3 Easy Ways to Decrease Your Facebook Ads Costs
Running Facebook Ads is a constant battle between strategic elements. Keeping an eye on your daily metrics to ensure your creative is not fatigued, audience is not over concentrated, and tracking is accurate are all keys to keeping your overall ad costs down and return up. If you notice that over time your costs are not decreasing or worse, have been increasing, it’s time to take a look into what may be causing that.
In this article, we’ll dive into three easy ways you can keep your Facebook Ad costs down.
TOC
Key Elements
Decreasing Your Costs
Alternative Solutions
When to Shut Off an Ad
Takeaways
Monitoring your Facebook Ads on a daily basis will help you identify new ways to keep your costs down and return up.
Key Elements
The number one mistake Facebook advertisers make is shutting off their ads too soon. If you shut off your ad too soon, you won’t be giving Facebook enough time to collect the data it needs to distribute your ads to the right people. Showing your ads to the right people is the key to keeping costs low. That being said, here are three key elements that help advertisers achieve this.
Budget - Facebook requires 50 conversions each week to fully optimize a campaign and allow it to exit the learning phase. Your budget must take this into account to give your ads a real chance at succeeding.
Audience - Obviously defining your audience is essential for determining if the right people see it, but your audience also needs to have enough people to allow Facebook to have options. If your ad is spending $100 a day and your audience size is only 100,000, Facebook will very quickly run out of potential users to show your ad to. Not all 100,000 users will get on Facebook during the duration of your campaign and not all of them will be identified by Facebook as relevant or potential customers for your promotion.
Creative - The content of your ad itself is vital for giving your campaign a chance at success. What you say, the offer and value you provide users, and the visuals you use to engage them will all play a role in whether a potential customer stops to learn more or continues to scroll.
Combined, these three elements alone can determine whether or not your ad succeeds. Most of the time when an ad fails, it can be attributed to one or all three of these elements. Likewise, when it succeeds, it reflects an effective execution of all three.
That being said, keeping an eye on these three elements will help you monitor your ad performance and identify ways to improve as it runs.
Decreasing Your Costs
The best way to decrease your costs is by making subtle changes to one or all three of the elements mentioned above. Don’t know where to start? Here’s how.
Compare your budget to your results. If your campaign starts out strong but falls off quickly, chances are your Facebook Ads budget is not large enough to allow for enough conversion events each week. For example, if you need 50 conversions a week for a fully optimized campaign and your average cost per conversion is $10, any budget less than $500 a week will prevent you from ever reaching full optimization, which will increase your costs dramatically.
Look at frequency and market size. If your budget is large enough to allow for 50 conversions a week but your costs still aren’t decreasing or are even increasing, take a look into your audience and frequency metrics. Compare how many people you are reaching a day to the number of people in your target market. If you’re reaching 5,000 people a day for a campaign that is built to reach 200,000 over a month, your costs will be affected as soon as the same people begin seeing your ad too many times in one day. A good way to determine this is by looking at your overall frequency over time. A frequency over 1.30 is generally a good indicator that Facebook has run out of new users to show your ad to and you need to increase your audience size.
Look at your audience interests and behaviors. This is where most advertisers over-target. They add too many interests or try to narrow their audience so much that they are leaving out tons of potential customers. If you are targeting by interests, try to keep it relevant and vague and only narrow your audience when you are sure about targeting specific interests or behaviors. Generally, you never want to add more than 5 - 7 audience characteristics.
Check your creative. If your budget seems fine, audience is still fresh, and you’re still experiencing high costs, you most likely need to change your creative. You may need to look at changing your hook, your headline, your offer, or your visual content. Video ads most often work best, especially when they are less than 30 - 60 seconds long. Try using action words and curiosity-piquing phrases to capture the user’s attention and draw them in. Make sure the content of your ad is also relevant to the interests and behaviors outlined in your audience.
Check your landing page. Wherever your ad takes users to after they click is vital for completing the conversion. You can read up more on how to optimize your landing page with a few Google Searches. Make sure to take a look at landing page best practices for your industry as well.
Whether your ad has been running for a while and has experienced rising costs, been running for only a short time and has not seen costs decrease, or has experienced a dramatic change in costs, these three elements and these 5 steps will help determine how well your ad performs.
Alternative Solutions
These five steps aren’t the only way to keep your costs down. Targeting warm audiences that have previously engaged with your brand is also very effective. You can do that by creating custom Facebook audiences from people that have watched your videos, visited your Page, engaged with your ads, or visited your website. These audiences are called retargeting audiences and help advertisers encourage action among users that are already known to be more likely to react to their content as they already have in the past.
Another alternative is using lookalike audiences. You can create lookalike audiences from your website traffic, conversion events, and video views and Facebook will identify and target similar profiles that are just as likely to take that same desired action. Lookalike audiences generally cost a little more to get started and you need at least 1,000 users in your original audience to make it more effective, but a strong lookalike audience can help convert your ideal customers for even lower costs than you could produce on your own.
Lastly, you can also use less expensive campaign objectives such as traffic or engagement objectives to build a retargeting audience for more cost-efficient targeting later on. If you plan on running a retargeting conversions campaign, you will want to make sure your retargeting audiences are large enough, generally 100,000 users or more.
When to Shut Off an Ad
Knowing when to shut off an underperforming ad is tough. If your ad has been running for two weeks and you haven’t seen any changes, you should definitely consider adjusting elements within your campaign. If you make several changes and do not notice any improvement, you can general tell it’s time to shut the ad off. The more difficult part is making too many changes too quickly. If you make small changes to your campaign several times a week, it can ruin your chances at ever seeing a fully optimized campaign.
It’s important to allow your ad to run, to keep an eye on important metrics, and to ensure that you are not making too many changes too quickly. It is also important to allow your changes enough time to adjust as well, or your ad may be doomed to never leave the learning phase.
Takeaways
Allow your budget enough room to convert at least 50 users a week.
Ensure your audience size reflects your budget and objective.
Keep an eye on frequency to help determine how often your audience is exposed to your ad.
Do not target too many different audience interests and behaviors.
Change up creative elements as ads fatigue.
Do not increase your budget by over 20% at a time. Likewise, don’t make too many changes too quickly.
Use retargeting campaigns and lookalike audiences to run less costly campaigns.
Know which elements to make small adjustments to when costs rise, and which elements to change when costs stagnate.
