Facebook is not just a social media platform; it is a behemoth with over 2.5 billion active monthly users. No business worth its weight in salt can today afford to ignore Facebook when trying to reach out to its target group of customers. When social media influences customers’ buying behaviour, it is not feasible to leave out Facebook from your advertising strategy. With the passage of time and increasing popularity, Facebook advertising has become too expensive for small businesses. Do you feel you are spending too much on Facebook advertising, or your ROI from Facebook advertising is not high? If yes, then here are some simple yet effective ways to reduce your advertising cost on Facebook.
Know the ways Facebook charges its advertisers
Before jumping on to ways to reduce Facebook advertising costs, it is pertinent to know a little bit about how Facebook charges customers for their advertising. There are two methods of pricing used by Facebook.
Link clicks– This is similar to the cost per click method of Google, where the advertiser is charged every time a visitor clicks on his URL.
Impression– Facebook charges you for every time ad is viewed whether or not it is clicked. Here the pricing is based upon cost per thousand impressions.
Factors affecting the cost of an ad on Facebook
Ad placement- Where your ad appears on Facebook decides the amount charged by Facebook. It is possible to lower your cost by changing Ad Placement.
Relevance Score- This is a metric used by Facebook to charge advertisers with Relevance Score being a value between 1 and 10. The higher your relevance score, the less you pay for your advert.
Ad Schedule- You can set a schedule for your ad to show on particular days and hours when your target group of customers is on Facebook.
Your audience- You can reduce the cost of advertising by limiting your ad to a specific age group, gender, or profession, based upon your target group of customers.
Optimize Ad Placement through trial and error
You do not know where to place your ad at the start. You need to try different positions and compare the ROI to know the best placement for your company’s ad. Facebook helps its customers through a tool called Facebook Ads Manager to check the performance of their ads by placement. You can customize the ad for various placements and later get rid of a placement that does not produce desired results.
Your bidding strategy
There are options for two bidding strategies offered to advertisers by Facebook. You need to try out both bidding strategies and make changes from time to time to get the best results with minimum cost. The first one is the lowest cost, also called the default bidding, where the advertiser gets cheap impressions and clicks. The other bidding strategy is target cost, where you can hope to get more clicks and eventually lower your advertising cost through a higher relevance score.
Wise scheduling of your ads
If you have identified your target group of customers, you also know the days of the week and the hours when your prospective customers are on Facebook. It will help you cut down on the cost of your advertising budget as you can schedule your ads to run only at times that are high performing according to your findings. Why run your ad on weekdays and during office hours when most of your customers are in their workplaces? To change the schedule of your ads, you need to switch to Lifetime Budget in Budget and Schedule section of your budget menu.
Refine audiences from time to time
To try Facebook advertisements with different audiences, you need to find out how your existing saved audience performs. You can do this by using Facebook Ads Manager to tell you about the performance of your ad with different age groups. If you are getting inferior results with a particular age group, you can exclude this age group to reduce your advertising cost and improve your ROI. It is possible to make changes in not just age but also gender, language, and location of your target audience to reduce your advertisements’ overall cost.
You can use these four methods and also unique combinations of these methods to see the performance of your advertising on Facebook. You will soon find out how to lower the cost of advertising on Facebook.
HOWEVER…
In recent years Facebook ads are getting more expensive due to various reasons, demand is outstripping supply, fake clicks and bots, fake Facebook accounts, and many other variants.
Bad results and high costs can sometimes prove lethal to SMB campaigns and often lead not only to frustration but may incur in substantial expenses.
ENTER CLICKZ.IO – A CHEAPER AND MORE EFFECTIVE WAY TO DO ADS
We established ClickZ.io specifically to reduce advertising costs for marketing professionals who are looking for better ROI on their marketing budgets.
Visit our promotion types page to learn more.