Are Facebook Ads expensive? Maybe, maybe not. Are you worried about your rising average Facebook Ads Cost?
Do you still think you can generate positive ROI (Return on Investment) or ROAS, given the unstoppable rise in Facebook Advertising costs (and also on Instagram)? Absolutely, but only if you are willing to give your campaigns some time, follow the right strategy, and stay patient.
So, how do you do it?
Here’s what you should be doing to reduce your average Facebook Ad cost instead of running blind and spending thousands of dollars for nothing:
Do some thinking Upfront
Think about what you really want from your campaigns. You can’t just waltz into your Facebook ads manager, put up a random image or video ad, and hope to make a killing out of it. If you don’t know what you want, you won’t get anything in return.
Here are a few real examples of how my thought process goes before I decide what kind of campaigns I should be running on Facebook:
Example 1:
For the forever free membership of my Ultimate Resource Kit — a compendium of digital marketing resources to make digital marketing easier for marketers, agencies, and small business owners — I can choose to drive traffic to my landing page.
So, I’d first create the landing page for my ultimate resource kit, set up a regular Facebook campaign (with images, images turned into a video or an actual video) and choose the “traffic” objective while I optimize the campaign for “landing page views”.
The Ultimate Resource Kit was built as an online course on Podia. For the online courses, I use Podia’s landing page builder for the landing pages so the actual transaction (for everyone who signs up for the kit) is still a “website purchase” for exactly $0 dollars.
You could build landing pages with Unbounce and Leadpages, regardless of your business, however.
Facebook will show the number of views of landing pages and website purchases in this case.
Example 2:
I also provide digital marketing training locally. In this case, my potential clients will actually sign up for a demo session first before they pay for a 30-day intensive course on Digital marketing. My goal is to then generate leads using Facebook lead ads by targeting campaigns to a select audience.
After leads are generated, they are sent an automatic email by Drip email marketing automation system to allow them to book a slot (available every Saturday, using Calendly), while a custom audience is also created simultaneously within Facebook.
See what I am trying to do?
You need to think about what type of campaigns you’ll run, your objectives, and how your marketing workflow is going to be like. If you just start without thinking, you can say goodbye to your ad budget (those nasty Facebook Ads cost you a pretty penny).
Use Retargeting To Reduce Facebook Ad Costs
One of the reasons why I implore you to add a Facebook pixel to your website (even if you have no intention of doing advertising now) is to help Facebook populate an audience of people interested in your business.
- People who visit your website or landing pages.
- People who engage with your videos
- People who interact with your Facebook business page
- Visitors of specific pages on your website.
You don’t have to do any Facebook campaigns to create audiences such as above within Facebook.
Anytime you are ready, you have the option of targeting “only these audiences” instead of the whole world.
This is retargeting, by the way, and you’ll spend much less on Facebook ads while targeting a highly-qualified, targeted, and engaged audiences.
Retargeting, all by itself, is a great way to bring down the average Facebook Ads cost.
Read more:
[Infographic] Retargeting Statistics For you To Gawk At
7 Cardinal Rules for Retargeting You Should Follow
Not All Businesses work 24×7
If you really wanted to, you could run your ads and generate results (leads or any other kind of conversions) 24×7. If you do this, however, you’ll obviously need a higher level of daily budget and you’ll spend more money per month (or for the time frame that your ads will run for).
But then, when you are just starting out, running your ads 24×7 is an overkill. Your ads don’t need to run all the time especially since most people shut off after a certain time. Running your ads at 2 AM in the morning is truly not needed at the stage you are in.
Use the Facebook ads scheduling and dayparting feature within your ad sets for Facebook ad campaign.
Schedule your ads to run only at specific blocks of time such as Monday to Friday: 9.00 AM to 6.00 PM or Monday to Friday: 7.00 AM to 9.00 PM, Saturdays: 9.00 AM to 6.00 PM
Scheduling your ads will work great in the initial stages of your campaign helping you spend much less and make your ads really work when they should.
Don’t Choose Entire Countries
Want to learn a simple trick to reduce Facebook Ads cost? Stop choosing entire countries.
For local businesses, it’s easy enough. Just choose the locality or the geographic local (plus or minus a few miles in radius) and launch your Facebook campaigns.
We’ll assume that you aren’t a local business and that you have national or international audiences.
If you have a business with a national or International spread such as an e-commerce store that ships worldwide, an online business, a blog or a publication with a global audience, it gets tricky.
When you don’t have an endless supply of dollars to spend on your Facebook campaigns, it’s best to choose very specific geographic locals (even for international targeting).
How, you ask?
Instead of choosing “United States” as a country, choose cities or major states. Dial it down to maybe five or six major choices. For instance, only choose New York, California, Texas, Ohio, Florida, and Washington.
With a more focused audience, your ad spend will come down while you are still hitting at a target audience that’s most likely to respond to your ads.
You can always scale up to the entire country (or countries) later when you get results from your first few campaigns.
How are you running your campaigns? What are some of those tips to save with Facebook Advertising?