5 ways to lower the cost of your Facebook ads
It’s always up to you to define how to spend on Facebook ads. But in case you’re looking to lower costs, this post suggests some tactics.
The whole bunch of factors determines how much you pay for your Facebook ads, no news here. Your audience, placement, bidding, creative, time of year, Facebook’s own updates and even big politics… While some of those things are totally in your hands, others — might be a bit more difficult to control. Two recent examples are GDPR and the updated News Feed algorithm. Don’t get all itchy, this is not a post about GDPR, it’s just worthwhile mentioning that we still need to see what kind of effect the new regulations will have on Facebook’s advertisers (especially smaller ones). As for the News Feed algorithm’s update, Facebook claimed that they’ll push posts from friends and family higher in people’s feeds at the expense of posts from brands and publishers. While being rather a good solution for users, for advertisers this meant the decline in impressions and increase in costs.
With all the changes Facebook will definitely remain an important channel for many brands. The good thing, is that the way Facebook’s algorithm will continue working, allows companies with lower budgets and high quality content, continue getting good results. The changes out there only mean that staying relevant and being smart about your campaigns is becoming even more urgent. In the end, it’s always up to you to define how to spend on Facebook ads. But in case you are looking to reduce individual ads costs, this post suggests some options on how to do so.
#1. Retargeting is (still) powerful
I’ll share here one specific tactic that I called ‘retargeting circle.’ Previously it allowed us to lower the cost per result (in that case it was app installs) to more than twice.
It follows the same steps as any retargeting campaign, but instead of bringing people to a landing page, you are building engagement around Facebook posts that contain highly relevant for your audience content AND are closely related to your product. In order to reach out to more potentially interested users, set up posts’ boosting. Once you have enough engagements, you can create Custom Audience for retargeting. Facebook allows to build Custom Audiences based on engagement in a particular timeframe with your Facebook page or Instagram business profile. So make sure that in this timeframe you are only posting and promoting content meant for your campaign. In the closing step of the retargeting circle, you will launch a campaign itself, using your Custom Audience. This way, you make sure that users are really interested in your product, and have heard about your brand before.
#2. Avoid ad fatigue aka banner blindness
Almost all of us experienced this. When the same ad is being shown to you again, and again. Wether that’s an ugly video, or a car insurance when you even have no license, or a decent ad that’s been there for too long. Ad fatigue, or banner blindness, happens when your audience becomes too familiar with your ads, so that they stop paying attention. Basically what happens here is that you are exhausting your audience, while still paying for impressions. Your ads loose their relevance, bring less results for more costs. In relation to the News Feed Algorithm update, that I mentioned before, and GDPR, ad fatigue might happen even faster.
In fact, there is quite an easy indicator that can help you predict ad fatigue, which is Frequency. Each of your ads get a Frequency score, which indicates the average number of times a person saw your ad. You’d want to keep this number low, and if it’s getting higher than 3 for retargeting ads and 2 for broad targeting ads — make sure to update your creatives, or format, and exclude those who had already acted on your ads. More advice on frequency you can find here.
#3. Use all latest and greatest
Facebook guys are regularly updating their ad tooling. They introduce new formats such as Instagram Stories Ads, new ways to optimise for ad delivery such as Page Views, or approach to reporting such a recent update in impressions reporting.
All these updates are a nice opportunity for those looking to reduce ad costs. While the things are still fresh, not so many advertisers are using them, and thus competing with you. You can follow the Facebook’s updates for business here.
#4. Hypertarget!
Well-defined targeting for Facebook ads sounds like a common knowledge. But I still see some companies falling into this trap — with less strict targeting, I get broader audience. Well, if that’s the goal — fine (but even then you are probably trying to reach someone somewhat specific). The fall back is that badly defined targeting will often mean high result costs. Such ads will most likely have low Relevance score, and won’t perform well. Here you can find some ideas on how to get a 10/10 Relevance score. I’ll describe only one approach of super specific targeting. This might help with lowering your ads costs (and/or reaching to a very desirable user group).
Previously we tested with location and interest-based hyper targeting. We knew that our audience is interested in particular music, and that people visiting some big festivals and events in Amsterdam are very likely to be our users. So we set up a campaign with very specific targeting, including music interests and location. The results that we were getting, cost us less than our average at that period of time.
#5. Avoid hot seasons
How many emails with offers, ads on Instagram with discounts, touching commercials on Youtube do you usually see around Christmas? I personally get the ton of those, out of which maybe act on 1–2.
Christmas is just one of the examples of the peak times. Other ones are Black Friday, St. Valentine’s Day, winter and summer sales. During these periods you are competing with a lot of bigger brands with bigger budgets. Big brands often during this time raises bids high, which makes it way more costly to get results. If you think that your best users can be found during those days — definitely advertise for them (find some advice on holiday ads here). However, if you are trying to reduce on ads cost, it might be better to avoid advertising during hot season.
These are just some tactics, that might help you reducing costs. E.g. I did not talk at all about creatives, or bidding. But well, obviously there is much more, and you can always come up with something out of the box, that works specifically for you. One last thing to mention, is that cost reduction only works well if you still get results for your primary metrics. E.g. if you are getting cheap website visits from a Facebook campaign, but none of them converts, you might want to question the value of your ads.
That’s it for now. Stay tuned! ☝☝️☝️️
