New campaigns extremely expensive recently?

[georgik]

Over the course of this and last week I have seen my CPM for new campaigns skyrocket for no reason. My ads are all "above average" in all categories according to the ad relevance diagnostics, yet my CPM on new campaigns is terrible

Meanwhile, my old campaign continues getting cheap conversions and a low CPM.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

[melancholyflower]

I just started a new campaign and I'm getting this too. I'm not currently running any old campaigns, so I can't comment on that. Glad to know I'm not alone at least...

[Regret Regret]

Not to be cold, but if it’s a new song then I would suspect that it is not hitting the same as the last one. It happens. My first song of 2021 was getting $.10 conversions, the next one was $.24. All my ads from last year were around $.12-17. My fav is the most expensive one, but I don’t get to pick what works and what doesn’t.

[georgik]

Lots of advertisers are seeing weird behaviour the past 2 weeks because of iOS14, but honestly that could be a part of it too. Although my Ad Relevance metrics are excellent, so idk...

[melancholyflower]

So I did a couple experiments, and I've concluded that it is most likely iOS14 and/or a bug on Facebook's side. Here were my experiments:

Experimental Setup

1. Campaign for new song (using custom domain)
2. Campaign for new song (using old style toneden domain),
3. Reactivated campaign for old song (using old style toneden domain)
4. New campaign for old song (using custom domain)

Campaign 1 and 2 (for short, C1 and C2) used the same song, same exact ads/audiences and same budget. Same for C3 and C4.

Results

Up until last night:

- C1 and C2 were both performing very poorly: $.45 per conversion
- C3 was performing as well as it used to: $.05 per conversion (I still don't understand why that song did so well)
- C4 was performing even more poorly than C1 and C2: like $1 per conversion. Note that C3 and C4 were the exact same ads and everything. That's a 20x conversion cost difference.

Starting sometime in the middle of the night last night: (I'm on EST, so the middle of the night was about 8 hours ago)

- C1 and C2 improved dramatically to $.23 per conversion
- C3 actually worsened a tad to $.07 per conversion
- C4 improved dramatically to $.07 per conversion

Conclusion

The behavior I'm seeing now (starting last night) is what we would expect: C1 and C2 perform the same, as do C3 and C4. I'm a bit disappointed in the $.23 conversion cost, but this seems reasonable and more likely a function of just this song not performing as well for whatever reason. So the issue seems to have mostly resolved for me.

georgik, are you still seeing the same extremely expensive costs as before?

[georgik]

Great experiment! I'm glad to see your costs are back down. Unfortunately, I'm still sitting at around $0.60 per ViewContent, so let's hope it does better soon :-) if not, I'll just chalk it up to the randomness of the universe and turn it off after my song gets into Discover Weekly next Monday

[melancholyflower]

Sorry to hear you're still having difficulties, but thanks for letting us all know. I think it's useful for us to all share as much information as we can, especially as we deal with the iOS14 changes. Best of luck with Discover Weekly!

I also wanted to add a quick follow-up to my experiment. I was going over the results again, and I did find a weird difference between C1 and C2: they have the same conversion cost, but C1 (the custom domain one) is getting waaaay more clicks. For C2, the clicks-to-conversions ratio is about 2:1, but the clicks-to-conversions ratio for C1 is about 7:1. So essentially C1 is getting a ton of extra clicks that aren't leading to conversions. I have no idea why this is, since C1 and C2 are using the same ads, audiences, etc...

Anyway, what this tells me is that the issue is not resolved, and there is still some weirdness going on. Whether that's the same issue georgik is having, whether or not this is related to iOS14, I don't know.

I would be really interested to hear if anyone else has been seeing weird behavior lately. And if everything has been normal for you, that's very helpful too.

[georgik]

Well. Made a new ad account and used a different pixel, got $2.50 per conversion. Looks like I'm gonna have to wait a few weeks until this thing settles or maybe make an entirely new business manager account and try that way. Obviously some business accounts aren't affected by this.

I considered doing Snapchat or YouTube ads, but honestly for conversions nothing even comes close to Facebook, so I'll spend as much energy as I can trying to get this thing to work again...

[capturez]

I tried adjusting my audience to exclude iOS users and Facebook wouldn't let me. They gave me a general error message. Wondering if that's intentional or if they're experiencing some issues in general.

[georgik]

That's weird. I set up a campaign yesterday to exclude iOS users and it worked. You will find the option right beneath where you choose placements.

[georgik]

I managed to fix it!

All of this began on April 16th, because that was when I first released my new song. I hadn't created a new campaign for weeks until that date. And just as it so happens, ToneDen had a complete outage on April 16th.

I decided that maybe Facebook had blacklisted my domain because of that outage and was now punishing me with a high CPM, so 2 days ago I bought a new domain and set that one up for conversions through ToneDen.

Also, I excluded targeting iOS users in my ad set. And I excluded all placements except Instagram.

Also, I changed my attribution setting to "1 day after clicking or viewing"

I don't know which one of those factors did it, but now I'm back down to $1.50 CPM (targeting rich countries) with a $10 daily budget. In a few days, once my campaign is fully optimized, I'll make sure to start targeting iOS users again.

I have a feeling it was the domain thing though.

EDIT: if it IS a domain thing though, it doesn't explain how my old campaigns continued to perform well and only the new ones suffered ...

[Regret Regret]

Glad to hear it’s working for you again. I still believe this is the best way to promote, but it’s so easy for it to go off the rails.

[georgik]

Imo no other platform even comes close when it comes to Spotify conversion campaigns

[georgik]

Update: I added in iOS and am still getting very cheap conversions. In fact, I am getting all of the cheap ones from the iPhone Feed placement.

[capturez]

Update: I added in iOS and am still getting very cheap conversions. In fact, I am getting all of the cheap ones from the iPhone Feed placement.

That's really good to hear! Glad you got things figured out.