How To Get The Cheapest Facebook Ads While Not Sacrificing Quality
In the following, we will be discussing an important topic that is “How to Get the Cheapest Facebook Ads without Sacrificing Quality” and will discuss it in detail within the article. When you’re doing Facebook advertising or any type of advertising, your objective is not to get a win right out of the gate. That’s typically not going to happen. Your objective is to seek out some semblance of traction and start bringing the numbers up over time while trying to find key spots to optimize.
Time is money, and while you’re waiting for traction and good data, you’re bleeding cash. But you don’t have to. Here’s how to get the cheapest Facebook Ads while not sacrificing quality.
How Much Do Facebook Ads Cost
How much you’ll have to pay for impressions and clicks on Facebook depend on a variety of factors. According to WordStream research, the average CPC or cost per click is about $1.72, but that’s simply the average. The finance and insurance industries pay about $3.77 per click on average, while retail, apparel, travel, and hospitality are all less than $.75 per click. Those numbers also vary by country.
Aside from industry, there are a lot of variables that make up the cost of a Facebook click, which may include your target audience, objectives as well as competition. Generally speaking, if you aren’t in a super-competitive industry, you’ll want to keep your CPC below $2 to get a good ROI. Try these tips to help keep costs down while still getting qualified leads and engagements from your target audience.
Update Or Cut Ads That Aren’t Performing
The approach through which Facebook advertising cost is calculated is by looking at how many impressions they’re serving up as well as how many clicks you’re actually generating. A lot of clicks you get in relation to impressions, the less you pay for every action. That’s why it’s important to ensure that your ads are performing to their maximum potential.
Go to your Facebook Ads Manager and take a glance at the placements that are costing you an excessive amount of money. But don’t just deactivate them – there may be simple reasons why they aren’t performing. Really dig into the stats on each ad to figure out what you can do to improve the click-through rate (CTR).
For example, if you’re targeting your ad to people between 18-65 years old (I hope you’re not!), you can see which age segments perform the best for your ads. If I’m selling enterprise software, I probably don’t want to reach out to the segments of 18-25 years or 55+. I want to reach folks that are 25-55, and the performance metrics will probably reflect that. Once you actually update that targeting, the ad will start delivering a better CTR or click-through rate.
But there are some ads you should simply cut. Typically, right-column ads have terrible CTRs and Instagram campaigns can hurt your numbers. If you start turning those placements off, you’ll probably notice that you’re Facebook overall ad costs go down, and your relevance score goes up. Ditto on any ads that don’t seem to be working on any level – bad creative, bad messaging, bad targeting (hey, we all make mistakes!).
What Is Relevance Score
Relevance score is a 0-10 metric that Facebook uses to identify how sensible your ad is. The higher your relevance score is, the cheaper your cost per action that can actually be a click, like or other engagement.
Here’s a look at the scoring system:
- Relevance Score 1-3: Not relevant. Low impressions. Higher bids required.
- Relevance Score 4-7: Relevant. Solid impressions. Average bids.
- Relevance Score 8-10: Extremely relevant. High impressions. Lower bids.
When your relevance score is a 2-5, they’re going to charge you more because they’re showing your ad to a ton of people who basically aren’t interested. So if you’re not getting a lot of clicks, which means you are simply just wasting money. If you scroll through your Facebook feed, sometimes you’re going to see advertisements or posts that have thousands of likes as well as tons of people sharing it. At some or the other point you must have wondered: how do I get there?
The key is that you want to make sure you’re promoting only one specific post. A lot of times people will make 10 different ad sets because they want to try different variations or different types of targeting. But rather than doing that, you want to run just one advertisement instead. That way, you’ll be able to let that engagement build upon only one post.
If you do that, you’re going to drive your CTRs higher, because people like to click on things that a lot of other people are engaging with already. Then your CPCs are going to go down and your overall cost per acquisition (CPA) is going to go down as well. Then you’ll be making money from your campaign.
Use Your Images Wisely
Another thing you should start looking at is your images. After your ad has been running for a while, you’ll notice that the same people are seeing it over and over again. When you will keep your frequency as close as possible to 1, you will notice that your cost of advertising is lower.
In order to do that, you need to continually upload new images. I know this is really simple, but you’ll be shocked by how many people don’t do this. Facebook shows you the frequency. So if the frequency starts getting too high, you will notice that you are paying through the roof for those ads. Because if you keep seeing the same ad over and over again and you never clicked on it in the first place, why would you click on it later? Chances are you won’t. For that reason, you need to continually adjust your images. There’s another benefit from adjusting images: it helps you to A/B test them. Over time, you’ll figure out what types of images resonate most with your audience, and then you can go all-in on them.
I was running a marketing-related campaign targeted towards a Brazilian audience once, and trying to get them over to my marketing page. So I tried different images of Brazil, like the Brazilian flag, and I also tried a yellow Camaro (at the time, there was a popular pop song in Brazil called “Camaro Amarelo,” which translates to “Yellow Camaro”). And I even noticed that the CPC or cost per click kept going down. In fact, the costs per like we’re the most affordable after I was using the Brazilian flag or the yellow Camaro.
Explore Automation For Your Facebook Ads
If the idea of doing all this updating and analysis sounds a bit daunting, there’s always programmatic advertising, which automatically shuts off ads or segments that aren’t performing well.
AdEspresso lets you create a lot of different variations of your Facebook Ads right away. They’ll basically make changes to your headlines, pictures or anything you would like to test, and then you can just set certain thresholds for your bare minimum CPA. Then if your CPA goes too high, it’ll shut down automatically. In each case, it will auto-optimize for you and show you what’s winning overtime.
If you’re going to make ads at scale – let’s say you want to make 5-6 ads at a time so that you can test rapidly – don’t do just one and then go to your designer and have them do another one, and so on. Designers hate banner ads and they are going to kick your ass if you keep asking them to do these ads. Trust me, I’ve done this before and I’ve gotten the hate from designers. Instead, you should go to Design Pickle, which is $399 per month for unlimited designs from professional designers.
Another option is to merely subscribe to a stock image supplier and use high-quality stock photos that almost seem like they aren’t stock. Whatever you do, don’t just lift images from the Internet because you could find yourself in a lot of trouble with copyrights if you do that.
Remember, Cheaper Isn’t Always Better
When you’re running your ads, another thing that you should test is optimizing for cost. A lot of individuals look at campaigns or clicks to a web site and try to get clicks or likes for the most affordable dollar amount. But what you will find is that not every single visitor or each single like is equal. For example, when we were running the Brazil campaign, we ended up with over 100,000 likes, just from marketers in Brazil trying to learn more about marketing.
One campaign was costing us around three cents per like. Another campaign was costing around ten cents per like. Some ad people examined the campaigns and said “You should be turning off the one that’s 10 cents per like. Why would you pay 10 cents when you could be paying 3 cents?”
But when we really looked under the hood at clicks and engagement, the 10 cents per like campaign was getting 7x the comments and shares than the one that was 3 cents per like. That’s a huge difference. It’s not about getting the cheapest fans in the highest quantity; it’s about quality. Why would you want fans who don’t engage? You want the best fans. In fact, if you have got fewer fans but a lot of them are sharing your content, Facebook will start showing that content to their friends and other people. That’s virality.
When you are driving traffic to a web site, don’t just look for the cheapest clicks, either. Target the right people: your ideal buyers. Cut out anyone who might not be your ideal buyer. Sure, you’ll end up spending more per click, but your campaign will convert way better and you’ll recoup that money. For example, I ran a webinar and we drove Facebook traffic to it. We started off doing re-marketing and getting clicks at around 20 cents per click, which wasn’t too bad. And it was converting.
But you know what? As the campaign progressed, that price climbed to $1 per click and that I instinctively made a bitter face. I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. How are we going to make the numbers work?” But those people were way more qualified. Sure, it cost us more money, more than 5x, but the conversion rate was so much higher than it was actually more profitable than those 20-cent clicks.
Try Using Facebook Lead Ads
Facebook Lead Ads have been around for a while, however, hardly anyone uses them. Basically, they allow you to collect information about user’s rights on Facebook instead of sending them to a landing page. You’re allowed to gather info directly from Facebook’s app.
In the above-given example for Lead Ads, you can see how it actually works. Somebody clicks on a CTA button on an ad to join, sign up, subscribe, etc. as well as they are taken to a form where they enter their contact information. Then, you have access to that information and can follow up on that lead.
Hootsuite has a good round-up of Facebook advertisers who ran lead ads and saw not only higher conversions, but lower costs compared to a standard ad that drives users to a landing page. Will they work for everyone? No. But it’s worth trying to see if they work for you.
Asking queries is a significantly effective tactic when creating lead ads, but only if you do it right. In a study done by AdEspresso on Lead Ads, they found that when you’re asking one question, your conversion rate is much higher than if you’re asking 7-8 questions. If you’ve got only 1 question, your conversion rate can be as high as 30-40%. If you add too many questions, it’s going to drop super low and you’re going to be paying a lot of money. Makes sense, right?
Don’t Forget Retargeting
When you retarget an audience specifically with Facebook Ads, you’re delivering those ads to a “warm” audience. In other words, they are those people who are already engaged with your brand in some way. As the saying goes, a user needs seven touchpoints with your brand before they are ready to convert.
Retargeting hits people lower in the marketing funnel. And because those people are more likely to click than someone who is seeing your ad for the first time, you’ll bring the CPC down.
Final Thoughts
Facebook Ads don’t have to cost a fortune. If you do them right, you’ll be able to get quality leads and customers without blowing your whole marketing budget. As always, when it comes to marketing, it’s important to test different tactics, then optimize, then test more tactics, then optimize. Rinse. Repeat. Success.
