How to Lower Facebook Advertising Costs

Run Ads Over a Longer Time

Your ads will have lower costs if you run them for a longer period of time.

Why is this?

The longer your ads run, the more time Facebook has algorithmically determine who is more likely to convert. It means Facebook can optimize your ads, reducing CPMs as it finds your best audience.

On some days, audiences might be more expensive to reach, and on others, it may be cheaper. You need to give ad sets enough time to optimize, and find the correct audience.

As long as your ads aren’t outrageously expensive, you should let them continue to run so that Facebook can help you save money.

Summary: Let ads run longer to optimize.  

 

Run More Than One Ad Set

One of the one of the biggest reasons your ads are expensive is poor audience selection. If your audience isn’t interested, no amount of bid tweaking will fix it. You’ll spend, and spend, and spend, and not see any results.

To ensure you find a profitable, low-cost audience, you need to test and experiment with multiple audience groups, intead of spending all your money on one test audience.

You should start with as many audiences as possible at a $10-$20 budget per ad set, with at least 1-3 creatives.

Not only will you find a profitable audience, you’ll find it much more quickly.Running $50 per day for one audience means you won’t know which audience is profitable until 5 days later. Running five audiences at $10 per day means in 1-2 days you’ll know if an audience is working.

Summary: Running multiple audiences saves you money and reduces the time it takes to find a profitable audience. 

 

Advertise Earlier in the Year

Facebook advertising costs are driven by a bunch of different factors.

Competition has an outsized influence on costs. If 100 advertisers are competing for the same audience, chances are it will cost more.

Studies show that advertising costs rise later in the year. This is becuase of the holiday season and companies needing to spend their year-end budget.

A study by Social Code in 2014 and found CPMs rose dramatically in November and December when competition increased.

In 2015, Facebook tracked ad costs during the holiday season. They showed that CPMs increased by over 100% during the holidays.

When planning your yearly budget, you should consider spending more before November to reduce competition costs. The focus should be on building your retargeting pool, and your email audience.

Summary: Plan to spend more money early in the year to reduce ad costs.