Another industry figure that killed it on the Affiliate World Asia stage in Bangkok was Tim Burd, the co-founder of Agency Y. Afterward, he sat down with Benjamin Yong to share his expert insights on Facebook regarding campaign budgeting optimisation, pixel fire, and more.

This post, “Tim Burd Shares Tips For Facebook’s Campaign Budgeting Optimisation, And More” was first seen on the AWC Facebook page.

AWasia Interview with Tim Burd, Co-Founder of Agency Y

Introduction

Tim Burd:
Hi guys, my name is Tim Burd. I’m the founder of the Facebook Ad Buyers group, also have an agency called Agency Y and a private community called AdLeaks.

60-Second Video Ads

Benjamin Yong:
?️ So Tim, so our audience has got a lot of questions for you right there. The first one, why do you suggest a maximum of 60-seconds video ads?
Tim Burd:
That’s a great question. So anything longer than 60-seconds will disqualify you from Instagram. Instagram has a 60-second cap, and you want to make sure that you do or you’re able to get some Instagram traffic, then it needs to be less than 60-seconds.

Automatic Versus Manual Bidding

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Alright, fundamental difference between automatic bidding and manual bidding?
Tim Burd:
Great question actually. So when you’re doing auto-bidding, you’re telling Facebook, “I don’t really care about my bid, I care that you spend my budget” okay, which means you’re not going to typically get as good as a conversion cost. With manual bid, you’re saying “hey, I care more about my conversion cost than I do, like if you can’t hit my conversion goal, then don’t spend all my money”. So that’s the fundamental difference, but I do find that I like manual bid because it gives you like an extra lever to pull in the algorithm, which can be very important for a lot of my methods.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Right. So is that also a reason why you’re being known as the “bully guy”?
Tim Burd:
Yes, I’m known as a bully guy. It’s because I’ve been pushing, I’ve found many, many years ago that bidding much higher than your suggested bid, one, gets you a better quality of traffic and two, makes it very, very easy to scale. You can scale way easier. And then you can literally bully people out of the auction, so if I’m bidding $150 and you’re bidding on the same audience, then after a few days you’re going to pause because you’re losing money so then my cost goes down. So you’re actually bullying people out of your audience.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Nice, nice.

Campaign Budgeting Optimisation

Benjamin Yong:
?️ So this is something new, so for campaign budgeting optimisation, CBO, like how would you recommend people to test this method?
Tim Burd:
Just test it with a five plus ad set, not too many. I’d say less than ten for sure.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Less than ten? Is there a reason why?
Tim Burd:
Just because it will spread your budget around maybe too much and you want it to have enough data on an ad set so that it can find the good ad sets. So make sure you have a decent-sized budget, you need to budget for ideally at least 10-20 conversions per day, total across the campaign and then 5-10 ad sets. Somewhere in that range. And then, but other than that it does very well.

One thing to note though is you should set up some automated rules, otherwise sometimes Facebook will spend too much on a bad ad set, when you have a good ad set it could spend on.

How To Remedy Pixel Inaccuracies

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Okay so we all know there’s this issue with Facebook where the pixel fire is going under-fire most of the time, like by 10%, 20%. So how do you go with dealing with this kind of issues?
Tim Burd:
So one way is with offline conversions. You set up a Zapier or whatever depending on what you’re using and it sends the customers email back to Facebook and maybe half the time it will match with the Facebook user. So you’ll save half of your missed pixel fires that way.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ But you are suggesting that we are going to use third-party tools in order to get this done?
Tim Burd:
You can use it with a Facebook ad API, you just need to have a programmer do it, but you can do it that way without any tools and then besides that you just have to go in knowing that you’re losing 10% or 20% so if you see 10 conversions there on an ad set, just assume you have 11 or 12 and kind of do the math based on that.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Right, okay. So you’re actually suggesting that because I know a lot of guys, they actually, they won’t be using a third-party or have someone to develop something based on the API just because there’s this inconsistency. So are you suggesting that we can just ignore it or we can just take into consideration when we are looking into the conversions?
Tim Burd:
Yeah totally, for a lot of clients we just ignore it and if we know historically it’s at 20% inaccuracy, then again, if we have 10 conversions on an ad set that we show, we’ll say okay, we probably have 12. And you do the math based on that.

Tim’s Personal Experience With Manual Bidding

Benjamin Yong:
?️ So the next question is going to be an interesting one. What was your biggest mess up with manual bidding?
Tim Burd:
My biggest mess up.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ And how much money did you lose? I think there’s a lot of people that want to know.
Tim Burd:
I’d say it was probably when I was learning the Sneak Attack, when I was creating it. I made the mistake of, I wasn’t getting enough traffic so I increased the bid. I was like, screw it, I’m just going to put the bid a little higher.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ A little bit higher?
Tim Burd:
You know, a “little bit” higher and it was too much of it and I blew through, I think it was like $8,000 in like 45 minutes.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Oh wow.
Tim Burd:
You know, I like set the bid up and I was like, I’m going to go grab some food, come back, lost a lot of money. That’s why I had multiple times where I was like, “be careful, set up rules”. You can lose a lot of money.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Yeah right, because I do notice that whenever you are telling people to try the manual bidding you are always, always make sure that these people they have to be extra careful.
Tim Burd:
Yeah, especially with this method. Yeah because you can waste.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Especially when you are running on high budgets, right.

Agency Ad Account

Benjamin Yong:
?️ How can we get agency or invoicing ad accounts?
Tim Burd:
Okay. To get an invoicing ad account, what you need to do is have a lot of successful payments. So if it’s a brand new ad account, you just started spending money, and you request to be on invoicing, Facebook’s not going to trust you that you’ll pay because it’s a brand new ad account. You need to have a month, two months of good payment history with no failed payments, all successful payments and ideally the more you spend, the better. Then you can request it and hopefully you’ll have some business lines of credit and also that you can show them business credit cards or show Facebook the statements.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ But would Facebook be asking for your, for example, company registration just to prove that this business exists?
Tim Burd:
They typically will ask for that. If you’re asking for let’s say $100,000 invoice account, like a high-limit. If it’s a lower limit, then they’re not as stringent. It’s the same as a bank. They’re essentially giving you a credit line and they’re going to ask for some documents, you know. And the higher the amount, the higher the documents, usually.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ What would be the minimum audience size in each ad set that you would recommend?
Tim Burd:
Good question, so no matter what method that you’re using I like to do a minimum audience size 1 million. Ideally 2 million plus and even if it’s 70 million, that’s good, but 1-2 million minimum. I never go less than that.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Okay, thank you so much for sharing Tim.
Tim Burd:
Thank you.