It’s fashionable now to boldly state that Facebook ads are too expensive.
Ad costs are indeed higher than they used to be (the average CPM climbed from $3.60 in February to $8.60 in June). But that misses an important point.
It’s not what you pay that’s important, but whether that’s within your budget so that you can still come away from your Facebook advertising campaign with a healthy profit.
Lowering your CPM is a helpful way to reduce your spending and get more ad results. Here are our top tips on optimizing your cost per impression on Facebook.
First, What Is Cost Per Impression?Â
Cost per impression is what Facebook uses to help you benchmark and compare your ads.
The data label on the platform is CPM. That means cost per thousand impressions. It’s what you pay for every thousand people who see your Facebook promotion.
Use Facebook’s Budget Optimization Tool
The AI built into Facebook’s ad platform is sophisticated, and it’s worth using this to your advantage. One feature on offer for advertisers is the Campaign Budget Optimization tool.
This tool will let Facebook analyze your campaign performance and decide how to distribute your money across each ad within that campaign. Try this tool to see if it helps reduce your cost per impression.
There is much debate about whether it’s best to invest your advertising budget in Facebook or Google. For a definitive answer, check out this Facebook vs Google Ads article.
Try Lookalike Audiences
You can set up an audience in Facebook ads. That audience might be your website visitors, customers, email subscribers, or perhaps people who liked your Facebook page.
This audience gives Facebook a profile of the type of person you want to target. Once they have that, you can set Facebook to go out and search for similar people with a similar profile to that audience.
That’s called a lookalike audience. If you have a large and well-targeted audience, trying the “lookalike” functionality is an excellent way to reduce and optimize your cost per impression metric.
Try a Fresh Ad Creative
Perhaps you’ve had a campaign running for a while, and you’ve recently seen a cost hike. If that’s the case, it might simply be that people are bored of your ad.
They might have seen your post too many times, or perhaps you’ve saturated your target audience with your brand so much that you are a victim of ad blindness.
If so, you can either pause your ad or take a break for a while. Or you can refresh your campaign with something new. That might be a new product or a new promotional offer.
A new ad to an existing audience often works beautifully. People already familiar with your brand will take notice of a new and exciting post that appears in their news feed.
Facebook Success is Down to Optimized Ads
Don’t set and forget your Facebook paid ads if you want to see success. You need to concentrate on optimizing your campaigns, and optimizing your cost per impression is a sensible place to start.
For more marketing and advertising tips, why not check out our