Last month Facebook made some adjustments to the way they calculate cost-per-click (CPC) on their ad platform. Following the changes, the social media company will no longer include all click actions such as likes, comments and shares in its CPC calculation, focusing purely on link clicks instead.
Here’s a quick guide to the most important things to consider when bidding by Facebook CPC.
1. Don’t Neglect Your Engagement Metrics
Although Facebook’s new CPC calculation will be based solely on link clicks, it’s still important to consider the other available social metrics when making a CPC bid. The most valuable performance indicators to analyse are cost-per-click, click-through rate and the quality of traffic on your hotel’s website.
That doesn’t mean you should disregard your engagement metrics, though. Keeping an eye on your shares is a great way to assess the true quality of the content you create, and of course, shares get your content seen by your guests’ friends and family, leading to further reach and even more traffic.
Remember to closely monitor social actions and use them to inform your content creation. Think outside the box and use your social data to create a cost-per-share metric, then see if you can identify the intersection of where cost-per-click and cost-per-share are lowest.
2. Adjust, Adapt and Optimise
When it comes to analysing the performance of your content, there are several different approaches to consider. One option is to compare your content types in terms of Cost per Engagement (CPE). As you might expect, content created with engagement in mind will typically rank more highly, while click-orientated posts will have a higher CPE.
However, even if some of the content you create does have a high CPE, there’s still plenty you can do to keep everything in check. Firstly, ensure your resort’s promoted posts are written in a style consistent with your brand voice and that they contain information that engages the interest of your audience. Keep in mind that your social audience will get bored pretty quickly if you’re continually posting sales-driven content, making it even more difficult to drive clicks in the future.
Lastly, once you seem to have landed on a formula that gets results, don’t get too complacent. It’s important to closely monitor your performance on a consistent basis and always be ready to adjust and adapt.
3. Get Serious about Efficiency
The last point concerns the very reason why all this stuff is important in the first place: you want to put your marketing budget to the best use possible. Imagine you have one Facebook post with a CPC of $0.50 and another that’s generating a CPC of just $0.20. It’s clear which post has the more attractive CPC, but you’ll need to analyse both posts to uncover the differences between optimally performing and sub-optimal content. To generate the same engagement rates as the $0.20 post (5000) with a $0.50 CPC, you would need a budget of $2500. If, hypothetically, your hotel is optimising content ten times a month, that number adds up to $25,000. If you could manage to optimise your posts so that they all performed at $0.20, you’d benefit from an increased efficiency of $15,000 to use in your hotel’s budget for future promoted posts.
How does your property monitor, analyse and optimise Facebook ad CPC? Let us know in the comments below!
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