Case Study: Only 580K Facebook Users, So How Did eCPM Hit $81?

GEO Insights

Hi, I’m Peter.

Last week’s Facebook BM ban wave took down many people’s accounts overnight, leaving them with no usable accounts at all.

When you can’t keep the accounts, the ads obviously can’t get pushed out, and old creatives that had been running for ages started getting flagged as violations for no reason.

We’ve published a few Clickbox case studies before, all real runs on Facebook. Today let’s talk about the GEOs in this series.

Quite a few of you have been testing along with the cases, and the popular GEOs are mainly PH, BR, BD, ID and TH.

Popular GEOs have big volume, but the competition is also fierce.

Some small countries can actually perform very well too.

For example, the two new GEOs just added to #20418: TJ and KG.

New GEOs added to #20418: TJ and KG

01 Playable offer

Normally we wouldn’t pick Central Asia as the first place to run. Let’s start with the offer itself.

#20418 is Click Box Simple, a Playable offer. The network’s Best-for-Facebook section is a separate collection of offers that have already produced results on Facebook.

Based on recently collected data, eCPM has gone as high as $81.252. But don’t treat that number as a revenue expectation. It’s the network’s figure converted per thousand impressions. Once you’re actually running, you still have to watch EPC.

Now look at the size.

• Tajikistan: Facebook ad-reachable audience of 582,000;
• Kyrgyzstan: 938,000;
• Philippines: 95.8 million, 165 times Tajikistan.

The two combined come to 1.52 million, less than 3% of Thailand. That’s the traffic ceiling, but a small population has its upside: fewer advertisers fighting for the volume.

02 Audience analysis

In Tajikistan, Instagram’s reachable audience is 2.05 million, while Facebook’s is only 582,000.

Kyrgyzstan: 3.9 million vs 938,000.

I pulled the neighbors while I was at it: Kazakhstan has a 5.2x gap, Uzbekistan 6.1x. It’s the same across all of Central Asia.

Instagram ÷ Facebook ad-reachable audience

The GEOs we’re familiar with are all the reverse. Philippines 0.28, Vietnam 0.15, Myanmar 0.07.

In PH, Facebook covers 97.7% of users, so setting placements the usual way is fine.

But copy that setup to Central Asia and three quarters of the people are simply gone.

The list gives you the country, not the entry point.

03 If you’re really going to test, treat the two countries separately

The easiest trap to fall into is running one set of creatives in both countries.

TJ’s adult Facebook audience is 73.2% male; KG is roughly half and half.

The languages differ too. Russian is an official language in KG, so creatives can be used as they are; TJ’s national language is Tajik, so you need to localize.

Purchasing power differs by about 2x: GDP per capita is $1,637 in one and $3,081 in the other, so the bid ceilings aren’t at the same height.

Network speed: in both countries, 3G/4G/5G share is above 90%.

I’ve put all of this into one chart. Go through it before you start testing.

Key differences between the two countries (audience and network data: DataReportal Digital 2026)

04 My take

Back to this BM incident.

The last big ban wave was in April. Now it’s here again, only four months later.

At this frequency, the turbulence isn’t an accident, it’s the norm.

What you can do is not put everything in one basket. That goes for accounts, and it goes for GEOs.

Small GEOs are for diversified testing, not the main battlefield. The main force is still the high-volume GEOs; open the small ones with a small budget. When the next wave hits, you won’t be left with nothing.

• Placements: start with Instagram only, add Facebook once it performs;
• Creatives: split TJ and KG into two groups;
• Timeframe: give it enough time. Samples build slowly in small GEOs, and stopping after three days like you would in Southeast Asia is an easy way to misjudge;
• Stop-loss: if CPL is clearly higher than the GEOs you know for several days in a row, shut it off and go back to your main GEOs.

If you happen to have Clickbox running, you can open a small group for these two GEOs to test, but note that payouts are low in both, so starting with a small budget is the better fit.