The global average CPC (cost per click) for Facebook ads is around $0.97, according to Adespresso’s exhaustive research.
As with most businesses, your resources are limited. You can’t afford to throw money out willy-nilly, spray and pray, and just “try it out”. This is hard cash, and it needs to be taken care of.
Before your Facebook ad budgets spiral out of control, check out these simple ways to keep your Facebook ad campaigns running while keeping your Facebook ad budgets consistently low.
Start with low budgets
We aren’t sure if it’s the “keeping up with the Jones Syndrome” but the first tendency with Facebook is to throw what you can and see what sticks. This isn’t outdoor advertising or newspaper advertising — there’s no need to spray and pray.
Start with relatively lower budgets to start with since:
- Facebook puts your campaigns into a “learning” phase. What’s the point in blowing millions of dollars while Facebook is “learning” and “figuring out”?
- You need enough time (and a budget to last) to experiment, to test things out, to try split testing, and to optimize your campaigns.
- You’d be doing mistakes while you are launching your campaigns.
Start low. Find out what works. Scale up.
Use Custom Audiences
If you’ve been building up your audiences visiting your website and/or landing pages within Facebook by using Facebook Custom Audiences, by using the Facebook pixel (hopefully, you are), be sure to start from the start and build up a sizeable audience (even if you aren’t really launching any Facebook ad campaigns).
By doing so, you’ll have your custom audiences (such as website visitors) ready for you when you want to use it.
By including your custom audiences within your ad sets for your campaigns, you’ll automatically reduce your cost per click per campaign or ad set and thereby reduce your overall spend.
Meanwhile, targeting your custom audiences would mean that you are reaching out to all your visitors who’ve visited your pages, read your blog, checked out your products, etc.
Constantly refine (& redefine) audiences
Fact #1: Most business (and even agencies) don’t spend enough time on “audiences” while creating campaigns.
Fact #2: They repeat Fact #1 for every campaign they run.
One of the reasons why most ad campaigns have a low relevance score, high Costs per click, and hence campaigns quickly go “expensive”, is because most businesses and advertisers don’t bother to take their time to create their audiences.
The right way to do it is this:
Build your customer persona: It’s easy enough to read this but we can bet you’ll skip this step.
Pamela Vaughan has a free template and detailed instructions on how to build your buyer persona along with 20 questions to ask to help you define your buyer persona by Lindsay Kolowich of Hubspot.
Go beyond the obvious: For a real estate merchant, you might rush in and think that Facebook’s audience that says something like “looking to move” might be the right fit.
We’ve seen Facebook audiences with nothing else but a location and just one or two insertions for Facebook audiences like “ Household Income above 25%… ” and “Looking to move”.
Instead, for a particular location and demographic type, you could target not just the obvious options but also things like magazines they read, newspapers they read, TV shows they watch, groups or communities they might be associated with, and more.
Use Facebook Audience Insights: Facebook has everything you need to at least give you a jumpstart to let you know who your ideal audience is already, even before you get anywhere near launching your campaigns.
If you have a large enough visitor base and healthy engagement on your Facebook page and on your website, Facebook Audience insights can provide you with information on gender profile, demographics, locations, interests, other pages your audiences like, and so much more.
Use it. It’s free.
Take your time out to create a comprehensive list within Facebook Audience section with the help of your own construction of the buyer persona that best fits your business.
Boost your Relevance Score
The devil is in the details. It’s all good to check your Facebook statistics to see how your campaigns are performing and only look at those metrics that make you feel good such as “website purchases”, “leads”, and results.
Before you get to results, you need to keep an eye out for the relevance score. After Adespresso’s analysis of over 104,000 ads, the rule is as simple as it gets:
“The Higher the relevance score, the lower the CPC is”
Although there isn’t a secret rulebook that tells you how to boost your relevance score for your Facebook campaigns, Greg Swan of CPCStrategy recommends:
- Know your target audience
- Keep changing your ads frequently (see point above)
- Be sure to create ads and copy tailor-made for the exact target audience you are aiming to hook in.
Get brutal with high frequency of ads
Frequency, simply put, is the average number of people who see your ad. It’s an average (which it’s not absolute and that one particular person could have seen the ad more than what the number tells you).
With a high frequency of ads, your Cost per Click takes a massive hit. According to Adespresso, at a frequency of 9, the average cost per click increase by 161% compared to the beginning of the campaign.
If your frequency is high, you’ll not only end up spending (a lot) on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis but also your ads are subjected to banner blindness. Your ads, with a high frequency, could also be boring the heck out of your audience and maybe even irritate them.
Which of these tips are you following to make your Facebook Ad campaign costs stay low at all times?
Visit our Ad Management Services page to learn more about how we can help with your Facebook Ad campaigns. If you’d like some strategic input, be sure to fill out this short form, and member of our expert team will contact you to schedule a call.