willing to pay 2,000 VND per interaction. An auction runs among the “bidders”, and your ad is shown if it beats the competition.

However, the actual price is usually lower than your bid, unless you set your Facebook ad bid too close to the price Facebook estimates per interaction. If there are 3 ad slots but 4 competitors, a bid that is too low can knock you out early and hand the slot to a higher bidder.

Relevance score (ad quality score)

The relevance score is an important factor Facebook uses to judge ad performance and effectiveness. It is based on user interactions, from positive ones like likes, shares and comments to negative ones like hiding the post or reporting a violation.

When an ad gets many positive interactions and few negative ones, Facebook understands the ad is hitting the right audience and giving users relevant, useful information, which raises your ad quality score.

Estimated action rate

Facebook does not publish exactly how it estimates action rate. It may use engagement rates from earlier ads in the same field to make an estimate.

To optimize your Facebook ad bidding strategy, advertisers need to understand the nature of their field and assess factors such as engagement rate to choose the most suitable bidding strategy.

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3 effective Facebook ad bidding strategies

To find an effective way to set Facebook ad bids, you need an optimal strategy that fits your goal. Here are 3 strategies to choose from.

Lowest cost strategy (Lowest Cost)

A Facebook ad bidding strategy from Meta that delivers your ad as efficiently as possible at the lowest cost. With this strategy, you set a bid for each ad impression. Facebook then tries to optimize cost so your ad is shown the targeted number of times at the lowest possible price. This strategy suits businesses that want to save on ad costs while keeping results high.

Set a bid cap within the lowest cost strategy (Lowest Cost with a bid cap)

This strategy lets Facebook reach your goal at a cost within the range you set. For example, you can set a cap of 30,000 VND. When setting the ad bid, you do not need to worry about bidding too high, because Facebook always tries to get you the lowest price. However, do not bid too low, or competitors will outbid you and take the better audience. Calculate and set a price that is optimal and fits your goal.

Target cost strategy (Target Cost)

When you use the target cost Facebook ad bidding method, you let Facebook spend above the bid you set. For example, if you set a bid of 50,000 VND per order, the Target Cost strategy lets Facebook spend more than 50,000 VND per order.

This bidding strategy is ideal for those who care less about saving every bit of ad cost and focus on a specific ad goal. It optimizes ad performance and raises your chances of reaching business goals.

Facebook ad bidding methods in use today

Finding a Facebook ad bidding method that is flexible and effective is what marketers look for when running campaigns. Here are some Facebook ad bidding methods you need to know.

CPM bidding

Bidding CPM means choosing the Facebook ad bid you are willing to pay for every 1,000 ad impressions. This method suits those who want to reach their target audience widely and boost brand awareness.

CPC bidding

Bidding CPC is a manual bidding method based on each interaction. You set a price per interaction and pay only when the ad gets an interaction. It suits those who want to maximize clicks within their budget, and it also improves ad performance by charging only when there are real results.

CPA bidding

The CPA method sets a price for each conversion and you pay for it. A conversion here can be an action such as a call, a click to the landing page, adding a product to the cart, or paying online. This way of setting Facebook ad bids suits those who want to optimize ad performance and make sure ad spend goes to results that bring real value.

Where do you view and adjust Facebook ad bids?

To view and adjust Facebook ad bids, go to the Budget and Schedule settings of your ad campaign.

In this section you will see the three Facebook ad bidding strategies above to choose from. You can also review the bid you set earlier and adjust it as you like. Adjusting bids flexibly and correctly optimizes campaign performance and makes sure you invest in your business goals as efficiently as possible.

The best ways to optimize Facebook ad bids

With the right techniques and strategies, you can make sure your ad campaign delivers the best results for a given budget. Knowing how to set Facebook ad bids smartly and effectively decides the success of your marketing strategy. Let's explore ways to optimize Facebook Ads bids to make sure you are investing wisely.

Switching

Today, using Facebook ad bidding strategies based on each conversion is one of the most effective ways Facebook recommends to users. It optimizes ads to be shown to the right target audience and increases the chance of conversion. This saves cost and gets the best results for your campaign.

Link clicks

Even though the conversion rate is not always high when users click a link, it still creates a chance to boost conversions. So optimizing Facebook ad bids this way is a reasonable choice to raise the chance of conversion from users.

Impressions

If you want to focus on building your brand rather than selling directly, an impression-based ad bidding strategy is the best fit. In particular, when you use remarketing on Facebook, impression-based bidding helps raise awareness while keeping costs reasonable.

Show once a day to each user

If you want your ad to appear only once per user per day, optimizing bids this way is ideal. It stops the ad from showing again and again to users who are not potential customers.

Engagement

More engagement also adds credibility to your post, so your post makes a stronger impression on customers. This is the most effective and common way to set Facebook ad bids on the platform today. It suits businesses that aim to increase the number of orders at the lowest ad cost.

Brand recognition

Your ad is shown to users who are interested in your brand, which boosts brand awareness and creates positive engagement from your audience. This optimizes campaign performance and produces positive results.

Leads

If you want to build a list of potential customers on Facebook, choosing a lead-based ad bidding method is the best fit. It is an effective way to set Facebook bids so the ad targets users who tend to share personal information on social media, while also saving ad cost.

What causes ad bids to be too high?

If you face Facebook ad bids that are too high, find the cause right away so you can fix it in time and avoid wasting ad budget. The main causes of inflated ad bids are:

• Unappealing ad content: Click-through rate click-through rate (CTR) will be low, which leads to a higher bid per click.
• Large, unlimited ad budget: Facebook understands you want to maximize your ads and raises the bid.
• Ads at the wrong time: If you do not advertise at the right time, viewers are not interested, which also raises the bid.
• Reported ads: User reports of violations reduce your ad's reach.
• Violating ad image policies: Using images with text covering more than 20% of the area will raise your bid.
• Targeting the wrong audience: If the target your Facebook audience is inaccurate, the impression rate and the click rate on your ad are low.
• Ads on untrustworthy pages or ad accounts: For example, spammy pages, pages with fake likes, pages unpaid Facebook ad bills. This can also raise bids.

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What you may have gotten wrong about Facebook bids

Although the ways to set Facebook ad bids look simple, there are hidden factors in the process you may not know. Understanding how bidding works can raise your chances of success in your ad campaign. Read the content below to understand how to set Facebook bids effectively.

About the Facebook ad bid trap

The bid trap is something many Facebook marketers run into. Ad bids feel cheap, rise a little, and still feel acceptable. In reality, the ad price has gone up a lot compared with before.

When Facebook ads first started, the price per interaction was as low as 100 to 200 VND, but now it has risen many times over. This is a big challenge for marketers trying to optimize their Facebook ad bidding strategy.

Engagement goes up but quality goes down, so results are poor

A common problem Facebook marketers face is that engagement rises while the quality of that engagement falls. Compared with past years, the quality of engagement on Facebook has dropped noticeably. That raises the question of why ad results fall short of expectations even when engagement goes up.

That is all the information about setting Facebook ad bids that MONA has compiled for you. By choosing the right bidding strategy and optimizing cost, you can get the most out of your ad campaign. We hope that with this guide you will master how to set Facebook Ads bids and apply the strategy to your marketing work.