This was emailed to me in response to my Ask Away! post. Feel free to ask me any questions about affiliate marketing there or contact me via email.

When targetting groups of people at a tight level [on Facebook] (City+single age+Keywords+Gender), how many individuals would you consider as being ‘too low’?

I’ve found that when I try and target groups that are too small I don’t get any impressions.

Or do you create multiple highly targeted ads tailored for each group?

I know this is pretty broad but do you have any sort of rule of thumb?

There are few decent questions there that deserve answering.

As far as how many people is too few to target, when I ran campaigns like this, I would target 100-200 people some times. I’d run it at CPC because I knew CPM would burn through them too fast. I’d be getting about ~1% CTRs making my click cost only a cent or two. Of course, either way, I’d burn through that demographic really fast. It usually only took me 1 minute to set up the ad for them, and I’d make 1000 – 2000% ROI on my investment, so it was completely worth the time. It wasn’t a campaign that was sustainable for a long time. I could normally run it a few days every month and make conversions from it, then pause it for a month and open it again.

Also, I’d take a large demographic and just break it up into highly targeted ads. Custom images, ad title and ad body were included in this. It would drop my average CPC on these ads by about 20-30 cents on some campaigns.

I’m not too sure whats wrong with Facebook impressions. Rather than give impressions to the highest bidders, they like to split up impressions instead. So if 100 more advertisers enter the same demographic on the same day, you’re up against them. It’s a wonky (shitty) system that needs improvement. Some days you’ll get millions of impressions, the next day you’ll be like “Facebook doesn’t want my online monies today or what?”

As for a rule of thumb, Hey! As long as its making you a decent amount of money, and its worth the amount of work you put in to it, go for it. Some days I’d work on campaigns all day that would make me 4 figures a day, some days I would build small Facebook campaigns that took 10 minutes to set up and make me 20 bucks a day on each ad.

Money is money, and how you make that is completely up to you!