Facebook: I feel like you are cheating me

Yup that is what I am feeling now. Your brand image just gets worse (at least to me). I don’t like to be cheated at all. I was a complete amateur in this instance.

Ok here is what happened:

• I enabled conversion tracking tags From Facebook for my ads today. I use the self-serve platform by Facebook for my personal account and use my own credit card of course.
• If you are not familiar with Facebook Conversion tracking then please refer to this link
• My objective is direct response so I always (yes always) use “Optimize for clicks”, “Manually bid for clicks” setting for my personal campaign. You could refer to the screenshot below to understand what I mean

However to my HORROR, after activating the conversion tracking pixel today, Facebook AUTOMATICALLY changed my bidding strategy to “Optimize for Conversions” and pricing from Cost per Click (CPC) to CPM “You will be charged every time someone sees your ad or sponsored story (CPM).” And you know what? there is NO CPM limit. I could be charged $10 CPM for all I know.

Below was what Facebook did automatically

Worse still, I enabled the tracking pixel for ALL of my campaigns and my Average CPC went up more than 8 times! in some cases it went up to 10 – 12 times the historical average value. Did I get any conversion: A big NO NO. Why would Facebook do this?

Luckily for me, for some strange reason I logged into the Ad Manager and checked and FOUND out. If I left this running for a while, I don’t know what would happen to my average CPC, and my budget.

I didn’t see ANY notifications from Facebook saying that It will automatically switch my bidding option and pricing strategy from Optimize for Clicks, CPC bidding to Optimize for conversion, CPM bidding with NO CPM limit. I have to admit, there is a small chance that there might be some notifications but may be I skipped them.

But well I feel cheated by Facebook. Yup Facebook, the company who already gathers so much of my personal data, (NOT from myself) but from my friends, relatives etc…

Anyone has the same experience or want to share? I might be wrong as well so just let me know.

T.T

Chandler

P.S: I just want to share my experience so that if you are about to turn on the pixel tracking for Facebook, be aware.