Table of Contents
Today we introduce several ideas to reduce advertising costs on Facebook.
Facebook is one of the most popular advertising platforms for those who are taking their first steps into digital advertising. Its great variety of formats and platforms (Facebook, Instagram) allows to obtain very positive results. But we have a responsibility: our budget and the achievement of results.
More than 8 million businesses worldwide are using Facebook advertising, and that growth doesn’t seem to be stopping.
What makes Facebook advertising so attractive to businesses?
The first and most obvious reason: Facebook has 2.6 billion active monthly users! Therefore, it is likely that your customers will be there. All you need is a Facebook page and 5 € a day to get started, even if the Facebook ads are easy to set up.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy to get good results. Your goals may vary:
- Get people to click on your ads
- Get more subscribers to your email list
- Increase your sales
- Or simply increase interactions on your site.
Why is it hard to get results?
Because the success of a Facebook ad depends on countless factors such as:
- The right advertising objective
- The audience, i.e. the people to whom your campaign is directed
- The right kind of auction and the right budget
- The offer
- The copy of your ad
- The choice of an appropriate and striking visual support (image, video, GIF)
- Choosing the right locations for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network
When we advertise, we all have the same goal: to pay as little as possible to get the best results. We will present solutions and ideas to reduce the cost of your Facebook ads for better results.
Choosing the right campaign objective
The objective is at the beginning of the process of creating a campaign. Before talking about objectives, it is important to know the structure of a campaign:
Campaign: The top element, where we can choose the budget and our target. Some examples: traffic, conversions, traffic, participation, video views, etc.
Ad set: this is where you choose your audience, the duration of the campaign, the location of the ads. For each ad set, you can set up multiple ads.
Ad: This is what users will see!
The problem is that it is very easy to choose the wrong target when creating your campaign (especially if you have little experience in web marketing).
Which goal to choose?
The honest answer is: It depends.
To let more people know about your activity, you can use targets such as “reach”, “interactions”, “video views” or “brand recognition”.
For example, the goal of “outreach” allows you to reach as many people as possible in your target audience. Para que más personas conozcan su actividad, puede utilizar objetivos como “alcance”, “interacciones”, “vistas de video” o “reconocimiento de marca”.
The goal of “interactions” allows you to reach people who regularly interact with Facebook posts. This is particularly useful for increasing interactions with your ads and reducing costs.
Therefore, do not use this goal if you want to attract traffic to your website (there is a specific goal for that).
What if you want more leads or customers?
This is where many novices make mistakes and confuse the target “conversions” with the target “traffic“.
We use the traffic target to send traffic to a website. Nothing else. If you choose this option, Facebook will optimize the distribution of your ads to find the users most likely to click your ad link.
In itself, the goal is to minimize your cost per click (CPC). We’ll get back to it.
The problem is that the people who click won’t necessarily be the ones who turn into your website. If your goal is to get conversions, there’s a solution…
Conversion targeting allows you to create ads that invite people to perform a specific action on your website, such as a purchase or subscription.
So in which case should you use the conversion target, and not the traffic target, since in both cases you are sending people to a website?
- If your website is a landing page requesting contact information. Usually a page that promotes a free e-book when the user gives their email address in a form.
- If your website is a sales site.
- If your website is a product page (e-commerce)
DigitalMarketer did a test, to find out which target was best to generate leads. The results are clear: 5 times more leads with 5 times less cost per lead with the use of the conversion target.
Trust the Facebook algorithm, if you want sales the goal to choose is conversion. The real goal is not to have the most traffic on your sales page, but to turn every visitor into a customer!
However, remember that to sell, you have to comply with the basic principles: Good product, trust, recognition,..
Audience size matters
If you work with a funnel-shaped campaign structure, it is very likely that the lower you are in your funnel, the smaller your audiences are.
It is recommended that your custom audiences have at least 25,000 members. When you reach an audience of more than 100,000, you can consider more precise segmentation and get 2 audiences.
If your audiences are too small, the Facebook algorithm will tend to increase the cost per click. Before activating a retargeting campaign, make sure your reach/traffic campaigns are creating enough volume to get the most out of it.
Don’t forget A/B tests
The A/B test is a technique that allows you to test several versions of your pages/creativities to determine which is the most effective. Thanks to this, you can find out what works and what doesn’t work in your ads.
The principle is to put two versions of the ad in competition, for example, version A and version B. If we find that version B generates more sales or more clicks than version A, well, we keep B.
We try first and maintain what is most efficient. Result? Mejor retorno de la inversión (ROI) y mejor tasa de conversión y, por lo tanto, menores costos.
Don’t make the mistake of many advertisers, which is simply putting an ad online and then letting it run on its own. The best way to find out what works is to try out some different ideas beforehand (texts, images, videos, forms, etc.).
How is it done concretely?
When your ads are published and you want to test everything, you can start with the image or the texts.
You need to create a first ad and do an A/B test of the image, for example. Keep the same text in each ad, you just change the image.
Therefore, you will have ads with identical text, but different images. By monitoring your campaigns, you will quickly see which ad works better than others. As I mentioned before, all you have to do is keep the one that works best and remove those that have a low relevance index (you should create ads with relevance indexes of 8, 9 and 10/10). The final strategy will be to focus your budget on successful ads in order to reduce advertising costs on Facebook.
Renew ads
Why make sure you renew your Facebook ads? For two main reasons:
- Avoid reaching too high a frequency
- Be constantly updated, that is, in line with current trends and the tastes of your audiences.
There is one point you must constantly keep in mind: people get bored quickly and love new things. They want to interact with advertisers who can innovate and therefore surprise them.
Therefore, you should be able to recycle the elements of an ad. Once the campaign is over, you can create a new one. For example, add new images to the same offer, change the text, invent a new phrase, while addressing the same audience.
The goal is to interest, to attract attention, to have fun, to move … A good ad should not give the impression that it is only intended to sell a product, it should, in itself, bring something to the person who consults it: a smile, a tear, a reflection, in short, anything.
Obviously, if you’re already running an ad that works very well, don’t change it!
But if you see that it is ineffective, or that its impact is diminishing, then it is time to change it. Once again, the A/B tests will be a great asset. By designing multiple versions of images, text or offers, you can combine features and develop a wide variety of different ads in a very short time.
The power of images/videos
The image you choose for your ad is the first thing that will jump out at a user and ultimately decide whether they will read your text or ignore it.
Image is one of the most important elements of your advertising, and choosing the right image will reduce the cost of your ads by increasing their click rate and relevance score.
Moreover, as you well know the human brain is divided into two parts: the left part is the rational and logical part, while the right part calls for sleep, imagination, intuition. So, when a person mobilizes the emotional part of his being, he will tend to look to the right. Hence the interest in choosing the right image, because an ad first seeks to “make people want”.
There is still basic information to know about the impact of certain images in the ads:
Ads with photos tend to attract more attention than illustrations, for example.
Choose contrasting colours. The main color of your ad is crucial to get a user’s attention. You should know that in marketing colors have a meaning and should be consistent with the message of your ad. For example, if your ad refers to an organic product, it may be advisable to choose green.
And you should always choose an image that is consistent with your text.
Don’t just try to get clicks. The goal is to make the user stay. The goal is for the user to click AND not be disappointed with what they discover.
Again, in order to determine the image that arouses the most interest, it will be necessary to carry out tests.
Understanding audience segments
You can optimize the costs of advertising on Facebook through targeting.
To ensure the effectiveness of your publications, with low costs, the first step is to place your audience at the center of your strategy. It goes beyond the obvious demographics, such as age and gender.
Knowing the people who interact with your brand, what they like and want to see, helps maintain a lasting conversation with them. To group your audiences into specific segments, start by asking yourself some simple questions:
- What demographics are already interested in your brand?
- What kind of issues do they get most involved with?
- What are your other areas of interest?
- What other brands do they like?
- What pages of your competitors are they following?
There may be several answers to these questions. Identify the segments that make up your audience and personalize the content according to each category.
Dividing your Facebook ad campaign into several custom micro campaigns remains the best way to get a low CPA (cost per action) and thus reduce advertising costs on Facebook.
Optimize your landing pages
The landing page is unfortunately underestimated too often. However, this is the page where people who click on your ads land.
You must leave them with a very good impression, which implies at least:
- Fast loading time of this page, especially on mobile devices,
- Responsive design, i.e. perfectly suitable for all screen sizes (PC, mobile, tablet …)
- The bounce rate is not too high,
- Fully optimized conversion rate for your landing page …
Basically, you are spending money to attract potential customers to your site, think about taking care of your guests and guiding them towards your goal.
But in addition, a landing page also helps to reduce the cost per result and optimize the performance of your advertising.
Do you think Facebook is only interested in what is happening on their platform? This is not the case.
Facebook, at least its algorithms, take into account the entire user experience. Facebook doesn’t want to disappoint its users. Like all internet platforms, Facebook seeks to better satisfy its users. If your users are not happy, Facebook will lose members on its social network … and if it loses people, it cannot make money and, of course, neither can you!
Simply put, Facebook’s priorities are:
- Happy users,
- Making money,
- Letting you do it too.
You’re at the bottom of the stairs! Now you know the rules, so you know how to play by them. Optimizing your users’ experience on your landing page will help you reduce advertising costs on Facebook.
Optimize your campaigns by location
All locations have a different cost per click and impressions. This means you can remove expensive and inefficient locations for best results.
The value of your bid will determine not only whether you can receive advertising space, but also the advertising spaces, which can mean the difference between success and failure.
Now, you can see how your ad set was displayed in different locations. Facebook also shows whether the location appeared on a desktop, a mobile application or the mobile web.
If you do not know which location to choose, you can activate your campaign in all available locations during a short period. With the report breaking down the results by location, you can make decisions that will help you reduce your advertising costs on Facebook/Instagram.
