Facebook Ads are irrefutably one of the strongest social media advertising platforms, if not the strongest. However, the bane of all advertiser’s lives is the cost per result, and in this case, Cost Per Click.
One of the main reasons for this is that in the past 5 years, more and more advertisers have been flooding to the platform, meaning many brands with weaker activity have been edged out, causing increases in CPC. As shown by the graph below, ad revenue growth has increased by 400% from $3.32B to $16.62B in just 5 years. This illustrates the massive influx of advertisers using the platform over such a short period.
However, this doesn’t have to be the case. There are plenty of ways to reduce your CPCs to get your results at a cheaper rate. Read how, below…
1. Target more specific audiences
Of course, if we could, everyone would like to have their face or their brand in front of as many people as possible. However, this isn’t the most efficient way to spend your advertising budgets.
Targeting more niche audiences can drastically reduce the competition from other brands running ads to a similar audience. It’s important to remember that Facebook refers to their ad space as an “auction”, and you are in a bidding war with hundreds of other brands. Reducing the size of your audience increases the likelihood you will resonate more closely with your target demographic and reduce the number of other advertisers you’re bidding against. This will, in turn, reduce CPCs.
2. Check for audience overlap
Testing and using multiple audiences in conjunction with one another is great to reach as many people within your target audience as possible. However, in doing so, you may have inadvertently overlapped your audiences.
‘Overlapping audiences’ refers to what happens when you have multiple people that fit into one of your audiences, who also fit into another one of your audiences. When this occurs, you’re essentially paying twice to reach these people. Using Facebook’s Audience Overlap Tool, you can identify any overlap and adjust your audiences accordingly.
3. Refresh your creative
Finding creative that resonates with your audience is great for achieving high results at a reasonable cost, however, eventually, you might begin to see your results peter out and your costs go back up. Frustrating.
What you may be experiencing here is known as “creative fatigue”. This occurs when an audience engages with your ads at first, but eventually get bored of seeing the same ad over and over again. A new suite of creative will help reduce creative fatigue and in-turn reduce your CPCs.
4. Use bid caps
At campaign level, Facebook allows users to introduce something known as “bid-caps”, and for any advertiser looking to control how much they spend per click, conversion, lead or any other metric, they are essential.
As we mentioned previously, Facebook’s ad space is like an auction and it’s possible for you to spend more per result than you’d like. A bid-cap will let Facebook know a limit you are willing to pay for any given result. For example, you can set your CPC cap at £0.40. By doing this, it ensures that you will never pay any more than £0.40 for someone to click through to your site.
5. Test different creative
The key to lower CPCs boils down to putting the right ad in front of the right audience. If you have both of these components, you should have no issues reducing your CPCs. However, how do you know what the right ad is?
Testing across all facets of your paid social activity is essential, potentially most of all with your creative. By building multiple different ad types using a variety of copy options and creative options, you can ascertain what your audience resonates with and what they want to see. By putting exactly the kind of ads your audience wants to see in front of them, this will also reduce your CPCs.
If you want to know how we can help lower your CPCs on paid social or paid search, get in touch. We’ve also written a post on how to lower your CPCs for paid search, here.