Depesh Mandalia Dishes On How To Lower Your Facebook CPMs

Aside from being one of the UK’s leading Facebook ads experts and the CEO of SMC and ZASR Digital, “Chef” Depesh Mandalia was also one of the speakers for Affiliate World Asia in Bangkok last December 2018. In his interview with Benjamin Yong, he shares some tips on how to lower your Facebook CPMs.

This post “Depesh Mandalia Dishes On How To Lower Your CPMs” first appeared on the AWC Facebook Page.

AWasia Interview with Depesh Mandalia, CEO of SMC and ZASR Digital

Introduction

Depesh Mandalia:: Hi, this is Depesh. I run a Facebook ads agency and I’m a bit of a Facebook ads pro. So I’ve been running high-scale campaigns for the last 4-5 years and I work with a lot of people helping them to improve their Facebook ads results as well.

The Recipe To Running Facebook Ads

Benjamin Yong:

?️ Alright, So here with me, we have chef Depesh and tell us what’s on the menu today? What are you cooking?

Depesh Mandalia:

We’re cooking up lots of Facebook ads results. So I’m really keen on cooking. I love the concept of cooking and I actually bring that in to my marketing. So all of my ingredients and recipes are all focused on high-scaling and making Facebook ads work.

Benjamin Yong:

?️ So how do you combine all these three so that the Facebook ads that people are running can be a lot more effective?

Depesh Mandalia:

Sure, so one of the key things about building recipes for Facebook is focusing on what Facebook are looking for. Facebook are looking to keep their user happy, and that starts with everything that I do. That’s one of the key ingredients. Am I making the user happy? Then everything falls off the back. Am I communicating my product, my brand? Is my imagery good? Is my copy good? My landing pages?

Everything else falls off the back of it and the recipes change based on your store, based on your niche. Ingredients are roughly the same. And then it comes down to experience. So are you able to make this work? Are you testing enough? Are you learning from your mistakes? I’ve made a lot of mistakes, I’ve learned from them, and I build off of them as well.

How To Lower Your CPMs

Benjamin Yong:

?️ First question from the audience. What are the reasons websites are getting high CPMs exactly? And will it be lower once you improve on those ecom website changes?

Depesh Mandalia:

So there’s many reasons why your CPM might be high and there’s reasons why it may be difficult to bring it down. So there’s different ways that CPM gets punished by Facebook or at least, you end up with higher CPMs so the obvious ones are competitiveness in your niche so if there’s lots of advertisers that will increase the CPM.

Consider CPM as bidding for a product on eBay, if there’s a lot of people bidding, then the price of the product will go up as well and that’s how Facebook works. So you can reduce your CPM by a few ways.

Number one is actually page engagement. From the last maybe 6-9 months, Facebook placed a big focus on the quality of your page because if you think about it, if you start your ecom store or affiliate offer, a lot of people would neglect their page. Brands don’t generally neglect their page, so Facebook looks at that is a clue as to whether you’re giving users a good experience or not.

So that’s one. Number two is about competition so if you’re bidding on website conversion and the purchase event, think about bidding on payment info event or initiate checkout event. It’s slightly further than the goal but your CPMs will be cheaper as well. Think about the ad quality, relevance score, and CPM go hand in hand. So I would never optimise for relevance score but if I’m struggling with CPM, I’d be looking at my relevance score and figuring out what’s Facebook grading my ads as. What’s the experience with those ads. So it’s just a few things to look at.

Yes, you can improve your CPM over time but there are some things that get punished harder so if you’re getting ads disapproved, if you’ve got poor quality experience of your landing page, they can have a lasting negative impact on your CPM for the account as well.

Benjamin Yong:

?️ Are there any other things that they can do to try to reduce it or are you suggesting that either they change their vertical because the vertical is too competitive or?

Depesh Mandalia:

So I generally don’t see verticals as a problem, so when I’m playing with Facebook ads in any niche, I can generally find a way of cutting through better than competition. So it could be my creative, it could be my funnel, it could be my bidding strategy. There’s way that you can cut through. So I never see a niche as too competitive but I find that people give up too early. They’re not testing enough.

So test different creatives, for example. So if everyone is running one particular type of creative, and you can spy on people’s ads quite easily on their page now, try different ad formats, try different objectives from Facebook. So, video views, page engagement, website conversion. There’s different ways to slice and dice your targeting and your messaging to try and get those CPMs down as well.

Tips For Ecommerce Newbies

Benjamin Yong:

?️ For ecommerce newbies, any good tips for them?

Depesh Mandalia:

Sure, my biggest tip for ecom newbies is don’t overly focus on your store. So the first thing you need to do is, is your product going to sell, is your funnel any good? So create a minimal, viable funnel, and don’t spend too much time and money worrying about the brand, the logo, the product page, things like that. Get something up that you’re happy with and start testing it with traffic because that will tell you whether your store is going to sell or not and then you can start to tweak your store once you get some data.

I see a lot of people spending months and months trying to tweak their store, load up lots of products, try and get their store working as best as they can without knowing whether it’s going to work or not, in any case. So do the testing first with your ads.

The other thing I would say is start doing customer feedback early on in your journey. So when people visit your site, and let’s say after 30-seconds, you deliver a poll on the website and ask people, “Why are you not buying today?” that’s one of the most powerful things you can ask people because the data you get will help you in your retargeting ads. So someone might say, I don’t know what the return policy is or how long delivery takes. You can use that in your marketing.

So these are just a few tips to help you get started in ecom and focus on finding out why people are not buying and tweaking and tweaking as you go along and try not to spend too much time or money wasting on things like logos and things like that.

Ecommerce Facebook Groups

Benjamin Yong:

?️ We know for a fact that on all these Facebook ecommerce groups, where people keep posting screenshots about how much they can do like 5-figures, 6-figures a day and in a way, do you agree that maybe somehow all of these newbies will be distracted by all the numbers that eventually they would lose focus along the way?

Depesh Mandalia:

Yeah I mean, this is a real big problem I see with people new into ecom. They see that someone’s made 100k in 30 days and they get depressed when after 30 days they’ve only made 1k. But you know, what you don’t often see is how much profit have they actually made? Because if you spend 100k, generate 100k revenue plus the cost of your good, you’re in the negative there. And so don’t get holed up on the screenshots from Shopify, the screenshots from Facebook ads, and think that people are setting such wild benchmarks that you can’t achieve that.

Look at your own cost of goods, your margin on your products, and figure out what kind of profit you can create per sale and then look to scale that up and magnify because I would rather sell $50,000 worth of goods a month and make $25,000 profit than sell $100,000 and make $10,000 profit. It’s not worth the hassle of trying to sell so much for such a small profit as well.

Keeping Your Facebook Ad Accounts Safe

Benjamin Yong:: ?️ How do you keep Facebook ad accounts safe? Can you please suggest some actionable ways?
Depesh Mandalia:: So one of the things about Facebook ads is when I go back to maybe 2014, 2015, when policy really started to kick in, I hated policy back then, I hate it now. It’s all legal jargon and I’d rather not spend time learning policy but if you want to stay on the safe side of Facebook then you need to understand at least the basics of policy and a lot of it actually comes down to common sense.

Appealing Facebook Account Bans

Benjamin Yong:

?️ Right, okay so I do understand that there are some guys where in fact, they did not breach any policies but still they get their account banned so in that case, what would you suggest? What can they do?

Depesh Mandalia:

You have to look at the reasons why that happened. So Facebook do try and tell you, but in the flip-side, also understand that not every ad goes through manual review. So sometimes you get an ad disapproved, and it’s completely legit. If you really, really feel it’s legit then appeal it. Go through the appeals process, and just say, “This is my ad, I’ve looked through policy, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong.” And more often than not, I get this myself, and the ad gets approved because the machine gets it wrong. The machine will sometimes get it wrong. So do appeal it, try and get through the process.

Now when you have actually made a mistake, fix it straight away. What I would also recommend is if you also have disapproved ads in your ad account, delete them. If you can’t improve them, delete them because that can have a negative impact on your account overall and over time could lead to your account getting banned.

So I’ve had lots of situations recently over the last 6 months, where I’ve spoken to people who had ads on their account from a year ago that were disapproved. Now Facebook changed their policy, and their ad account has been banned because the level of disapproval has been escalated. So if you get a disapproval, and you can’t fix it, delete it. So there are some ways you can kind of protect yourself from some of these problems as well.

Scaling and CBO

Benjamin Yong:: ?️ Last question, when you are scaling, do you increase the budget or you duplicate or both?
Depesh Mandalia:: So if I go back to early 2018, I used to duplicate, I used to do manual bid, I used to do a lot of the hacks, which a lot of people use because they used to work. Facebook made a fundamental change to the algorithm around February, March time in 2018, which impacted that kind of growth strategy. What I actually do right now and one thing that’s really been working the last two months is testing ads and audiences, seeing which ones are working with the typical kind of ad set budget and then moving it to a campaign budget-optimised campaign.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ Oh so the CBO, the campaign-level?
Depesh Mandalia:: That CBO, the campaign-level. So you put the spend at the top level, you put your best ads in at the ad set level and the ad level but you also use automation to pull out any bad performers. And you let Facebook scale it up.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ So it’s kind of like setting up rules or automated rules?
Depesh Mandalia:: Absolutely. So you can scale up really quickly from 1k to 10k a day and it doesnt’ impact the ad set negatively because Facebook spreads it across all ad sets. It’s the safest and fastest way of scaling as long as you do your groundwork in advance.

Campaign Budget Optimisation

Benjamin Yong:: ?️ Okay, just a quick one. We know campaign budget optimisation, do you do it before you test the creative or after you have got a winning combo as to your targeting and also your ads or do you only run it on your CBO?
Depesh Mandalia:: So I’ve experimented with CBO a lot since it came out. I was really excited to see it and I had lots of failure. I just couldn’t figure out like why wasn’t it working and then I figured out when CBO has a good audience, a good ad, and a good lander, and a good performance, it performs really well. So if you add things in to your CBO campaign that are not tested, generally they don’t work well and it brings down the general performance as well.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ So it’s always better to put something that is proven and tested.
Depesh Mandalia:: Pre-test it, put it into CBO. The other tip I would share with you, and time and time this has worked for me as well, is use higher budgets and use the 1-day click optimisation. Because for some reason the campaign budget doesn’t work so well when you use 7 days, so use 1 day and use higher budgets as well.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ Right, thank you so much for sharing. I’ve learned so much today. Thank you so much.

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Depesh Mandalia Dishes On How To Lower Your Facebook CPMs