Social Media Advertising Getting Costly? Learn How to Lower Your Costs

Most businesses are blown away by how easy it is to go through budgets for social media advertising. This could be a nightmare to deal with. Well at least in your case, that shouldn’t be the case.

Social Media Marketing Costs

We can’t change the facts:

• Facebook is a compelling platform for advertisers for many reasons, including powerful targeting options and affordable costs, among other things.
• Your Facebook ad costs, of course, will vary based on several factors, including your audience, industry, goals and optimisation settings.

In this article we share four of the best ways to keep your social media advertising costs low. Where  better to start than with the second-biggest traffic driver – Facebook?

Facebook Charges per Ad

Ads are charged in two ways: Link Clicks or Impressions. Let’s explore the two below.

Being charged by impressions means you are charged per ad view, and this is isn’t affected by the number of clicks you receive. Facebook calculates the cost per 1 000 impressions (CPM).

Somehow, being charged by Link clicks is the more commonly preferred method. It’s often referred to as cost per click (CPC) bidding. With this bid type, you’re only charged when someone clicks on your ad. In this instance the view doesn’t count.

To manage your ad spend and to change how Facebook charges you, click on the Budget & Schedule section of your Facebook ad.  Gain your control at a click of a button.

Which Factors Have The Greatest Impact On Ad Spend?

Well, there are several factors which directly impact your Facebook ad cost and having a solid understanding of those factors is a big game changer. You could spend less on your Facebook ads, and still get the best results. How?

Bidding strategy

Put your bid strategy to the test. You see the Facebook ad platform is like an auction, with two scenarios at play:

• An automatic bidding process, where Facebook sets a bid on your behalf for the most actions at the best price, or
• The manual bidding process, where you decide what a result is worth to you. This function allows you to prevent unnecessary and expensive clicks by setting a bid cap or target cost. This is so that you know what your campaign goals to avoid limiting your bidding choices. Bidding on conversions gives you more options and helps you get the best results from your Facebook ad campaigns. The beauty of this beast is that its bidding strategy comes with the transparency about its unique advantages and disadvantages.

Ad scheduling

Timing is everything so pick it well. It’s like with everything else: the calendar and scheduling your ads plays a crucial role in reducing costs and maximising results. The key to getting better results from lower cost is to schedule your ads to run only at historically high-performing times of the day.

The Big Tip: In the Budget & Schedule section of your ad set, change your budget to a lifetime budget, by clicking the Budget drop-down menu and select Lifetime Budget from the list to make the switch.

The Audience

Facebook is like a limited ad real estate and auction for audiences, as some are more sought-after than others. This makes it more competitive and expensive to get your ads shown to certain audiences. Yet the more relevant your audience, the lower your cost. You can also edit Facebook Custom and Lookalike Audience Segments as they typically outperform saved audiences and help bolster your relevance score. For further refining, your audiences, combine saved audience criteria with your custom and lookalike audiences. Targeting these ultra-specific hybrid audiences allows you to focus on only your most profitable customers.

Relevance score

We have mentioned that Facebook values user relevance. According to the platform, your relevance score estimates how well your ad resonates with its audience, and it also has a direct impact on how much you pay and how often your ad is shown. The higher your ad relevance score, the better your ad’s performance and the less you’ll pay. Note: Facebook will soon replace the relevance score with three new relevance metrics.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

When it comes to Facebook advertising, there are multiple factors that can affect the cost at which you advertise, and you can use the tools presented and hopefully pay less for effective advertising. Want to know more about social media marketing? The Digital School of Marketing’s Social Media Marketing Course will teach you about this and so much more! For more information, visit our website.