Advertising on Facebook or Instagram, Which platform is more cost-effective?

Jakeson Christopher
Plus Marketing
Published in
4 min readDec 7, 2020

Social media advertising provides marketers with advanced audience targeting options and reliable conversion tracking. Although Facebook has been around for a long time and has a larger user base than Instagram, Instagram users are steadily increasing, especially with Instagram Stories Marketers are paying more and more attention to the Instagram advertising platform, such as the massive promotion and use of new features.

If your brand is active on Facebook and Instagram, the best way is to make good use of both social media networks to activate your advertising campaigns one by one.

However, every business may have a fixed and strict social media marketing budget, and marketers may need to ask themselves which platform is more worth investing in more budget: Facebook advertising or Instagram? This answer needs to be searched by marketers themselves. You can analyze which platform brings more advertising revenue based on the data, and just choose the investment that is more suitable for your brand.

Instagram

Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users, making it increasingly an ideal choice for businesses and brand promotion.

Instagram also has a stronger natural coverage, which is a trait that the social platform deliberately retains, and it also continues to develop and update its functions.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the longest-developing social media platforms. Compared with Instagram, it has a larger active user base: 2.2 billion monthly active users.

If you want to talk about coverage, Facebook deserves to be the number one social media platform with the highest coverage. Therefore, if your goal is to increase brand awareness and not target a specific age group, Facebook may be the right choice.

In addition, Facebook does have a large number of advertising targeting options. These are all options available for creating new audiences, and you can find them in the “Audience” section of the Create Ads Settings on Facebook Ads Manager.

Part of a custom audience is Lookalike Audience, which is a target audience created based on your “existing customers”. It will find other audiences on Facebook that are most similar to existing customers. Regarding this part of the content, the tutorial “How to Target the Target Audience of Facebook Ads” will teach you how to use the audience targeting function to filter out overlapping users and find more potential new customers.

On the other hand, in 2017, 70.7% of US companies used Instagram to promote marketing.

This is a huge increase compared with 48.8% in 2016. Why do so many brands choose Instagram?

Instagram claims that 80% of users will follow at least one business account. As of March 2017, data shows that more than 120 million Instagram users have visited a business website, obtained business directions, contacted companies by phone or email, or sent messages directly to companies.

The Facebook engagement of natural posts may be changing, but there are many opportunities for ad targeting on this social network. Through advertising, you can learn very specifically what kind of participation/interaction you are looking for.

After the above detailed research, both platforms are actually very valuable online marketing and advertising platforms. I believe you will also choose to run ads on both platforms at the same time.

ADCostly shows that the average cost per click of Instagram ads is about $0.8. However, there are many factors that determine the cost of Instagram advertising. For example, based on different user age groups, the cost per click (CPC) on Instagram ads has different costs.

Facebook’s average cost per click is $0.35. However, this is not a fixed fee, it also fluctuates depending on different factors.

Facebook advertising pricing also depends on the timing of your advertising. For example, advertising during holidays will be much more expensive than non-holiday advertising.

For all detailed data, you can use ADCostly for inquiries, and there is also a detailed price analysis of interest. In this process, calculate CPC, CPM, CPA, CTR, ROI, Roas, you can use these two Google extensions to help you quickly get back the advertising effect.

CPC & CPM & CPA Calculator

ROI & Roas Calculator

Which is better, Instagram or Facebook, you can make a reasonable analysis according to your product situation, ensure the reasonableness of the advertising budget, and timely review the advertising effect, you can better use the two social media.

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