Have you ever been surprised how easy it is to break your social media budget before you even realize it? This is especially true if you run a large number of Facebook ads that are not intentionally optimized to have the lowest possible cost-per-click (CPC).
Many businesses and marketers don’t realize that you don’t have to sacrifice cost to get results. Instead, the way the system is set up, you’ll likely see lower CPC because you get more results.
Do you want to learn more? In this post, we’ll teach you how to push your social ad budget even further with these six quick tips for lowering your Facebook ad cost.
6 tips to lower your Facebook ads CPC
1. Understand your relevance score
Because your relevance score will directly affect CPC, it’s important to watch and understand it carefully.
Facebook ads will provide a relevance score for each campaign you run. As the name suggests, this score shows how relevant your ad is to your target audience.
We don’t know the exact algorithm Facebook uses to calculate it, which makes it a black box measurement, but we do know that positive interactions such as engagement, clicks, and ad save will increase the score, while hiding the ad will lower the score.
Facebook prioritizes ads that are highly relevant and will actually lower your CPC if you have high scores. This can sometimes significantly reduce the cost of your ads. That’s why you should monitor the relevance score for all of your campaigns and adjust or stop campaigns with low-end scores.
2. Focus on increasing CTR
Increasing the clickthrough rate (CTR) will increase your relevance score, thus lowering your Facebook advertising cost.
- Here are some of the best ways to increase your ads’ CTRs:
- Always use desktop news feed ad placements that provide higher CTRs.
- Use the appropriate CTA buttons. “Learn More” sometimes gets more clicks than “Shop Now” for cold audiences who don’t trust you yet.
- Write simple, clean text that gets straight to the point and doesn’t let users guess what they clicked or why they should click.
- Keep your frequency (or the number of times the same user sees the same ad) as low as possible. If the frequency gets too high, your CTR will drop.
Image source: AdEspresso
However, the most effective way to increase your CTR is undoubtedly to run highly targeted campaigns for niche audiences. Which brings us to our next tip…
3. Run highly targeted campaigns
Running highly targeted campaigns gives you a distinct advantage: you know exactly who you’re targeting, so you can create ads and offers that you know will be buyers. For example, a comedy club might have the best chance of showing ads for Jim Gaffigan to a more family-friendly audience and ads for Amy Schumer to women ages 18 to 35.
You can use different targeting options such as age, gender, location, interests and even behaviors to build solid audiences. Under Behaviors, you can target, for example, specific device owners, anniversary contacts in the next two to three months, and users who have recently made a commercial purchase.
You can find any group of people you’re trying to target with Facebook’s incredible targeting system.
4. Use retargeting
Retargeting is the practice of showing your ads to people familiar with you and your product. Because this is a “hot” audience, they will be more likely to interact with or click on your ad, which will increase CTRs and lower CPC.
You can create custom audiences from those who interact with your page, site, and mobile app.
You can even use retargeting to send a follow-up ad to users who have already watched most of your video ad that was shown to a cold audience; this increases their likelihood of clicking because they are somewhat familiar with your ad.
You can also use custom audiences in your email list for retargeting. Whether you’re showing users ads based on their past purchases or past interactions on your site, you’ll know your relationship with them in advance. This can help you create ads and offers that they will be most interested in.
5. Split and copy test images
If you want to keep your CPC low, you should A/B test everything. It doesn’t matter if you come up with the most ingenious proposal ever – you still need to test it out separately. Create different versions of the same ad campaign using different images, videos, and text (both in the description and in the headline).
This not only helps you see what your audience actually prefers, it allows you to run campaigns with higher CTRs and pause on the lackluster ones, but also keeps your ads fresh and interesting to users who see them. This reduces frequency, increases engagement, and keeps your expenses low.
6. Target Facebook’s desktop News Feed only
There are exceptions to this; Both Instagram Ads and Facebook’s mobile ads are more effective when the goal is mobile app downloads or purchases. However, desktop news feed ads on Facebook consistently have higher CTR and engagement rates than other placements (possibly thanks to larger images, longer descriptions, and ease of desktop navigation). This increases the relevance score and lowers the cost of your ads.
It automatically activates a number of placements, including Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and mobile news feed ads. You have to manually disable them by manually unchecking the placements.
Select “Desktop only” in “Device Types” to turn off mobile overlays.
Facebook ads can eat up your social budget, but with some strategic adjustments, you can actually pay less for your ads and get more results at the same time. By focusing on increasing your engagement and CTR, you will increase your relevance score and lower your advertising cost in the process. No catch-22. The higher your ad performs, the less it will cost you. This is a huge incentive from Facebook to offer a great system to users and marketers alike, and it’s clearly effective.
Make the most of your Facebook ad budget with AdEspresso by Moyens I/O. The powerful tool makes it easy to create, manage and optimize Facebook ad campaigns.
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