How much it cost advertising on facebook
How Much Does Facebook Advertising Cost?
Advertising on Facebook has become a trusted strategy for businesses worldwide with around 7 million advertisers active on the platform. If you’re thinking about promoting your company on Facebook, however, you probably have one question: How much does Facebook advertising cost?
Watch the video below to learn the basics of Facebook advertising, and keep reading for more information about the price of Facebook ads, including how much Facebook ads cost for other bidding models, like cost-per-like (CPL) and cost-per-download (CPA).
If you want to lower your ad costs and improve your social media advertising strategy now, talk with our award-winning strategists. With a client retention rate of 91%, we are the trusted choice for businesses worldwide.
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Table of Contents
- How much does Facebook advertising cost?
- [Summary] Facebook ad costs
- How does the Facebook ad auction work?
- What determines Facebook advertising costs?
- Are Facebook advertising costs worth the price?
- FAQs for Facebook advertising costs
How much does Facebook advertising cost?
Facebook advertising costs, on average, $0.94 per click and $12.07 per 1000 impressions. Ad campaigns focused on earning likes or app downloads can expect to pay $1.07 per like and $5.47 per download, on average.
[Summary] Facebook ad costs
For a handy breakdown of Facebook advertising costs, check out this table:
$0. 97 | Cost-per-click (CPC) |
| $7.19 | Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) |
| $1.07 | Cost-per-like (CPL) |
| $5.47 | Cost-per-download (CPA) |
While compiled from an in-depth AdEspresso study that assessed almost $300 million of Facebook ad spend, these numbers are only averages. Your business may see higher or lower Facebook ad costs due to several factors, like ad placement, target market, industry, and more.
That’s why you want to use these amounts as a point of reference, rather than as a standard, for your company’s ad campaigns on Facebook. If not, you risk setting unrealistic expectations for your campaign, which can result in poor performance and unhappy company decision makers.
Before exploring the different factors that influence how much your Facebook ads costs, it’s helpful to review how the Facebook ad auction works.
Once you know how Facebook operates its ad auction, you can start optimizing your Facebook ad costs.
Here is an overview of the steps leading up to the Facebook ad auction:
- Advertiser logs into Ad Manager to create a campaign and ad
- Advertiser chooses their daily budget (or the maximum they’ll spend each day)
- Advertiser selects what action they’ll pay for, like views, clicks, or downloads
- Advertiser builds its audience using demographic, interest, and device targeting
- Advertiser adds their creatives, like their ad copy, images, and video
- Advertiser approves and launches their ad
Once there’s a chance to show an ad, the Facebook ad auction happens:
- Facebook grades every potential ad’s bid, estimated action rates, and ad quality
- Facebook uses estimated action rates and ad quality to determine ad relevance
- Facebook generates an ad’s total value, based on bid, estimated action rate, and ad quality
- Facebook delivers the winning ad — or the ad with the highest total value
Based on the ad auction, you can tell which metrics matter most to your ads and their costs:
- Ad bid
- Estimated action rate
- Ad quality
- Ad relevance
If you can optimize these metrics, like by improving your ad’s quality and relevance to users, you can lower how much your Facebook ads costs.
Facebook even says that ads with the most relevance cost less and get more facetime with users.
Keep reading to learn more about these metrics and how to optimize them, below.
Learn How to Create Facebook Ads
Like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising costs on Google Ads, a variety of factors impact your Facebook advertising costs. If you want to build a realistic budget for your business, then you need to understand how these factors influence the cost of Facebook ads.
The eight factors that determine how much Facebook ads cost include:
- Audience
- Ad Budget
- Ad Bid
- Ad Objective
- Ad Placement
- Ad Quality
- Season
- Industry
Learn more about each of these factors now:
1. Audience
An in-depth study by AdEspresso on Facebook advertising costs revealed that your target audience has a significant impact on the prices of your Facebook ads. Whether you’re focusing on a specific age, gender, or interest, you can expect a shift in your ad expenses.
For example, if your ad campaign targets women, your CPC may increase by $0.55. That’s $0.15 more than if your ad campaign targeted men. When you look at age, ads that target individuals 55-65 years or older tend to have substantially higher costs than campaigns focusing on users 25-34 years old.
That’s because Facebook only has 26 million users between the ages of 55 and 64. While that may seem like a high number, it doesn’t come close to the more than 58 million people (between the ages of 25 and 34) that use Facebook.
When you advertise on Facebook, you can also target specific interests or audience attributes, including:
- Outdoor recreation
- Meditation
- Philanthropy
- College football
- Commuters
- And more
This useful feature can impact how much it costs your business to advertise on Facebook, as you may target high-value attributes or broad interests. For example, if you target frequent travelers, versus frequent international travelers, you have a broad audience that may incur additional expenses.
While high-value attributes can help you reach your specific market, broad interests can inflate your target audience with low-value users. Since these users often click on your ads, but don’t act on your calls-to-action (CTAs), targeting them can result in a low-performing campaign.
Focus your campaign on the people that matter and offer the most value to your business. You don’t want to pay for clicks or views that offer zero value when it comes to your long-term goals, like driving a sale or generating a lead.
2. Ad budget
When you launch an ad campaign on Facebook, you set an advertising budget.
No matter your budget, whether it’s $200 or $800 per month, it will impact how much Facebook advertising costs your business. If you set a budget of $200, that affects your ad bids, ad performance, and the overall results of your social media advertising campaign.
As an example, if your company launches an ad campaign with a $100 monthly budget, you may set a maximum bid of $1 per click.
As the average CPC for Facebook ads is $0.94, it’s easy to see that your bid isn’t competitive and will probably result in a low number of impressions and clicks.
Not to mention, social media strategists recommend a daily budget of at least $5 for businesses. If you’re spending $5 a day on your campaign, however, you’ll use up your $100 budget by day 20. With this amount of funding, you don’t have the money to even run your ad campaign for the month.
While a large ad spend provides your business with additional flexibility, you can still make a small budget work for your company. Your company decision-makers need to realize, however, that a low ad budget provides fewer conversions because of its performance limitations.
3. Ad bid
Your ad bid also impacts the cost of Facebook ads. Facebook offers a few bidding strategies, including:
- Lowest cost bid strategy: This option, also known as automatic bidding, helps your business achieve the lowest possible cost per click or action.
It also aims to make efficient use of your budget, which is why companies tend to start with this strategy.
- Target cost bid strategy: This option, also known as manual bidding, works to reach your desired cost per click or action. You can only use this strategy for app install, conversion, lead generation, or product catalog sale campaigns.
Depending on your bid strategy, as well as bid amount, you may have higher or lower Facebook advertising costs. In most cases, manual bidding comes with higher advertising costs, while automatic bidding tends to make the most of your budget.
Before you decide on a bidding strategy, it’s vital that you understand how the ad auction works on Facebook. When you understand the algorithm behind the company’s advertising services, you can build a better ad strategy and advertising budget.
In an ad auction, Facebook rates each bidder (and their ad) with these three factors:
- Bid: A bid is how much you’re willing to pay for a user to interact with your ad.
For example, you may bid $1.50 for every click. According to Facebook, your bid is one of the most powerful tools for improving your ad’s performance.
- Estimated action rates: Your estimated action rates demonstrates the likelihood of users to interact with your ads, like by clicking on your ad or downloading your app. For a competitive ad, you need a high estimated action rate, which means creating a relevant ad for your audience.
- Ad quality and relevance: The positive and negative interactions of users with your ad determine its quality and relevance. A high ad quality and relevance score can improve the success of your ad in auctions.
If your ad comes away with the highest total value (based on the above three factors), you win the auction. In response, Facebook shows your ad, rather than a competitor’s, to the person in your target audience.
While an aggressive bid can increase your total value, it also raises your Facebook advertising costs.
That’s why your business wants to focus on creating a relevant, high-quality ad first. Then, you can assess your bidding strategy and bid investment.
4. Ad objective
When you create an ad on Facebook, you need to choose one of the following main ad objectives:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversions
Once you pick your main objective, you need to select a specific goal:
- Awareness
- Brand awareness
- Reach
- Consideration
- Traffic
- App installs
- Engagement
- Video views
- Lead generation
- Messages
- Product catalog sales
- Conversions
- Store visits
- Conversions
In most cases, more valuable ad goals, like a store visit or product purchase, lead to higher ad costs. That’s because these actions, like a product purchase, have immediate value for businesses.
A product catalog sale, for example, generates immediate revenue for your company.
As you build your ad campaign, however, it’s important to remember the value of brand awareness and consideration. When you reach and connect with users in the early stages of the buying funnel, you can grow their interest in your brand and move them further down the sales funnel, resulting in a purchase.
Even though this action occurs later, it offers your business real and tangible value. It can also decrease your Facebook advertising costs, as most companies pay less for awareness- and consideration-related goals than for conversion-related goals.
The only difference is the turnaround time for a conversion. With a conversation-related goal, you connect immediately with a user looking to buy. In comparison, users in the awareness and consideration stage need a little more time before converting.
5. Ad placement
Ad placement also shapes the cost of Facebook ads.
With Facebook, your ads can appear in six spots:
- Instagram Stories
- Facebook desktop newsfeed
- Facebook right column
- Facebook Messenger
- Audience Network
When it comes to social media advertising, Facebook offers a competitive advantage with its ownership of Instagram. Via Facebook, you can create Facebook and Instagram ads with ease, which saves your team time.
Instagram maintains the highest CPC when it comes to Facebook advertising costs. On average, companies spend an additional $0.80 per click to appear on Instagram. For Instagram Stories, the CPC increase is around $0.78.
The average CPC for ads on Facebook is around $0.30 less than Instagram. It offers a versatile platform for advertising your business. Your ads can appear not only on Facebook, but also Facebook Messenger, a popular messaging app for the social media network.
Audience Network
The Audience Network, which allows your ads to appear on websites and mobile apps, maintains an even lower CPC than Facebook and Instagram. In most cases, companies spend an additional $0.20 (based on the average advertising cost for Facebook) per click.
While you can modify where your Facebook ad appears, Facebook recommends Automatic Placements. This tool allows the social media platform’s delivery system to make the most of your ad spend by placing your advertisements on platforms that offer the most potential for results.
If you want to reduce your Facebook advertising costs, however, you can turn off this feature. When you turn Automatic Placements off, you enable your team to select where you want your ad to appear, whether on Facebook, Instagram, or the Audience Network.
6. Ad quality
The quality and relevance of your ads (as rated by Facebook) also affects how much Facebook advertising costs your business.
If you create ads with a high relevance and engagement score, you will see lower ad costs.
Hootsuite demonstrated the power of an ad’s quality or relevance score in a recent study. The company created two versions of the same ad: one with a relevance and engagement score of 2.9 and another with a relevance and engagement score of 8.
The low-scoring ad had an average CPC of $0.14, while the high-scoring ad’s CPC was $0.03.
When it comes to your relevance and engagement score, your ads can receive a rating between 1 and 10. Ten is the best possible score, while one is the worst possible score. Facebook assigns a relevance and engagement score based on positive and negative ad feedback.
If you want to make the most of your ad spend on Facebook, it’s critical for your team to create ads with high relevance and engagement scores. For the best results, monitor your relevance and engagement score on a routine basis.
Access your relevance and engagement scores with the following steps:
- Go to Ads Manager
- Select the ad you want to view
- Choose the Columns dropdown menu
- Click Customize Columns
- Select Relevance Score
- Hit Apply
- View your Relevance and Engagement Score
Keep in mind that Facebook requires around 500 ad impressions or views before assigning a score.
As long as your ad is live, Facebook will continue to monitor user interactions, determining if it’s relevant. That’s why you need to check-in and adjust your ad to feedback regularly. With this proactive approach, you can improve the performance, results, and costs of your Facebook advertising campaign.
7. Season
The time of year can also impact how much Facebook ads are.
In peak shopping seasons, businesses tend to spend more on advertising. The increased demand for ad space results in a competitive marketplace, which can lead to aggressive bids and bigger campaign budgets that inflate the cost of advertising on Facebook.
A few of the most expensive days to advertise on Facebook include:
- Thanksgiving
- Black Friday
- Cyber Monday
- Christmas
- Boxing Day
- New Year’s Eve
- New Year’s Day
While seasonal factors can increase your Facebook ad costs, your business probably wants to take advantage of increased demand from consumers.
In response, you may increase your budget for those high-demand months or audit your ad strategy to improve the quality of your ads.
8. Industry
While the average cost of Facebook ads is $0.94, you can gain more insight into your expected Facebook advertising costs by looking at the average price of Facebook ads for your industry. This data offers a more accurate estimate, which can help your team build your social media marketing budget.
Find out how much Facebook ads cost in your industry below:
Depending on your industry, Facebook advertising can offer a cost-effective option for building brand awareness, generating leads, driving conversions, and more. Even if you’re in a competitive market, like consumer services, you can benefit from a social media strategy.
Competitors in your industry advertise on the social media platform because they get results from it, whether it’s more followers on their social media page, purchases from their online store, or calls to their physical location.
It’s also helpful to mention that these prices for Facebook advertising are averages.
| Apparel | $0.45 |
| Auto | $2.24 |
| B2B | $2.52 |
| Beauty | $1.81 |
| Consumer Services | $3.08 |
| Education | $1.06 |
| Employment and Job Training | $2.72 |
| Finance and Insurance | $3.77 |
| Fitness | $1.90 |
| Home Improvement | $2. 93 |
| Healthcare | $1.32 |
| Industrial services | $2.14 |
| Legal | $1.32 |
| Real Estate | $1.81 |
| Retail | $0.70 |
| Technology | $1.27 |
| Travel and Hospitality | $0.63 |
That’s why you should only use these numbers as benchmarks for your business. When you adopt this perspective, your team and company’s decision makers can approach your campaign with realistic expectations.
Not sure which social networks will be successful for your company? Check out our FREE guide to learn
which social networks you should use to advertise. Show Me the GuideAre Facebook advertising costs worth the price?
That answer depends on your business, goals, and ad campaign optimization.
For companies that can generate a return on investment from Facebook ads (which can take trial and error), Facebook advertising is worth the price.
Tools that can improve your ad campaign targeting, like AdTechFX via MarketingCloudFX, can help your business improve its paid advertising performance by reaching the audience members closest to your ideal client.
Do you still have questions about how much Facebook advertising costs? Check out this FAQ:
How much does Facebook advertising cost for impressions?
If your ad campaign focuses on impressions, the average cost of Facebook advertising is $12.07. This amount refers to the cost per thousand impressions (CPM), which is what your company pays when 1000 users see your ad on Facebook.
How much does Facebook advertising cost for likes?
If your company’s ad campaign focuses on earning likes for your page, the average cost of Facebook advertising is $1. 07 per like. This amount is what your company pays, on average, for a single like on your Facebook page.
How much does Facebook advertising cost for app installs?
If your ad campaign focuses on downloads or app installs, the average cost of Facebook advertising is $5.47 per download. That means your company pays, on average, $5.47 when a user installs your app.
What factors influence Facebook advertising costs?
Several different factors determine how much your business pays to advertise on Facebook, including:
- Audience: Audiences shape your Facebook advertising costs in a few ways. They can increase or decrease your costs, depending on their features. For the best results from your ad budget, you should create a specific audience, rather than a broad one.
- Ad budget: Your monthly advertising budget also impacts your Facebook advertising costs.
While a big ad budget offers flexibility in your ad strategy, your business can also accomplish its advertising goals with a smaller monthly ad spend.
- Ad bid: An ad bid can directly increase your advertising costs on Facebook. You can lower your ad bid costs, however, by choosing an automatic bidding strategy and maintaining a high ad quality score.
- Ad objective: The goals of your ad campaign, which range from Awareness to Consideration to Conversion, also impact your Facebook advertising costs. A conversion-related goal tends to have higher prices than an awareness-related goal.
- Ad placement: The placement of your ads across Facebook properties, which include Instagram, Facebook, and the Audience Network, can also influence your advertising costs. Your business can automate the placement of your ads or select where you want your ads to appear.
- Ad quality: The relevance score of your ads plays a massive role in your Facebook advertising costs.
You need to design ads that engage and deliver on user expectations. When you do, you can lower your ad costs substantially.
- Season: During popular shopping seasons, like Christmas, your business can expect higher Facebook advertising costs due to increased competition in the ad auction. While unavoidable, your team can combat this feature by modifying your ad budget and bid.
- Industry: Your industry can also shape your Facebook advertising costs. Markets with the highest advertising costs include finance, insurance, and consumer services. If you’re in a competitive sector, focus on creating top-notch ads and setting competitive bids.
For an in-depth analysis of Facebook advertising costs, check out our earlier breakdown.
How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook per month?
Companies spend an average of $300 to $1000 on Facebook ads per month.
Depending on the size of your business, as well as investment in social media advertising, you may spend more than $1000 or less than $300. For example, an enterprise may invest $5000 per month on Facebook ads.
How much you spend on Facebook ads depends on your business and decision makers. While you don’t have to spend the average amount that other companies do, this range offers a competitive advantage that can help your organization earn more from social media.
That doesn’t mean price determines the success of your campaign. It does provide a benefit, however. With a larger budget, your company can pay for more ad clicks, which can result in more conversions and revenue.
To put this concept in perspective, imagine the following scenario.
Business A creates a $100 monthly budget for Facebook, while Company A invests $200. They both pay the average CPC, $0.94, which means Business A can afford 103 clicks. In comparison, Company A can pay for twice as many.
A bigger ad budget doesn’t equal a successful ad campaign, though.
That’s why many businesses partner with a professional social media advertising agency, like WebFX. With our team’s expertise, you don’t have to second-guess your bid, ad copy, or audience targeting.
Instead, you can focus on the impressive results we’re creating for your business.
How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook per year?
Businesses spend $2400 to $9600 on Facebook ads each year. The size of your company, plus social media marketing strategy, can influence how much you invest in Facebook advertising annually. Even if you’re a small-to-midsized business (SMB), you may spend more than $9600 on Facebook ads.
For example, an ecommerce store with an active following on Facebook may invest more in Facebook advertising because their campaigns drive product orders. In comparison, a well-known business may spend less due to their already remarkable brand awareness.
When it comes to your company’s annual advertising costs, it’s essential to consider which channels offer the most value.
If social media, specifically Facebook, provides a tremendous return on investment (ROI), then it makes sense to direct more of your advertising budget to Facebook.
If you’ve never advertised on social media before, you want to think about your audience and your goals. For companies that have an active audience on Facebook and objectives that align with the platform’s strengths, like building brand awareness, it makes sense to invest in Facebook advertising.
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Everything You Need To Know
Facebook advertising is a regular feature in many small businesses’ marketing plans. There are 3.7 million businesses running ad campaigns through Facebook, spending a combined $5.5 billion to reach potential customers using the social media platform.
Numbers like that are impressive … but intimidating. So much competition for attention on the platform means ever-increasing costs. That’s not to say you need a million-dollar Facebook ad budget to drive traffic, leads, and sales through the app.
This guide shares how much you should budget for Facebook ads, with tips to reduce the cost of your campaigns without sacrificing results.
Maximize your Facebook ads return on investment 💰
- What determines your Facebook ad cost?
- How much does Facebook advertising cost?
- How to reduce your Facebook ad cost
What determines your Facebook ad cost?
Despite what you see in your news feed, Facebook doesn’t want to overload its audience with adverts.
There are limited advertising placements for businesses to sponsor across Facebook and Instagram.
To determine which advertiser wins the spot, Facebook’s advertising algorithm enters them into an ad action.
Every advertiser submitting their campaigns competes for a specific ad placement in front of their target audience. If two beauty brands are reaching millennial women in the news feed, for example, they compete in the auction together.
Price isn’t the only factor taken into consideration when deciding on an auction winner. To award the ad spot, Facebook determines an ad’s total value—in other words, how much the target audience would like or engage with the ad.
The algorithm looks at ad quality (including previous feedback) and estimated action rates (how many people will take action—like, share, or comment—on the ad). The campaign that ticks these three boxes the best has the highest value and wins the ad space.
Auction aside, many advertisers find their Facebook ad costs fluctuate throughout the year.
The more advertisers that compete in an auction, the higher your Facebook ad costs will be. Facebook advertising in industries like finance, insurance, and home improvement tend to be more expensive for this reason.
Seasonality plays a role, too. Ad costs historically skyrocket throughout the latter months of the year. Black Friday and Christmas-induced online shoppers lead more advertisers to the platform, increasing the number of competitors in an ad auction.
How much does Facebook advertising cost?
Research suggests that advertisers should expect to pay: $0.94 per click or $12.07 per 1,000 impressions. Facebook bills advertisers based on two metrics: cost per click (CPC) and cost per mille (CPM)—otherwise known as cost per 1,000 impressions.
Average CPC for Facebook ads
The average CPC on Facebook is $0.94, making it cheaper than advertising on LinkedIn, Instagram, or YouTube.
As mentioned, seasonality and competition both play major roles in the cost of a winning Facebook ad auction bid—especially since a website visit is the desired outcome for many advertisers.
Run campaigns in the first half of the year if expensive ad costs are a concern.
Average CPM for Facebook ads
Many online stores use Facebook as a platform to build brand awareness. That’s sensible—the app boasts 2.8 billion monthly active users, many of whom use the social media platform to engage with their favorite brands.
If reach and awareness are your goals, expect to pay $12.07 to reach 1,000 people through the Facebook app.
Average cost per lead (CPL)
While there are only two metrics that determine how advertisers pay for ads, other financial metrics come into play when understanding the cost of your Facebook ad campaigns. Brands use the platform to generate email subscribers—potential customers they can sell to in the long-term without factoring in repetitive ad costs.
Research pits the average cost per lead for a Facebook ad at $5.83. But get your audience targeting right and this could be cut dramatically.
Alex Trpkovic, Marketing Director at Growbuds, explains how the brand ran “a Facebook lead ad campaign in early to mid-October, just before the Black Friday and Cyber Monday holidays.
“The intent of the campaign was to have as many people subscribe to our email newsletter,” says Alex. “We spent a little over $4,000 and gained over 2,600 new email subscribers, which have just recently 7x’d our ad spend on that campaign. We have a special segment for these subscribers to track the revenue they made.
“Since we didn’t care about CPC or CPM, the metric we valued most was cost per subscription—we tracked it to be around $1.55 per subscriber.”
💰Worried about overspending? As part of your bidding strategy, set a maximum daily budget and bid cap for your advertising campaigns. You’ll only enter auctions at your maximum bid, so you’ll never overpay to run the ad.
How to reduce your Facebook ad cost
As soon as Facebook becomes a reliable source of new customers, playing around with digital marketing budgets feels risky. You don’t want to shut the tap and let a competitor claim the ad spots proven to work for your business.
The good news is, a few small tweaks to your campaign can bring down advertising costs without sacrificing results, leading to better return on your investment. Here’s how to do it.
- Select the right campaign objective
- Go narrow with audience targeting
- Run retargeting campaigns
- Make your campaigns relevant
- Reduce ad frequency score
- A/B test ad creatives and placements
- Focus on post-click experiences
1. Select the right campaign objective
The first step of creating a new Facebook ad is to select a campaign objective. This is the overarching goal of your campaign—the result you want to achieve from buying ads on the platform.
Experimenting with these objectives, and being crystal clear on the outcome you want to achieve, impacts the cost of advertising on Facebook.
The algorithm pairs your objective with users who fit that criteria. If you’re bidding for sales, for example, your ad is more likely to be shown to Facebook users who’ve made purchases through the platform before.
As a result, the average CPC for each campaign objective differs. AdEspresso found that campaigns with the goal of awareness would pay $1.85 per link click. However, choose the link click goal and Facebook will find users in your target audience with a history of clicking ads—hence why the CPC for these campaigns is just $0.21.
David Sweet, VP of Marketing at Eterneva, adds, “Making a flawed choice in an ad objective, for instance picking lead generation, when your goal is brand awareness, can have a negative impact.
“This mistake is often compounded by not understanding your target audience prior to choosing a campaign. Doing your due diligence in identifying your target audience, and matching your marketing goals to campaign objectives before you begin, will increase engagement, add value, and lower cost.”
2. Go narrow with your audience targeting
Facebook’s algorithm considers ad relevance score when calculating bids. The smaller and more relevant your audience is, the more chance you have of winning the ad auction.
“Start your targeting a bit broader than you would initially think,” says Josh Jurrens, founder of Caliper Marketing. “This gives Facebook a bit more room to find users most likely to take your intended action before narrowing your targeting. Starting too narrow will result in high costs and fewer conversions.”
Let’s put that into practice and say you’re an online business selling quick, at-home coffee machines. You’re seeing expensive Facebook ad costs with this custom audience:
- Female
- Based in the US
- Aged 18+
Sales data shows most of your customers are based in Los Angeles; customer surveys show they purchase from you because they don’t have time to grab a Starbucks coffee on their morning commute.
Taking that information into consideration, you narrow your target audience down to people who fit this criteria:
- Based within 10 miles of Los Angeles
- Interest in “Starbucks”
- Annual income of $75,000+
Just like that, your audience size dramatically shrinks, but your ad relevance score increases—especially if you use that customer data in your ad creative (more on this later.
)
3. Run retargeting campaigns
The Facebook pixel collects data about your website visitors and pairs it to a Facebook profile—including the pages they visited, which items they added to their online cart, and how long ago they visited. All of that data can be used to run personalized retargeting campaigns.
“In my experience, I have found that remarketing ads were the cheapest to run,” says Usama Ejaz, co-founder and CEO of SocialBu, in an email interview. “All other ad types were simply very expensive, even when compared to Google ads.
“Let’s say you want to run a campaign for sign-ups or orders. If you run ads for conversions, it might become really expensive. But if you run an ad for simple clicks to a relevant blog post of yours, it can be less expensive. Now, combine that with a remarketing ad that targets the visitors to your blog post used in the first ad and you will save a lot of $$.”
Other smart ways to retarget Facebook users and decrease ad costs include:
- Dynamic product ads.
Show the products a shopper had in their online shopping cart but didn’t purchase. Reminding them of what they bought could be the nudge they need to head back and purchase. - People who visited a specific landing page. For example, people visiting your coffee machine and coffee pod categories see two different ads.
- People who visited your site in the last 30 days. The less time between visiting your website and seeing a retargeting ad, the more likely someone is to remember your brand.
Note: When running retargeting campaigns, regularly upload your customer list and exclude them from your ad set. That way, paying customers don’t stay lumped in the same retargeting audience as leads.
“Double down on audience types you exclude. Some brands worry they might be excluding potential customers, but if there are certain demographics or interests that might indicate a poor fit for your product, exclude them.”Brooks Manley, Lead Blog Editor at Brew Interactive
4. Make your campaigns relevant
Once you’ve got your audience niched down, use the information you’ve collected about them to make your campaign relevant. (This is why retargeting campaigns work so well—you’re showing personalized ad creatives based on the experience they’ve had with your brand.)
Dig deep into customer research and figure out their:
- Interests
- Tone of voice
- Pain points
- Goals and aspirations
- Favorite influencers
Use this data to produce your ad—everything from the ad creative to your message is determined by your customer data.
SourceContinuing with the same example: post-purchase surveys show 60% of previous customers purchased your coffee machine because an influencer recommended it. So, partner with said influencer to produce a short clip endorsing your product. Run the video ad to your target audience since they’re already likely to know, like, and trust the influencer you’re partnering with.
Don’t have time or budget for influencer endorsements? Replicate your audience’s tone of voice to improve relevance score (and in turn, reduce advertising costs). Magic Spoon, for example, promises customers can “up their breakfast game” by purchasing its cereal.
5. Reduce ad frequency score
One drawback to niching down your Facebook advertising audience is that campaigns quickly become repetitive.
A potential customer that sees your ad several times in their news feed will likely grow frustrated with the repetitiveness. (And let’s face it: if they don’t engage with your ad the first few times it appears, they won’t on the 11th.)
Facebook’s advertising algorithm considers ad frequency scores for this reason. It favors newer, fresher ads that haven’t been exhaustively shown to the target audience.
Keep an eye out for frequency scores in your reporting dashboard. Once it creeps beyond two or three, refresh the campaign with new ad copy, images, or videos.
The goal is to keep things interesting.
“Your ad will be seen by the same people repeatedly after it has been running for some time. Therefore, you will notice that your advertising costs will be lower if your frequency is as close to one as possible.”Tim Clarke, Director of Sales at SEOBlog.com
6. A/B test ad creatives and placements
Facebook advertising is a mixture of science and art. With so many variables at play, it’s impossible to know what the “perfect” ad is—one that drives results for your online store without costing a fortune. But you can get closer to creating it through A/B testing.
“Reducing Facebook ad costs is all about refining your target audience and using the best possible ad images, videos, and copy. We have found that investing in creating high quality video ads has reduced our costs the most.”Ryan Bales, CEO of West Slope
Facebook’s built-in A/B testing feature helps advertisers find winning combinations.
So, for each campaign, experiment with the following elements and monitor the impact on your ad costs:
- Ad creatives. Do images, videos, or carousels do a better job of engaging your audience? How about long-form versus short-form content? Influencer-created content or user-generated visuals?
- Placements. The news feed is the first port of call for advertisers, but test whether your ads get more attention elsewhere—like the audience network. Data suggests in-stream videos are cheaper if you’re billed based on reach. Instagram Stories are also worth exploring if your priority is clicks at the lowest cost.
“The boosted post is the cheapest Facebook ad option. Anybody can begin a boosted post campaign with little more than a click, and you can spend as little as a dollar a day. They’re cheapest for a reason, though, and don’t offer the precision targeting that promoting a post through Facebook Ads Manager can.
” —Stephen Light, Co-owner and Chief Marketing Officer at Nolah
7. Focus on post-click experiences
Driving traffic through Facebook ads is only half the battle. Presenting potential customers with a slow-loading website, or one with a generally poor user experience, isn’t going to drive revenue—no matter how eye-catching your campaign is.
Here are some simple ways to improve the post-click experience so people visiting your site through a Facebook ad convert:
- Direct shoppers to personalized landing pages. We’ve all been there: clicking a product highlighted in a Facebook ad, only to be diverted to the brand’s homepage and a search bar to find it yourself. Make product discovery easily accessible by always pointing to the product page.
- Have fast loading times. Just a one-second improvement in site speed can increase conversions by 27%. Compress images, remove Javascript, and minimize third-party apps to speed things up.
- Make it mobile-friendly. The vast majority (98.5%) of Facebook users consult the app via a mobile device. Make sure your online store is responsive and adjusts to a smaller screen size.
- Offer one-click checkout. Less friction at the checkout means less chance of people dropping off. Ecommerce stores using Shop Pay see 1.91 times higher mobile checkout-to-order rates than those with regular checkouts.
“The best Facebook ads in the world won’t convert until you have a steller website and post-click experience that exceeds customer expectations.”Josh Jurrens, Founder of Caliper Marketing
The cost of Facebook ads is always changing
Facebook is a valuable marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. You’ll find customers of various income levels, interests, and locations using the platform—many of whom discover new products through ads in their news feed.
Experiment with different campaigns and creatives, benchmarking them against the Facebook advertising cost averages we’ve shared in this article.
Winning, low-cost advertising formulas tailored to your business and audience will soon start to appear.
Ready to create your business? Start your free 14-day trial of Shopify—no credit card required.
Facebook ad costs FAQ
Why are Facebook ads so expensive?
Facebook marketing is becoming more popular. More new ecommerce stores are turning to the platform to drive customers. This results in more competition, which contributes to higher costs.
What is a good cost per click?
A good CPC for Facebook ads is $0.94, so expect to pay $940 to drive 1,000 visitors to your online store. But the lower your CPC, the better.
How much should you spend per day on Facebook ads?
The minimum budget for a Facebook ad is $1 per day for campaigns billed by impressions. For more intensive campaigns (like those designed to drive traffic or sales), start to see results from $5 per day.
Are paid Facebook ads worth it 2022?
Facebook ads do continue to be a good investment for online brands, but advertising costs are increasing. Diversify marketing channels or use Facebook campaigns to build an owned email list. That way, you don’t always have to pay to reach your target audience.
How much does advertising on Instagram and Facebook cost? — Marketing on vc.ru
Today advertising is a very powerful marketing tool with which you can earn good money. Advertising investment is mandatory for every company, both B2C and B2B
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The benefit of from reading this article is this: you will find out what is the minimum-optimal budget you need to get a good payback (provided that the specialist sets it up).
Reading time - 2-3 minutes
Daniil is in touch, a specialist in setting up targeted advertising on Instagram/Facebook. The average payback of my projects is 203%.
Now I work with such niches: franchise sales, turnkey repairs, information products
1. What we do and what we pay for
First, I would like to say a few words about advertising campaigns in general. If you think you only have to pay for the ads themselves, far from it. You need to perfect your landing page and make an attractive offer. In most cases, the items you need to pay for are:
- Advertising budget
- Landing page
- Advertising creatives
- Advertising Specialist Services
2. Money and descriptions
2.1. Advertising budget
If you want to pay nothing and get the most out of it, forget about advertising. Marketing is constantly testing new hypotheses and scaling up old ones. Everything, of course, depends on the structure of your business and your goals, but we can safely allocate a figure here, at least $ 25-30 per day.
This is the minimum advertising budget at which it will be possible to scale what is already working, as well as test something new. The bigger your goals, the more money you need.
2.2. Landing page
It's like your "face". If you drive advertising to the site, then it must first be perfectly licked. And of course, you need to test the landing page conversion itself, change offers, structure.
Here the price tag is different, but now mini-landing pages convert very well. Their price is from $400-500. If this is a lead form, then 0$ .
2.3. Advertising creatives
Another important element is creatives. It is necessary to test both video and photo, both the feed format and stories, both complex creatives and simple ones. You never know what will work best. Think carefully about advertising messages so that they are bright and catchy.
Normal designers charge for one video creative $5-10 , for a video they charge $15-40 , depending on the complexity.
2.4. Services of an advertising specialist
When choosing a specialist, you need to write memoirs, but basically there are criteria for distinguishing experienced specialists:
- They know the value of themselves and their time
- Do not suck up and do not bend
- They speak confidently about strategy and it is clear that they are cooking in topic
- Can show cases and tell on the fingers how everything was done, what were the problems, etc.
- They don't promise you mountains (They may promise bids but not sales)
- What price is this and the service ($100 or $200 for services is not a price, it's money down the drain. If you are told such a price for a month, then the targetologist himself does not understand whether he will give a result. Start counting from 300- $400 for a month somewhere. They usually already include advertising creatives in this amount)
3.
Conclusions
Once again I guess that advertising specialists are not magicians, they cannot do everything for you. Their task is applications, and processing is up to you, so think about how well you process them , measure the conversion from lead to sale .
Let's calculate everything together for a month:
Advertising budget 625$ (25$*25 days) + landing page 450$ + creatives 54$ (2 photos, 2 videos) + specialist services (350$) = 1500$
I have calculated approximately the average prices, which can fluctuate.
That's all for me. If you want to hear something in more detail, ask questions in the comments, do not hesitate. And if you need help with your project -
Leaving my contacts
How much does advertising on Facebook cost in 2021 and how to pay less
Translation material certainly affected the work with Facebook advertising. However, this platform is still great for promoting brands and attracting users.
Knowing what makes up the cost of advertising on Facebook will be useful if you are just getting started with this platform. Experienced users will learn how to save money on Facebook advertising.
Today we will answer the following questions:
- How much does Facebook advertising cost in 2021?
- Why is Facebook advertising worth the money?
- What affects the cost of advertising on Facebook?
- How to get the most out of your budget?
Content
Benefits of advertising on Facebook
Spot targeting
The more accurate the targeting, the lower the cost of advertising.
You can select only users within a radius of 25 km from the desired address or limit impressions by zip code. If you want to show ice cream ads to parents of 3-year-olds, there are all the tools for this. And that's not counting custom and affinity audiences.
Flexible budget settings
On Facebook, you can choose one of two budget optimization options.
Lifetime budget ( lifetime budget ) is suitable for campaigns with a time limit or a fixed budget. The daily budget ( daily budget ) is useful for optimizing current campaigns and when it is possible to adjust the budget.
Availability
Facebook advertising is one of the most profitable ways to promote a business of any size. When you have various reports, tools for testing and remarketing at your fingertips, you spend your budget more efficiently.
For clarity, here is the average cost per click (CPC) on major social networks in 2021.
- Twitter: $0.38
- Facebook: $0.97
- Instagram: $3.56
- LinkedIn: $5.26
How much is advertising on Facebook
Now let's evaluate the cost of advertising on Facebook by various parameters: cost per click (CPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM), cost per engagement (CPE). Please note that the numbers may change for different lines of business.
Average CPC on Facebook in 2021
Average CPC across all campaign areas and goals is $0.99.
Broken down by campaign objectives, the average CPC will range from $0.26 to $3.34.
For Akvertise customers, the average CPC in Q1 2021 was $1.20 but dropped to $0.80 by Q2.
Average CPM on Facebook in 2021
CPM for all areas was $12.45.
Depending on the campaign goals, CPM ranged from $1.43 to $30.97.
Akvertise recorded a CPM ranging from $6.50 to $11.50.
Average CPE on Facebook in 2021
The average cost per engagement on Facebook in 2021 was $0.12, while for Akvertise customers it was lower: $0.01-$0.05.
If you provide statistics separately for campaign goals, you see CPE ranging from $0.01 to $0.70.
How to calculate your Facebook ad budget
The cost of advertising on Facebook, like on Instagram, is made up of many factors.
1. Campaign goals
Facebook campaign goals are one of the main factors affecting the price of advertising. In turn, the importance or value of the goal itself depends on the stage of the funnel where the target audience is located.
For example, for Brand Awareness and Engagement campaigns, the cost of advertising will be lower than for the Conversions goal. It’s much easier to get a user to interact with an ad than it is to persuade them to go to the end of the funnel and make a purchase.
2. Audience size
If your ad is aimed at a large audience, the price will be lower than for a small audience.
Campaigns with a wide cold audience, which is in the initial stages of the funnel, are usually characterized by low cost of advertising. Attracting a small warm audience will cost more because such users are more likely to bring revenue to the brand.
3. Daily budget
If you have a modest budget, the Facebook algorithm will take longer to go through the learning phase.
New ad sets will cost more because the system is only trying to understand how your audience responds to ads and how to optimize your campaign to engage users. When your audience is already engaged enough, Facebook and Instagram allow you to pay less for ads.
4. Click through rate (CTR)
CTR ( click-through rate ) also affects the cost of advertising on Facebook. A low CTR usually leads to a high ad cost. This is especially noticeable in campaigns that are aimed at driving traffic to the site: if users do not click on the ad, then your ideas are not close to the audience.
The standard CTR for Facebook is 2%. Typically, CPC drops as CTR increases.
5. Season
There is such a trend that at the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 4th quarter of any year there is an increase in advertising prices. This happens because there are more online purchases on New Year's Eve, and this temporarily changes the market.
Competition among advertisers increases, more funds are allocated for advertising, which leads to an increase in the cost of advertising.
This is worth keeping in mind when planning your budget for the year. And if e-commerce and Christmas discounts don’t concern you in any way, it’s worth deciding in advance whether you will fight for impression share during this period or it’s wiser to slow down.
How to spend less on Facebook ads
There are three main tips:
1. Develop a strategy for all stages of the funnel
To correctly allocate the budget, choose a goal that corresponds to the stage of the funnel. In short, the Awareness and Consideration categories are more suited to the top of the funnel; "Consideration" and "Conversions" - for the middle; and for the bottom of the funnel, “Conversions” will do.
Start at the top of the funnel to reach a wider audience with a lower ad cost, and then move on to campaigns with the Conversions goal, which will optimize accordingly.
We also suggest reading how to develop a complete strategy for all stages of the funnel.
Yes, there are brands that choose the "Conversion" goal when the audience is still at the top stages of the funnel: in such cases, they help out with cheap goods or something that provokes people into an impulsive purchase.
Sometimes users really immediately buy a product that they see for the first time on Facebook. However, in most cases, the audience still needs to be warmed up and find common ground, talk about the benefits of the brand.
2. Use Auto Placements
As much as you'd like to manually choose where your ads appear on Facebook, it's best to choose Automatic Placements at first. By placing ads manually, you are making one of the 7 mistakes that drain your advertising budget.
Facebook can test all placements and choose the ones where your ad performs the best. It will also allow you to complete the training phase sooner and enable optimization, which is based on the data collected by the algorithm.
This, again, will reduce advertising costs.
Regardless of the placements, the targeting settings will remain the same: that is, Facebook may show your ads less often, but the cost of placement will be lower, which will allow you to receive additional income.
3. Conduct split tests (A/B tests)
Split testing will also help you save on advertising. By testing different components of your ads, you will understand what works and what does not. Test text, headlines, images, videos, landing pages, and more.
Facebook is not a platform where you can run ads once and forget about them. You need to test different options constantly in order to achieve the best results. Split testing at the ad level will help increase engagement and CTR — as a result, you will get more without increasing your advertising budget.
Facebook Advertising Cost in 2021 (briefly)
- Facebook advertising is worth the money because the platform offers: large reach, precise targeting and flexible budget settings at a reasonable price.
