Facebook Advertising Cost: Keep It Low

Facebook Advertising cost has already gone through the roof. You better know how to keep those costs down.

Facebook is turning into a behemoth of an advertising platform with an incomparable number of visual formats for ads, the number of different campaigns you can run, the kind of audiences you can target, and the way you can build up (and manage your audiences).

Facebook advertising cost, meanwhile, is only soaring thanks to an ever-increasing number of advertisers who want their ads to be shown in the same newsfeed (saved by the different audiences, demographics, and interests advertisers want to target).

Your Facebook Advertising cost depends on the overall budget and the actual price to pay to get the specific results you seek. Learn more about how Facebook ad auctions work.

What is the Cost of Advertising on Facebook then? The answer you won’t like: it depends.

• What target market are you aiming for?
• What kind of audiences are you targeting?
• Are your campaigns regular campaigns or retargeting campaigns?
• How are your ads and copy written?
• What is your daily budget?
• Are you using landing pages or are you sending all clicks to your website? [ Don’t do this]

In 2016, $0.27 was the average CPC (Cost per click) for a Facebook ad and $7.19 was the average CPM (Cost per thousand impressions), according to Betsy McLeod of Bluecorona.

According to AdStage, the average CPC of a Facebook Ad was $0.54 while the average CPM was $12.45 and the average CTR was 2. 39% according to Adstage.

The average CPA (Cost per Action) or Cost per result across industries is a hefty $18.68, according to Wordstream.

Those costs will continue to go up and more advertisers take to Facebook and Instagram advertising. How do you ensure you keep your Facebook advertising cost low?

Here are some tips:

Choose the right audience (Spend time here)

While it’s one thing that Facebook Advertising’s most compelling USP has always been the most granular way you can slice and dice to reach the exact kind of people you want to target, it’s another thing that most businesses don’t put in the time and effort to choose the right audience.

Start with a holistic understanding of your own audience from Google Analytics and Facebook Audience Insights. Then, do your research on Google, Google Trends, Facebook’s Knowledge Graph, Keyword research, and use Facebook’s own suggestions to narrow down to the exact audience you want to reach.

Why bother, you ask?

The more targeted your audience is, the higher the relevance of your ads is. Facebook charges you much less for a highly relevant ad compared to an ad that scores low on relevance.

Image credit: Hootsuite

That’s a fact.

Here’s what Ana of Adespresso has to say about that:

“You’re in direct competition with every other marketer who wants access to that particular customer.

That particular customer that I, as a yoga mat salesperson, am targeting is not going to have yoga as their only interest. This customer also loves fishing, scuba diving, skiing, fine dining, and has recently opened a small business. These are each traits that multiple brands will be targeting uniquely, and we’re all pitted against each other to place an ad on this one, very valuable, very diverse customer ”.

Keep Ads Fresh & Use Spunk

Normal ads are boring. Ads that just say “Get 50% off” are so common that they might just slip through the newsfeed of even the most bored (but specifically targeted) Facebook user.

Use bright colors, use language that’s simple but still something that grabs attention, go full-length on the copy if you have to, use personality, bring out your voice, bring in brightly-colored icons and images.

Use some spunk. Experiment with various angles to bring out or invoke feelings or emotions. If you’d like (and if you can) court controversy too.

Here are some examples to bring in spunk into your ads:

“You are Not Tim Ferriss.You Need This ”
“Your Sales Funnels Suck, & You Know It”
“Got time? You Shouldn’t Have Any Left”

Opt for Facebook Video Ads

Facebook Video ads provide you a way to get higher reach, a healthier click-through rate (CTR) and for a much lower CPM or CPC (you don’t even need to test this).

Video makes for very compelling medium and using video for ads helps you start your campaigns healthy giving you the results you seek. In a case study on Refinery29 (sustained campaign, stretching 12 days with video), it was found that Refinery29 got a whopping 87% increase in traffic to the landing page and a 56% increase in conversions for those people who saw the branding video first.

Video just works, and I recently wrote about some incredible Facebook video ad creation tools that you can use to create videos in no time.

What’s your campaign objective?

Too many Facebook campaigns out there has no objective.

Facebook provides you with various options when it comes to campaign objectives and the objective you choose (and then how you optimize your campaigns for that objective) determines just expensive or “flapping-arms-because-this-is-too-good-to-be-true” cheap.

Adespresso did an extensive study of various factors that affect Facebook advertising cost.

You can see that the “reach” objective is by far the most expensive while “page engagement” is the least expensive.

Thankfully, important campaign objectives such as video views, lead generation, offsite conversions, and link clicks are all affordable.

Anna Gotter of Adespresso advocates using specific campaign objectives for each relevant ad set.

“You would, for example, focus one set of ads on lead generation. You would focus the next set of ads on social engagement. The third set would focus on remarketing products to your custom audience to drive purchases. Another set of ads would focus on connecting with new users, which you would accomplish by targeting users who you aren’t yet connected to.”

Go global (If you can)

Note: this is valid only if you have products or services that can be served globally. You are better of with Local facebook advertising or specific location targeting if your business doesn’t allow you to sell to people in every country.

If your product is global, and if you are targeting only United States, UK, Australia, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and others, you are throwing money out into the drain. It makes no sense to just keep advertising in countries that you “think” where the money is.

Plenty of money is spent (So, what are you selling?) in India, Brazil, and South Africa too.

Going global with your campaigns helps you lower your overall CPC, CPM, and CPA.

How do you plan to keep your Facebook advertising costs low? Tell me about it.