Running effective Facebook advertising campaigns is a goal for every marketer, but keeping costs in check can be a challenge many struggle with. With the ever-evolving landscape of social media marketing, staying up-to-date with strategies that ensure you don’t overpay for your advertising operations while maximizing your ROI is crucial.
Understanding Your Facebook Ad Costs
Before diving into the specific strategies to cut your costs, let’s revisit the basics of understanding the factors that impact your Facebook ad costs. This will allow you to understand what levers you can pull on a fundamental level to drive desired performance.
1. Automatic Placements
Your choice of ad placement can significantly impact your ad costs. Selecting the right placements, such as Facebook’s news feed, Instagram feed, or other options, can improve your results while avoiding low-performing areas. Regularly monitor and adjust your placements to ensure optimal performance. As we (Hop Skip Media) noted, monitoring placement performance is key to optimizing your Facebook ad campaigns.
2. Relevance Score
The relevance score is a crucial metric to watch. A higher score means lower costs because if your ad is more relevant, it’s more likely to be clicked, and that is good for Facebook; thus, it awards you with a lower CPC (You could think of it as an appreciation bonus). It’s influenced by audience interactions like clicks, engagement, and ad saves. According to Customer.ai, the average Facebook ad conversion rate increases by over 70% when going from a relevance score of 1-3 to a score of 7 or higher. If your score is consistently low (4 or below), consider optimizing or discontinuing the ad to avoid increased costs.
3. Bidding Strategies
Experiment with different bidding strategies, including Target Cost, to optimize your Facebook advertising costs. Continually test and refine your approach to find the strategy that delivers the best results for your budget and goals.
4. Timing Matters
Take into account the time of year, day of the week, and time of day when running your ads. Analyze your Facebook ad reports to identify peak performance times and schedule your ads accordingly. This way, you avoid wasting your budget on less profitable periods. Audience behaviours can take wild swings with seasonality for some industries. Check annual charts to understand these
5. Audience Targeting
Precision is key when targeting your audience. Aim for an audience size between 100,000 and 500,000 for optimal results. Custom audiences and lookalike audiences, which target people similar to your existing customers, can help you achieve higher relevance scores and reduce costs.
Let’s delve into the advanced strategies that can supercharge your Facebook advertising cost-reduction efforts.
Strategies for Facebook Advertising Cost Reduction
1. Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO)
Use Dynamic Creative Optimization to automatically test multiple versions of your ad creative. This strategy helps identify the best-performing ad creative, which can lead to cost reductions as you focus your budget on what works.
2. Lookalike Audiences
Expand your reach by utilizing Lookalike Audiences. Target users who share similarities with your existing customers, increasing the likelihood of attracting interested prospects while keeping costs in check.
3. Custom Audiences
Leverage Custom Audiences to re-engage people who have interacted with your business before, such as website visitors or email list subscribers. This strategy can lead to cost savings as you target a warm audience likely to convert.
4. Retargeting
This is a really important part of any marketing strategy. Retargeting allows you to engage with audiences who have opted into your funnel and moved further down, maybe even purchased.
If you don’t interact with them there is a good chance that you could lose top-of-mind awareness and even may lose the customer to a competitor who is running similar ads.
5. Improve Landing Pages
Landing Pages are very important assets to any campaign. They act as silent closers and move the audiences down the funnel by guiding them to complete a specific action.
While looking to optimize a campaign the Landing page is a great place to start because the people who reach the landing page have already clicked your ad and thus you have already incurred a cost. And if your landing page isn’t up for the task, that cost would be wasted.
To get started you can start exploring tools like Microsoft Clarity which offers heat maps for landing pages. This will allow you to understand how people interact with your landing page and improve them to drive Facebook conversion rates up.
6. Keep Testing Creative
Once your landing page is ready to go, you can get into experimenting with new approaches to convey your message using creatives. A good rule of thumb I like to follow while working on creatives is to remember that the goal is to convey a message not to look beautiful.
And so when working with the design team always remember that each element in your design should be directed towards making your message as clear as possible. Once that is done, then you can get to fancy designs or video edits.
7. A Clear Structure
Think of your account structure as a road map of where your ad money flows. And the moment you do that you will understand why a clear structure is important. It allows you to know where each dime is going, it’s easy to judge and measure campaign performance, it’s easier to re-route your budget to better-performing campaigns, and it also allows you to understand why some campaigns are underperforming.
And more than not, accounts face all kinds of problems rooted in an inefficient account structure.
By combining these strategies with the fundamentals of understanding your Facebook ad costs, you can supercharge your efforts to reduce advertising expenses while achieving better results. Remember that ongoing testing and adaptation are key to success in the ever-evolving world of Facebook advertising.