About Facebook Bid Multipliers

Updated 

Splitting budgets and optimizing bids based on different targeting attributes leads to over-segmentation of audiences among multiple Ad Sets with relatively smaller audience pools. This reduces the effectiveness of the Facebook algorithm as well as the efficiency of the budget split.

Sprinklr Strategy Groups Smart Bidding allows you to leverage Facebook Bid Multipliers to solve this problem and improve your campaign performance/ROI through the application of Sprinklr's AI to optimize Facebook's bidding algorithm. In this article, we will guide you through the following.

What are Facebook Bid Multipliers?

Facebook Bid Multipliers enable you to maintain a nuanced bidding strategy within a single Ad Set (one target audience) and reduce the number of audience segmentation. In other words, this tool allows you to modify your Bid down by splitting your target audience into audience segments and specifying a multiplier value for those segments.

For example, you can create a single Ad Set and then use bid multipliers to modify the base Ad Set level bid by demographics, placements, age, and more of such splits.

Bid multiplier enhances Facebook's algorithm by providing guidance to Facebook on which audience segments should be prioritized from an impression delivery. If you have insight or data about valuable audience segments that Facebook doesn't have, then it makes sense to use higher Bid Multipliers on those segments.

Facebook Bid Multiplier Use Cases

CUSTOMER

WHEN TO USE BID MULTIPLIER

EXAMPLE SCENARIO

people

Media Practitioner

Align with your business initiatives or any structural business setup.

  • If you are a Luxury Brand and want to push for an entry into specific geographies of the United States, then you can use this information in your Bid Multiplier setup and increase the multiplier value for that specified time period to increase delivery.

  • If you are a Luxury Brand whose store presence (number of stores) is higher in 5 specific states as compared to the rest, then you can leverage this information point using Bid Multipliers to increase or decrease spend as per the geographies that generate more business.

people

Media Practitioner

The Lifetime Value (LTV) between audience segments varies for your campaigns.

  • Based on your CRM analytics you know that the repeat order rate for people in the Age Range of 40-60 years is 50% higher than that of the 20-40 years age segment. Thus, both these segments have different LTV.

  • You are an e-commerce business with varying percentages of order returns from different audience segments. Thus, every segment varies from each other in terms of their LTV.

people

Media Practitioner

You are pushed to bid for an interim goal rather than your real end goal.

  • For a Lead Generation customer, there is a long delay for the conversion to take place, due to a longer sales cycle. But based on past data you know that conversion rates for real end goals are higher for leads from certain specific geographies.

  • For a Conversion focused customer, due to the high value of purchases, they see very few conversions. Thus, you are leveraging landing page views as the bidding optimization metric on Facebook. However, when you analyze the segment data, you see that the Female segment has a much better conversion rate but Facebook is spending more on the Male segment.

people

Media Practitioner

The Incremental effect of Ads (i.e. conversions lift) varies between different audience segments.

  • After running a Facebook Conversion Lift Study, you have found that Facebook ads are giving you a 50% higher conversion lift from the spend on Instagram platform as compared to the Facebook platform. This would be a good scenario for you to leverage Facebook Bid Multiplier to prioritize and bid higher on Instagram.

people

Media Practitioner

Target audiences on priority based on the time elapsed since a user took a particular action on your website.

  • Using Web Analytics, a client analyzed the drop in user activity. They observe that if a user doesn’t return to finish a Purchase within 6 hours, then the probability of him/her returning back to complete the purchase reduces dramatically. This is a good case for signaling Facebook to prioritize and spend more on people who have added products to their cart but dropped off in the last 6 hours.

 

To Apply Facebook Bid Multiplier

  1. Click the New Tab icon Space Add New Tab Icon. Under the Advertising tab of Sprinklr Marketing, click Strategy Group within Optimize.

  2. Follow the steps outlined in Strategy Group Smart Bidding. Note that you select the Channel as Facebook.

  3. After you have manually configured the Smart Bidding details on the Strategy Group Smart Bidding window, scroll down to the Audience Bid Multiplier section and slide the Toggle icon Screen Shot 2017-09-18 at 11.07.13 AM.png alongside Enable Facebook Bid Multiplier.

  4. Click Add Audience Bid Multiplier to provide the details that will help guide Facebook's optimization system to bid low/high based on business insights.
    Enable Facebook Bid Multipliers in Strategy Group Smart Bidding

  5. On the Configure Bid Multipliers pop-up window, provide the necessary details.​Configure FB Bid Multipliers

  6. Click Submit in the bottom-right corner once you are done. 

Determine Multiplier Value

You can get the most out of Bid Multipliers when they help you optimize your Ads towards Lifetime Value (LTV) or Incrementality (prioritizing conversions that happened because of the Ad and not because of just clicking or seeing the Ad).

For instance, if you know the LTV of a new customer in each of your audience segments split by Age and Gender, you can determine how much you are willing to pay for a single first purchase of a new customer (when you are targeting prospecting audiences).

Lifetime Value (LTV)
Bid Multiplier
Females 18-30

200$

200$ / 300$ = 67%
Females 31-55
300$
300$ / 300$ = 100%
Males 18-30

150$

150$ / 300$ = 50%
Males 31-55

250$

250$ / 300$ = 83%

Similarly, in another instance, you see the LTV for Instagram users is 20% more than Facebook when your audience segments are split between Facebook and Instagram platforms, you can determine how much you are willing to pay for conversions on each platform.

 

Lifetime Value (LTV)
Bid Multiplier
Facebook

250$

250$ / 300$ = 83%
Instagram
300$
300$ / 300$ = 100%

You can then enable these Bid Multipliers on top of your Bid Cap. 

Things to Remember

  • The Bid Multiplier value needs to be between 10 – 100 %. If you want to bid higher for an audience segment, use smaller multipliers for other segments instead.

  • Only use this capability with Facebook Campaigns having either Lowest Cost with Bid Cap or Lowest Cost without Bid Cap as a bidding strategy.

  • Only use this capability with Facebook Campaigns having bidding Optimization Goals as either one of the following:

    • Offsite Conversions (any custom and standard conversion)

    • App Installs

    • Link Clicks

    • Landing Page Views

    • Lead Generation

  • Note that the Splits must not overlap. For example, don’t specify the age splits as 18-25 and 25-35, as those overlap each other.

  • Don’t use the same split again in a descendant audience segment. For example, don’t split by Age again under an Age split.

Best Practices for Using Bid Multipliers

Using Bid Multipliers might affect your Budget Pacing if your campaign delivery is limited by its budget (instead of bidding). Simply put, using multipliers (especially small) might make it harder for Facebook to evenly pace the budget spend throughout the day. Start with more conservative bid multipliers (closer to 100% than 0%) to be on the safe side and adjust accordingly if things go well.

When NOT to Use Bid Multipliers

Do not use Bid Multipliers in the following scenarios as it can affect the performance of your Ads:

  • When you bid for your real end goal and value conversions from all your audience segments equally. You do not have any of the mentioned Use Cases.

  • When you bid until the end of the funnel and the CPA for that event is your final goal.

    • When you look at the average CPAs across these audience segments, you may find some audience segments (age groups or cities) performing better than others, but Facebook's optimization already takes care of the optimal budget split between these audience segments.

In other words, if your analysis is based on Facebook data that Facebook is already optimizing towards, then it doesn't help to use Bid Multipliers.

Example

Let us take an example where we have defined two types of Splits as shown in the screenshot below. The top-level split is for Publisher Platform where we have selected Facebook and Instagram respectively. Under each of these platforms. we have further split based on Home Location. (You can further split based on any dimension)

Let us assume that the Bid Cap is set to $100. The following will explain how the above example will multiply bids for each audience segment:

  • $10 for users on Facebook, living in New York (say)

  • $20 for users on Facebook, living in London (say)

  • $30 for users on Facebook, living anywhere else in the world

  • $40 for users on Instagram, living in New York (say)

  • $50 for users on Instagram, living in London (say)

  • $100 for users on Instagram, living anywhere else in the world

    Note: If you don't specify a multiplier value, the default of 100% will be used.

    • $60 for users on any other platform outside of Facebook and Instagram

Facebook Bid Multipliers Limitations

  • Bid Multipliers will not work on Facebook Special Ad Categories. However, if you are using Bid Multipliers on Facebook Special Ad Categories, it will not give any error but Facebook will ignore it and the bid multipliers will not have any impact.​

Bid Multipliers — Setup

Terms
Description

Type

Select the category of audience you want to define a bid multiplier to from the following:

  • Age - Bid differently based on the age or age range.

  • Custom Audience - Bid based on the custom audience the user is a part of. Lookalike audiences are also supported for this option.

  • Device Platform - Bid differently based on the user's device platform, such as mobile or desktop.

  • Gender - Bid differently based on gender.

  • Home Location - Bid based on the user's home location. This represents their current home location. The home location multiplier can be broken down into cities, regions, and countries.

  • Locale (Language) - Bid differently based on locales such as English or Spanish.

  • Position Type - Bid based on which position an ad is shown; for example, Facebook FeedFacebook Marketplace, or Instagram Story.

  • Publisher Platform - Bid based on the publisher platform such as FacebookInstagram, Audience NetworkMessenger.

  • User Device - Bid based on the user's device, such as the iPhone.

  • User OS - Bid based on the user's device operating system such as iOS or Android.

  • User Recency - Bid based on when the user last visited the site or app.

Audience Segment

Select a segment of the audience type you want to define a bid multiplier to.

For example, if you have selected Age as the audience type, you can set a minimum and maximum age range for which you want to bid differently.

Multiplier

Enter the Bid Multiplier value in % (Percentage) between 10-100 % for each split.

Example - An Ad Set has a Manual Bid set at $10. The Bid Multiplier value of 50% will indicate to Facebook to use bid $5 for that segment.

Split

Click to further break down the bid for that audience segment. This will create a tree structure for your bidding.

For example, if you choose Publisher Platform as your audience type and select Facebook as your audience segment, you can further break down this audience by the Position Type and bid differently on Facebook StoriesInstagram Explore, etc. You can also define two separate Publisher Platform splits.

Add Another Entity

Click to add another audience segment to configure bid multipliers. You can either add an entity within an audience segment (as a descendant) or define another audience segment using the same entity (as two parent entities).

FAQ

Yes. Bid Multipliers work with your Ad Sets running on Auto Bid as well as Manual Bid.

No, it is not possible to view Bid Value updates as Facebook Bid Multiplier can be used with Auto Bid where Bids are set automatically.

No, Bid Multipliers will not work on Facebook Special Ad Categories. However, if you are using Bid Multipliers on Facebook Special Ad Categories, it will not give any error but Facebook will ignore it and the bid multipliers will not have any impact.

No, it is not applicable for Facebook Bid Multipliers as there are no bids being set.