Effective Tips On How To Reduce Your Facebook Ad Cost

Facebook advertising costs have been slowly increasing over the years, especially recently thanks to the heavy decline in organic reach. Paid promotion on Facebook seems like the more viable options for businesses days, therefore the already fierce competition on the platform has is getting even hotter.

The recent estimates show that Facebook Ads costs $0.4 per click (CPC) and $14.4 per one thousand impressions (CPM) on average.

A number of factors affect your Facebook ad costs and give you an idea about what needs to be optimized if you want to get the most bang for the buck:

Audience: The size of your target audience could vary greatly based on the geographic, demographic, interest, and behavior filters you set, and it impacts your advertising costs. Targeting a more specific audience costs you more, but

increases your chances of achieving your selected goal. Targeting a broad audience may cost less, but could negatively impacts performance since you may attract low-value interactions.

Timing: The costs of Facebook ads can fluctuate a lot, sometimes in a matter of hours. This could also happen in special occasions like holidays or important spot events. The effect of timing on Facebook Ads costs is directly correlated to the amount if competition you’re facing; The more advertisers you have to compete with, the more expensive ads will get.

Objective: Your campaigns could have different objectives which could change the bidding model and costs of advertising. For example, awareness campaigns that focus on introducing brand to new people usually cost less than conversion campaign which try to make people to purchase from you.

Placement: Your ads can appear on many places across Facebook’s network which also includes Instagram and Facebook Audience Network. These placements consist of Instagram, Instagram Stories, Facebook newsfeed, Facebook right column, Messenger, and Audience Network. Each of them cost differently and you should select the one’s the better fit your business objective and budget.

Try following these tried and tested practices to optimize your Facebook campaigns to the fullest without having to sacrifice costs:

As mentioned earlier, the size and demographic of your target audience directly influence your Facebook advertising costs. You could go with expanding your audience and reduce filtering layers to decrease costs, but that’s necessarily a good solution because you won’t gain any noticeable performance advantage.

Furthermore, not all campaigns give you much room to broaden your target audience (e.g., retargeting campaigns). The better method is running highly-targeted campaigns. Focus on a narrow audience that’s more likely to engage with your ad and take your desired action. You’ll have much more options to tweak your ads and make them more appealing to your audience based on the knowledge you have about them.

Ad Relevance Diagnostics system is Facebook’s take on ad quality ranking and its importance in keeping your CPC low is often neglected. This system assigns a Relevance Score to your ad based on how relevant it is to your intended audience. Engagement, clicks, and saving ads are positive factors and hiding ads will tanks your score. In Facebook’s ad auction model, the Relevance Score is one of the major factors to decide the winner, since Facebook prioritizes higher-quality ads.

Achieving a high score on Facebook ad quality ranking could significantly lower your CPC.

A common mistake between Facebook advertisers is putting too much focus on generating awareness and skip on converting warm audiences. If you’ve managed to create warm audience segments whether through previous awareness campaigns or tracking prospects on your website with Facebook pixel, it’s absolutely crucial to run retargeting campaigns and get these people to buy from you (isn’t that your ultimate goal after all?).

Warm audiences already know your brand and may even have shown interest in you buy checking out and signing in your website or subscribing to a newsletter. It’s much more likely to convert these people and luckily, Facebook gives you some very powerful options to directly target them with customized ads (like Dynamic Product Ads).

There’s no argue that you have to invest in creating high-quality and consistent-with- your-visual-identity creative assets for your Facebook ads. However, that’s not the end of story. Constantly using the same sets of creatives, albeit top-notch, will result in ad fatigue and numbness, meaning your target audience will either grow sick of seeing your ads, or gains a natural ability to ignore them without effort.

Even if your ads are performing well, consider creating more high-quality assets to keep things fresh and exciting. Make sure to closely monitor campaign performance and refresh creatives if you notice a decline in metrics that matter to you.

Ad fatigue is one of the biggest obstacles you’ll face while running campaigns on Facebook, and adjusting ad frequency is an effective way to avoid it. Bombard your audience with ads every day will make them tired of you, resulting in lower engagement, fewer click, and higher costs. When setting up campaigns, pay attention to scheduling and adjust the displaying times of your campaigns with the active hours of your target audience. Use frequency caps to limit the number of

times a specific user sees your ads and if possible, use different sets of creatives for each time to keep things fresh.

Testing is an inseparable part of digital advertising and it’s key to find out what need to be tweaked, altered, or ditched altogether in order to maximize performance and minimize costs. Facebook provides advertisers with tons of performance analysis and actionable data to help them with this matter. Use them and split test almost everything to discover the optimal combination of ad properties, creatives, and copy.

A/B testing should be an integral part of your Facebook advertising strategy. Create the same ads with different images, videos, CTA copy, targeting, and placement to find out which ones work best and learn the behavior patterns of your audience. You could use a Facebook Ads spy tool to discover newest trends or fresh ideas for each aspect of your campaigns and put into test.