💰 I hear a lot of people say “The leads are bad!”… Most often, though, people simply don’t have a full understanding how Facebook marketing works. To help, here is a graph that gives you just a little insight into what we marketers call “pacing” and how the Facebook ad auction operates.

To put it simply — you need to place a higher bid in the ad auction to target the “higher intent” prospects in your targeted audience. If you are bidding too low, then your ad will be served out to people that are probably not the right prospects that you had hoped for. However, this is not universally true. Facebook’s ads that are optimized to perform a certain action, like get leads or get messages, will still perform and do what they are optimized to do. It’s still important to bid high enough in the auction to really reach the best prospects.

Keep in mind, at any given time there are hundreds of other advertisers bidding for your same target audience or, at the very least, there are large areas of overlap. Unfortunately, Facebook bids are always a blind auction, meaning you can’t see what other advertisers are bidding. Because of this, Facebook identifies ads ads that will serve the audience in the most relevant and engaging manner, combined with the best or highest bid. From there, they find the most likely prospects that will take action on those ads based on the value you have placed on the leads that you want.

Moral of the story. Bid correctly, write good ad copy that is relevant, have engaging ad creative, and give the algorithm time and data to do it’s magic.