It’s a question we hear all the time, and see plastered everywhere: How much do Facebook Ads cost?
We see the question a lot, and one of the only consistent answers we see is “it depends on a lot of factors.”
This is absolutely true. There’s a lot that goes into understanding Facebook Ads cost; everything from your audience to your bidding plan to ranking Facebook gives you directly affects and influences how much you’re going to pay.
We’ve just analyzed well over 100 million dollars of ad spend during this past year! This provides us with Facebook Ad cost averages for the entire 2016 year to compare across the quarters. It might not be able to tell you exactly how much your specific campaign is going to cost, but it’s going to give you a good reference point of the current costs of Facebook Advertising today.
Keep in mind that what you spend on Facebook Ads is up to you and how you set your budget; this post is all about how to affect the cost of Facebook Ads and how to lower the individual rates.
We’re going to take a look at the most relevant data of Facebook Ads cost averages from all of 2016 (with an emphasis on Q4).
We’ll cover cost per clicks, cost per likes, and cost per app installs. We’ll also cover differences based on gender, day of the weekly, hour of the day, and month-by-month breakdowns. We’ll explain what affects the cost of advertising with Facebook Ads — and also how we can reduce it.
If you’re short on time, you can watch this video! We cover the main points of Facebook Advertising cost, but don’t dive into 2016 data – you’ll have to read on for that!
If you’d like to skip ahead to the 2016 data, click here.
How Does the Bidding Process Work?
It’s important to note that Facebook works like an auction. This is important because it’s part of the reason that there’s no set answer to “how much does Facebook Ads cost?”
What this means is that you, as an advertiser, will say how much you’re willing to pay for an ad—you can actually manually adjust this in the pricing and bidding section. If you don’t, Facebook will automatically calculate a bid for you based on your budget and how long you choose to have your ad run.
Here’s the thing: Facebook Ads is a popular place, and you aren’t handing over a stack of cash and getting an ad. You are entering a bid. Plenty of other advertisers are trying to get that same ad space in a users’ Newsfeed, too, and Facebook limits the number of ads each user sees. This is only one reason why knowing how much Facebook Ads cost is so important.
What Factors Influence the Cost of Facebook Ads?
As we mentioned above, a lot of factors directly or indirectly affect the cost of Facebook Ads.
How much your ads will actually cost—and how much you’ll get for what you pay—will depend on a variety of different factors.
Here are some of the biggest factors that directly influence the cost of Facebook Ads.
The Audience You’re Targeting
The audience you choose will directly affect how much you’re paying for Facebook Ads. This, in part, will largely be affected by who else is targeting the audience you’re targeting.
We’ve discussed above that Facebook Ads works on a bidding system. It’s important to note that a common misconception of marketers is that they’ll only be in competition with those in their industry, like they typically are in sales. If, for example, I sold yoga equipment, I might think I’d only have to worry about other brands that sold yoga or fitness products. This isn’t true. You’re in direct competition with every other marketer who wants access to that particular customer.
That particular customer that I, as a yoga mat salesperson, am targeting is not going to have yoga as their only interest. This customer also loves fishing, scuba diving, skiing, fine dining, and has recently opened a small business. These are each traits that multiple brands will be targeting uniquely, and we’re all pitted against each other to place an ad on this one, very valuable, very diverse customer.
See where the chaos happens?
Fortunately, by increasing other factors and creating a high quality ad, you’ll be able to stand out amongst your competition when you’re trying to bid for an ad. Audience is an important part of the cost, but it’s not the only factor that matters. Thanks to a high quality ad, for example, you could pay significantly less than your competition is paying to advertise to the same exact user.
Your potential reach for this targeting could be 187,000,000 users– all who have other brands and pages trying to connect with them, too.
To a certain extent, the audience you’re targeting isn’t something you can necessarily control. While yes, you absolutely choose the audience, if your perfect audience is just more expensive, that’s just the way it goes. You don’t want to sacrifice the audience for cost.
The amount you’re paying for your audience (which won’t be obvious or stated anywhere) will vary even amongst your own campaigns, as your exact audience for different types of ads is likely to change. Your custom audience will include different members than an audience who isn’t yet connected to you, and vice versa.
Quality of Your Ad
The quality of your ad can send the cost of your ad skyrocketing or lower it dramatically. As if there wasn’t enough motivation to create a great ad so that users convert, we now have another incentive: it directly and obviously affects the cost of our ads.
There are two metrics you want to look at when evaluating the quality of your ad, which are the relevance score and the click through rate.
You’ll get a relevance score for each ad you run, which will be a number between 1 and 10, and it’s measuring (you guessed it!) how relevant your ad is to the audience you’re targeting. Keep in mind that a high relevance score won’t automatically mean high conversions—your copy might still need tweaking—but the ad itself will be considered relevant, and that will mean a lower cost.
Your relevance score will likely continually change as more users interact with your ad. If they react positively (such as interact with it or click it to a landing page), the score goes up; if they react negatively, by telling Facebook they don’t want to see the ad, the score goes down.
The higher your relevance score is, the less you’ll pay on ads; Facebook directly confirmed this. In an experiment we did, we also confirmed this. We ran the same ad twice, once with strong targeting (relevance score of 8) and once with poor targeting (relevance score of 2.9). The ad with the relevance score of 8 got 4 times more clicks on the same budget, where we emphasized cost per click.
Our experiment with relevance scores showed how much a high relevance score can affect the cost of your ads.
Your click-through rate is the number of clicks on your ad divided by the number of impressions. A higher click-through rate will indicate a higher relevance, and thus more value to your audience. Facebook will see this and lower your overall cost, though if you’re optimizing for CPC, the more clicks you get the more you’ll spend in that sense. Still, aiming for a high CTR can help the cost of your ads and its performance.
The Time of Year
There are peak times in the year when advertisers are flocking to Facebook Ads in droves—even more than normal. During these peak times, there will be more competition for ads, and you’ll pay more as a result.
Think about how much ads are during the super bowl—now imagine every marketer trying to use Facebook Ads for Black Friday and holiday sales, because that’s pretty much what happens. Big brands spend a lot, raising the cost of Facebook Ads for everyone (thanks, Walmart).
Black Friday and winter holiday sales times will be among the busiest times of the year, but there are other busy seasons and holidays to watch out for; Labor day often comes with a lot of sales and marketers wanting to advertise them, for example.
Busy times of the year can still be worthwhile, even with the extra cost—but you should definitely keep in mind that it will almost certainly cost more.
The Importance of CPA & ROI
While looking at ad cost and ad spend is important, what’s even more important is the CPA and the ROI you’re getting. This is how you can determine whether what you’re paying—and what your ad is costing you—is worth it. Does your ROI (return on investment) have a higher value than your CPA?
Let’s look at another example. Let’s say you’re paying $1.00 per mobile app install. The customer will pay $1.99 to actually install the app. You’re also able to determine that one out of three users that came from your Facebook Ad will make an additional in-app purchase of $3.00.
Let’s say you get 100 downloads. You spend $100, but you make $199.00 from those downloads, and an additional $90 from later in-app purchase. You’ve spent $100, but you’ve made $290.
Your landing page and offer play huge factors in actually getting those conversions, and this is how they’ll affect the cost of your Facebook Ads.
The conversion rate, cost per action, and ROI rates are the most important things to keep an eye on. Make sure that your ad cost isn’t outweighing the ROI (which can be social ROI, too). The more you lower the cost of Facebook Ads, the larger your ROI—financial or otherwise—will be.
How do Bidding Options Affect Cost?
Bidding options allow you to choose how you want to pay for Facebook Ads. You can pay depending on how many people click on your ad, or you can pay for the number of people who see your ad, for example.
There are different types of bidding options, or ways you can pay for ads. These include:
- Cost per click (CPC): You are paying only for each user that clicks on your ad. They do not have to complete the conversion and purchase on your site or sign up on your landing page; they just have to click. That being said, you aren’t paying for users who viewed your ad and didn’t convert.
- Impressions (CPM): You’re paying for cost per 1,000 impressions. The cost per impressions is much lower than a cost per click, and when you want to get a lot of eyes on your ad, this can be a good way to go.
- Cost per action/conversion (CPA): You’re optimizing for a specific action to be taken (i.e. a conversion) however you are paying per impression. Each click to the website may cost more than when you are optimizing for link clicks but, on average, each click when optimizing for conversions is more likely to lead to a conversion.
- Cost per like: Used in campaigns where the objective is to gain likes on your Page, this will allow you to pay for each like you get from your ad.
Facebook also offers different optimization options, each of which will optimize the ad delivery to users likely to take the requested action. These include:
- Conversions: Facebook will deliver your ad to people who are most likely to complete the designated action you’ve chosen (such as purchase from your site). They evaluate this based on past user history, and you’re paying for impressions (CPM).
- Impressions: Facebook will deliver your ad to as many people as possible, getting as many views on your ad that they can. You’re paying for impressions (CPM).
- Clicks on your ad/to your site: Facebook will deliver your ad to the people who are most likely to click to your site. You’re paying for cost per click, or CPC.
- Daily Unique Reach: Facebook focuses on delivering your ads to people up to once a day, affecting frequently. You’re paying for impressions (CPM).
Facebook will automatically choose a bidding option based on your objective. If your objective is to send clicks to your website, Facebook will set the bidding strategy to optimize your ad to accomplish that objective. You can manually change it.
Similarly, Facebook will automatically have the bid set to get you the most conversions/clicks/impressions for the best price; this means they will bid for you based on how much your budget is and how long the ad will run. You can, if you choose, enter your own specific bid and add in how much you’re willing to pay specifically. You can also change your budget and ad schedule at any point, increasing or decreasing the amount.
Facebook allows you to enter in a manual bid price, which will determine how much you’re willing to pay per result. They will still recommend a suggested bid so you’re not flying blind.
Bidding options affect cost a great deal, because you are choosing what you want to pay for. A cost per conversion may be more expensive than the cost per impression, but if you want to send users to your site and only a few of your impressions actually clicked, it makes more sense to choose a CPC style of bidding.
You also have to consider what’s more expensive per click/impression/etc, and what’s more expensive to run as a campaign.
Facebook Ads Cost: 2016 Data (Q1, Q2, Q3, & Q4)
Now that we’ve got a clear idea of how the bidding system works and what factors currently are most heavily affecting the cost of our Facebook Ads, let’s take a look at the data.
This data was pulled from all AdEspresso users from the end of 2015, Q1, Q2, and Q3 of 2016! Over 150 million dollars in ad spend has been imported and analyzed by us in Q4 alone. All currencies have been converted to USD in this data.
While all the data and numbers in this post are coming off real campaigns, you should be using these numbers only as a reference or a guideline.
There are so many factors influencing Facebook Ads cost that there’s no way to know exactly what the cost will be for you until you run a few campaigns. Still, this data can provide a powerful point of reference and more concretely give a rough answer to the question “How much do Facebook Ads cost?” that doesn’t involve a shrug of the shoulders.
When breaking down the numbers in our research, we looked at how different factors like the age and country users were from affected how much they were spending and what the results of the campaigns were.
Here’s what we found…
CPC Costs & Results
This data reflects the average cost per click, amount spent, and numbers for multiple variables for all of 2015 and Q1, Q2, and Q3 of 2016. This information is limited to campaigns with website clicks or website conversions as the objectives. The currency is in dollars.
2016 averages:
2016 Q4 averages:
In just the USA, the average cost per click (CPC) of Facebook Ads in Q3 2016 was 27.29 cents (and 27.40 cents for ALL objectives). The cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) based on Q3 was $7.19 (and $7.34 CPM for ALL objectives).
CPC by Age Range:
CPC went up for the 18-34 age but still didn’t surpass Q1’s cost. 65+ showed the most continuous trend of lower CPC costs over time.
CPC by Gender:
CPC by Placement:
The Instagram placement had a nice drop!
CPC Monthly Breakdown:
CPC by month was relatively stable in 2016 with an increase towards the end of the year!
CPC by Day of Week:
As of 2016 Q3, Sunday and Monday has taken the crown as the “cheapest” day based on cost-per-click! This graph also shows that OVERALL, on average, CPC was lower in Q3.
CPC by Hour of Day:
CPC by Campaign Objective:
The reach objective is by far the most expensive.
Cost Per Like for Page Like Campaigns
Running a campaign for page likes can be valuable; it enables you to get more followers quickly, who will then get plenty of your information in their News Feeds without you having to pay for it. This data shows the findings of all campaigns created with the objective to gain more page likes in the second quarter. We have limited countries as we set the minimum spend to 50K or more.
Cost Per Like by Country:
2016:
Cost per Like by Age Range:
44 and under showed overall decline in cost per like, while the older ages are costing more to get those “Likes!” On the very upper end, Mom and Dad (or Grandma and Grandpa?) are still cheap.
Cost per Like by Gender:
The cost to get a female to “Like” your page dramatically dropped in Q2, and it continued downward in Q3, but peaked back up in the last quarter of 2016. Males became cheaper as the year progressed.
Cost per Like by Placement:
Cost Per Like Monthly Breakdown:
Q2 had higher average costs, and Q3, on average, was lower cost per likes on average, but notice that the trend seems to be going upward again!
Cost Per Like – Day of the Week :
Cost Per Like – Hourly:
Cost per App Install
Driving mobile app installs is a great reason to use Facebook Ads. This data is limited to campaigns that used the objectives “mobile app installs” and “canvas app installs” from 2016.
Cost Per App Install by Country:
Cost Per App Install by Age:
Cost per App Install by Gender:
Females and males both had a huge jump in cost – the highest it’s been all year.
Cost Per App Install by Placement:
Cost Per App Install by Month:
Cost Per App Install by Day of Week:
Cost Per App Install by Time of Day:
Cost Per App Install by Device:
Summary of the Data (Overall)
For a quick 2016 summary, and to help us all notice a few interesting trends, we found (on average) that:
- The “Reach” objective is by far the priciest – Unlike impressions, reach focuses on appearing only once for as much of your audience as possible.
- It consistently cost less per click/like/install to target much OLDER users. However, keep in mind that you also want to track your revenue rate per conversion; younger users may be excited or willing to engage with your ad or product, but how much will/can they buy or spend?
- CPC cost less for “link clicks” than any other objective except page engagement. This makes a great deal of sense; Facebook has been working hard to improve their optimization algorithms, and this is proof that it’s working. If your goal is to generate general traffic, optimizing for clicks is hands down the way to go.
- The amount businesses spend on ads increases at the end of the year, so although the “averages” show lower costs all around, you can see at the end of September that costs in the monthly breakdowns almost uniformly started to spike up. We expect this spike to continue. This not only causes a surge in costs but also creates a problem of deliverability. November and December are/will be showing intense competition. Even the Facebook Ads community was flooded with complaints from small businesses unable to even spend their budget last year.
- The CPC/CPA on Instagram is usually higher than other placements. This does not mean that you shouldn’t advertise on Instagram, because it’s an incredibly valuable platform. Instagram gives us the opportunity to extend our reach to a new audience– particularly a younger audience– and to grow your brand awareness.
- The CPA by device is inconsistent – Outside of the iPod, it is very variable.
- Gender CPC/CPA has evened out – In early 2016, females were much more expensive. Now it’s evened out!
6 Tips to Reduce Facebook Ads Cost
We now know roughly what we can expect our Facebook Advertising to cost, give or take different varying factors. Some users will find these numbers to match their own; others will find that they’re spending more. Either way, wouldn’t it be great to lower your Facebook Ads cost, no matter what you’re spending now?
Believe it or not, it is possible to reduce the amount you’re spending on Facebook Ads. Even better: it’s possible to do so without sacrificing the quality or success of your ads and campaigns.
Here’s 6 tips to reduce Facebook Ads cost and save you money…
1. Split Testing
Split testing is so important; it can help you to determine what’s working on your ad and what isn’t; it can increase your ROI and your conversion rates; and, yes, it can help reduce your Facebook Ads cost.
Plenty of advertisers make the mistake of crafting the absolute perfect Facebook Ad and leaving it at that; if they were to split test, they’d be surprised to see that in many cases, the perfect ad (A) is for some reason not performing as well as another similar ad they’re split testing (B).
Sometimes we won’t know exactly what will work best until we test out a few different ideas.
Until relatively recently, when you ran multiple ads under an adset, the budget wasn’t divided evenly among them. Facebook would prioritize one or two ads, and most of the budget would got to them. They changed this halfway through last year; the budget is now divided equally amongst an ad set, so you’re actually getting a true split testing.
When split testing, you want to test everything, but starting with your image and your text is a good way to go. Our ad creation software makes it easier; you can upload two different blocks of text and two different images, making 4 variations to test. You can also split test your offer and your landing page.
These two ads are a great example of keeping an ad the same but changing the image and seeing what changes. One got significantly more likes and shares, while the second got more comments.
As you monitor your campaigns, you’ll quickly see which are performing better than others. By dividing up our ad spend to test out campaigns for effectiveness and not blowing the whole budget on one just-ok ad, we’ll ultimately find what works best, helping us to lower our score and focusing more of the spend towards the successful, lower costing ads.
2. Keep an Eye on Frequency
A high frequency of your Facebook Ads can be silent but deadly.
Frequency is the metric that tells you how often the same user has seen your ad. If the same people keep seeing your ad over and over, it means two things:
- You aren’t reaching a new audience
- The audience you are reaching keeps seeing the ad but might not be converting
While sometimes a user will see an ad once or twice before they click and convert (Plated finally got me with the third campaign), in general, if they’re interested, they’ll click the first time.
The higher your frequency gets, the less interaction, CTRs, and conversions you’ll see on your ads. This will start to increase the cost of your ads, and you won’t be getting any results.
Ideally, keep your frequency under 3. If it starts getting higher, it’s time to stop the campaign and either adjust it, or terminate it.
By making sure users are only seeing the same ad a few times, you’ll keep engagement and interactions with your ads higher in number,
3. Keep Your Ads New and Fresh
Partly in an attempt to combat frequency and definitely just because you should, you always want to make sure that you are constantly updating your ads. If you run even the most successful campaign for six months straight, it’ll run out of steam eventually.
While you can recycle parts of an ad, you want to keep your ads new and fresh; once one campaign ends, create a new one. Add new images to the same offer; switch up the way you phrase the offer but target the same audience.
By changing how the ad looks, you can continue to create new campaigns that will keep users interested– and converting. Even if you’re really saying the same thing.
Sure, it would be nice if we could run the same ad over and over again, but trust me, when it comes to Facebook Ads, you want to be like Geico’s commercials—there seems to be a new one on, with a new character or gimmick or joke, every time you turn on the TV.
Split testing can help with this; by creating different images and text and offers, you can combine them and create a large variety of different ads quickly and efficiently.
4. Choose Your Audience for Each Specific Campaign
You should be choosing an audience specifically for each campaign you run (or create a campaign specifically for that audience). You don’t need to include your entire target audience in every campaign; by doing so, you can drive up your costs a lot. Instead, focusing on sections and subsections within your audience and sending them highly targeted messages will be more effective.
Different audiences will cost less than others; we discussed this above. Sometimes, an audience will cost less not because of who you’re targeting, but what your relationship with them is.
Remarketing to an audience who is familiar with you (whether you’re using a custom audience from your email mailing list or a custom audience from your website) is likely to get you more clicks, especially when combined with highly targeted messaging designed specifically for them. The more clicks, the more conversions, and more interaction you get, the less you’ll pay and the more ROI you’ll be likely to see.
Remarketing often boasts higher conversion rates because you’re appealing to a warmer audience.
Choosing your audience is so important, and sectioning off different niches within your target audience will ultimately lower your cost and increase your success.
Why, for example, would you want to run a campaign designed to help you connect with new users and want to include the people already following you within that audience? To prevent this, all you’d have to do is exclude users who are already connected to your Facebook page. With one tweak, you’re already in front of a much more relevant audience. You can even use a lookalike audience created off your current high value customers to increase the likelihood of profitability.
There are a ton of different audience targeting options on Facebook, and you can use them in any combination that you see fit.
By focusing on one particular segment in your audience at a time and hitting them with highly targeted, relevant ads, you’ll see your ad cost and your ad spend go down quickly.
5. Focus on One Specific Objective
Facebook makes advertisers pick an objective as the very first step when creating Facebook Ads.
Still, I see a lot of campaigns run on Facebook Ads that don’t seem to have much of a focus, trying to get users to like their page, leave their lead information, purchase, and also check out their mobile app all at once. Even if this seems like a slight exaggeration, I actually saw this combination on an actual ad once. It felt chaotic, disorganized, and like it was just plain too much work.
Trying to get more bang for your buck by throwing every single objective into one ad just isn’t going to work. Instead, create multiple different campaigns—and ads within those ad sets and campaigns—that each have a specific focus.
By focusing on one specific objective within each individual ad, you’ll be able to make your call to action clear, as well as to get that ad to the right audience who will convert on it.
You would, for example, focus one set of ads on lead generation. You would focus the next set of ads on social engagement. The third set would focus on remarketing products to your custom audience to drive purchases. Another set of ads would focus on connecting with new users, which you would accomplish by targeting users who you aren’t yet connected to.
Each of these has unique focuses and a unique audience. The copy, image, and offers should all be created and targeted for that goal and that audience.
This ad features a ton of different images, many of which don’t seem to be connected. Because it’s so disjointed, it’s unlikely they’ve got a specific target audience in mind. They could be better of targeting each audience niche– with each product– uniquely.
Ultimately, this will drive down your costs, putting your ads in front of the people who are interested, and keeping you from paying for empty clicks that don’t amount to much.
6. Choose the Right Image
The picture you choose for your ad is going to be what jumps out at a user and ultimately will decide whether or not they even bother to read the text, let alone click or convert. The picture is one of the most important parts of your ad, and choosing the right image will help you lower the cost of your ads by increasing click-through rates and your relevance score.
Plenty of businesses are using carousel ads, giving them the chance to feature more images in a stand-out format; as a result of both having more images and standing out in the Facebook Newsfeed, carousel ads are known for having higher conversion rates, which raises your relevance score and lowers the cost per ad.
Carousel ads allow you to feature more images.
You’ll want to choose an image specifically for each campaign that relates to the targeted messaging and its related audience. Just like with copy and targeting, images you use for Facebook Ads aren’t a one-size-fits-all.
There are some basic starting points you can use to create a stronger image. Ads with pictures (particularly of attractive women) tend to perform better than illustrations, for example. Color contrast– and color choice— can help draw a user’s eye (though you want to be careful it doesn’t come across as spam-like). And you must always, always choose an image that at least makes sense with your text and copy, though this is more for making sure it makes it past the ad approval team.
This picture looks engaging, uses warm colors, and features smiling people.
No matter what, you always want to test multiple designs and images. Split testing can help you find the right image, which can lower the cost of your ads and increase its success. Win-win.
Final Thoughts
There are plenty of factors that can affect how much you’ll be paying for Facebook Ads, including your audience, relevance scores, and bidding strategies. Our data that we’ve shared here, however, covers a large span of usage and demonstrates a starting point of what you can use as a reference point to get a realistic, number-based view on how much Facebook Ads actually cost.
Your costs will likely be slightly (or, in some cases, very) different, but knowing what affects the cost of Facebook Ads and how to lower them, you can go in knowing what you’ll be paying, and armed with tools to hopefully pay less.
What do you think? How does our data line up with what you’re paying for Facebook Ads? Have you used any of these strategies to lower the cost of Facebook Ads? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think!
Great Article about some thoughts never read anywhere else.
I would also love to know how FB deals the target group “roll out” on each new (but same target group) campaign.
Assuming I start a new campaign each week, will always the the same first people in my target group see the new Ad – or will the people be mixed by random?
Hi Ana,
Could you please share how we can get Facebook invoicing as a payment method instead of a credit card? Please guide.
Once you start spending enough money ( tens of thousands of dollars per month but it change by country ) you’ll qualify to get a Facebok Rep following you and you can ask them to open a credit line if that’s what you meant!
There are only two Facebook blogs that I make a point of reading and paying attention too. One of them is AdExpresso.
My criteria; get one actionable idea from a post. In this AdEspresso never disappoints.
Thanks.
From a big fan
Darryl
Thanks Darryl! We do our best to keep the quality high and always provide value in each post!
Is there a way to post ads based on geofencing in Facebook?
What’s the other Darryl?
Great article and insight to see how you stack up against the average! Thank you!
Thanks, Serg!
Wow– another really impressive data analysis from AsEspresso. I’m bookmarking this for referencing when I setup my next campaign.
Also, it’s good to hear that Facebook has restored truer split-testing. That update slipped by me.
Thanks Massimo, this is a super article! Just last week, I was asking your team why I was experiencing such a large difference between the CPC in Spain and in New Zealand, for essentially the same type of advertising. Do you have enough data to say where New Zealand would be on the country graph, or even to give a guess?
Hey Ewan, New Zealand is crazy expensive on average 😛 the average CPC is $0.54 (based on > $400,000 of adspent)
Thanks For the Article,
I want to start a campaign, I will target 6 European Countries:
England,Germany,France,Netherlands,Austria,Switzerland.
and 1 OP Country
Australia.
My Question is, How Can I create each image for each country, Because For Each country I will put there country flag on the imge, I think it will work better than Non-affiliation image.
Second Question how much the a verage cost will be based about European coutries .
thank you so much
Hey David, you’ll have to create one AdSet and on Ad for each country to do this kind of campaign.
Ad for the cost you can see the averages in the post 🙂
Hey quick question,
I have started tons of ads… and recently I did one targeting video views (from a video ad I ran before). So I did a normal (conversion goal) ad using an image and it started out amazing getting me .40 cent leads. I figured it would lower raise and not stay at this and it did. However I figured worst case scenario it would still stay around $1.00 or even less. But my ads ALWAYS just keep on rising and rising….
To the point where they became useless and they cost around $2.00 now… And I’m targeting 250,000 with not much money per day so it’s not like there would be ad fatigue.
Any ideas?
thanks
What was the frequency Joseph? Even if the audience is big sometimes it may be very competitive and you may be able to reach only a small percentage of it.
Also Facebook takes in accounts many factors. If they considered your ads’ performances below the average or received negative feedback that would negatively influence your costs
Thanks for this Massimo, really great article. I’m loving your site so far, one of the best places to get information on Facebook Ads.
I have a question though. I’ve been running Facebook Ads for a client, and when I run multiple ads within an ad set (totally different copy and images, this is a Post Engagement Campaign), only one of them seems to be delievered. Read through your article and you mentioned Facebook is supposedly distributing ads within ad sets more evenly. Would like to know what you think about this.
Thanks, Massimo!
Hey Reinart, Thanks, glad you liked the article!
The announced some month ago that they were going to start distributing impressions more evenly but I agree that often this is not happening.
If you want to test more reliably the design you’ll have to create one ad per adset so each design has its own allocated budget 🙁
Great article and helped clarify a few things.
I have noticed the past week or two that the cost to covert is higher than normal. I am assuming this is because of superbowl week. Just like the Xmas season. Anyone else seeing this?
thanks!
From personal experience and data collection. Facebooks ads are not as effective as they used to be. Even when they did “work” facebook ads drove engagement and visibility. Both of which are a very roundabout inefficient way to get “sales” (if that is your goal). It’s like being a girl’s friend and doing chores for her before asking her out. The direct approach is more efficient and effect.
HOWEVER, facebook ads Used to be great for Social Currency. SMM branding may not results in sales as well as a direct marketing campaign, but social currency has intrinsic value. Not financial value, but intrinsic social feel-good value. That is important, it’s not always about $ profit.
NOW, as of Feb 2016. FB ads get a LOT of impressions at a pretty good cpm. But the engagement is weaker than it used to be, and I’ve found this across many clients in several categories. Even major ones. Still the cheapest CPC on the market, but that “click” may be a video view or a pic view or a very useless page view. Likes/Shares/Comments etc. are hard to come by these days from sponsored posts.
In fact, with one major client we tested out not making any posts whatsoever. NOT only not advertising But not even having any FB activity at all for a period of time. Did not make a difference one bit. Well, except their profits went Up because they weren’t spending on social media. But even from a social currency/branding standpoint – no difference.
It seems that facebook is for users. period. If we want to get the word out about something we need to find a better place to do it. So FB is dying in that sense.
Hey Andy, thanks for weighing in your personal experience.
I personally don’t agree and the data we have show a pretty different story honestly. Simply, like every marketing channel, Facebook is no longer the cash cow it used to be for early movers.
With more advertisers jumping on board (either because it works or because they’re all crazy) getting great results requires more skills and it’s more expensive than before. It’s the natural evolution of every channel:
If a brand doesn’t see any decrease in performances from abandoning a marketing channel then that’s probably the right thing to do. But given that more and more advertisers (small and big) are moving budget from Google to Facebook, I’d seriously question my strategy so far if it didn’t generate any result at all.
Thank you Andy. So what is your strategy right now for clients? Are you back to Google? Thank you.
If I understand the article then the cost can vary hourly over a 24 hour period depending the varying factors mentioned.
It would seem ads would have much more engagement during hours of leisure rather than say during working hours where one quickly catches up with friend posts rather than take up limited time on a break. Correct or no?
The cost can change for sure based on days and hours but right now in this post we’ve not released any data on the time/day distribution 🙂
Cheers,
Max
It helps to know the rules of the game before trying to jump in and compete. I expect to earmark a portion of my marketing budget for Facebook in the second quarter. Thanks for the information.
you need to re-evaluate your pricing. Facebook at increased its pricing in some areas (esp in the US) so that its 100 times more expensive now. I used to use facebook post boosts all the time. Now for what i used to spend 10-25 dollars on now cost over 500 to 1000 dollars on. how is it worth it to pay $20 per page like or conversion? Until fb comes down to reasonable pricing, i wouldn’t bother using it.
Mike we’ve analyzed hundreds of millions of dollars in Facebook Ads and while prices are increasing as more advertisers are jumping on board, we never saw a 20x/40x increase. I’d rather think the product you’re promoting is saturated on Facebook on there are some other reasons for the price increase.
hi Max, im having the same issue as Mike. Do you have any idea where we can complain and log the issue?
Hi guys
I am running a Facebook ad. It is set up with the objective “Send people to your website”…and is to run on “Desktop News Feed” only.
I then choose the “Links clicks to your website option” and set it to automatic bidding for link click (CPC).
All I want to be charged for are clicks that go to me website…but I’m also being charged for clicks such as when someone “likes”, “shares”, and “comments” on my ad.
As a result Facebook is giving me two costs….it shows a cost per website click…and a cost per click for all clicks to the ad.
For example the ad I am currently running it shows that I have 36 website clicks and that the cost per click of these are $1.43. Then it also shows “Clicks (all) and that number is 62 and that the CPC is 0.83.
The issue here is this….I just want to be charged for clicks to my website only which in the example above would be for 36 clicks…but I am also being charged for 26 other clicks that are made up of “likes”, “shares”, and “comments”
What can be done to stop them from charging me for those 26 other clicks…and any clicks for “likes”, “shares”, and “comments”
Chaney I am about to start my third FB campaign for a non-profit and this is the question running through my mind. Let me know how this is going for you. I would like to add this for you to see: “The way clicks are measured has changed for some objectives. For website clicks and website conversions objectives, you can now choose to optimize and get charged for link clicks. Link clicks are clicks on your ad that takes people off Facebook. Other kinds of clicks on those ads will not be counted and you won’t be charged for them if you’ve chosen to be charged for link clicks.” ( From Jon Loomer )
use website conversions objective to acheive what you mentioned
I have a question. Recently I paused a large number of my adgroups for a few days. Since I have restarted them my CPI, CPM etc have increased on nearly all of them really drastically, around 50% more. Could this be because Facebook has started from scratch checking my CTR etc and not looking at all the history? If not, what could have caused this increase in cost? Thanks
Hey Debs, yes that may likely be the cause. Even if there’s nothing official about it, it’s likely that the history, even if not totally ignored after pausing your ads, may be considered less relevant and so the learning process restart.
If an ad variation is higher cost per click but getting a lot more clicks than the other variations, would you keep it running or turn it off?
This is a tough call. Stopping the ad that is getting most of the traffic does not guarantee that the traffic will be re-routed to better performing ads. And actually the low volume/high performance ad could see a decrease in performances if you drive more traffic to it.
I’d say it really depends on how big is the spread. If the high traffic one is much more expensive, I’d probably stop it. But this is a very personal decision 🙂
Hi Massimo
you said : ” And actually the low volume/high performance ad could see a decrease in performances if you drive more traffic to it”
Does this mean that if I have a good performing ad, it’s getting worse if I raise the budget?
How do I purchase your service? I am past the free trial!
Just Login in your old account and you’ll be redirected to the subscription page. If you did the trial a while ago you can open a support ticket and ask for few days more of trial!
Cheers,
Max
Ciao Massimo,
great post, however I think it misses statistics about average CPM (or CPV) for Video Ads by Country, that’s exactly why I landed here 🙂
I’m desperately searching around for this info, with no luck till now.
Is it something you can share?
Grazie 😉
Hey Valerio 🙂 We’ll try to add them in the next update for Q2!
This site is absolutely invaluable!! I was totally nervous about a Facebook ad campaign. After reading this I feel more confident in how to proceed effectively. Thank you!!
Glad to hear that Lena!
Hey there guys,
I came across this article looking for info on a recent price hike that I came across on a client site. The Q1 2016 and April 2016 dates were the closest I could find regarding pricing, to my current situation.
The issue I’ve got is we’re seeing rates of $6-$11 PER CLICK on average from Facebook. We set the ads up in May and I recorded all of the estimated CPCs there to estimate the budget breakdown and get the client team to sign off on. The prices in 3 weeks’ time have skyrocketed over 10X – from nearly everything under $1 to everything costing several dollars per click.
I’ve run campaigns for this client and others in the past and I’ve never seen anything like this on Facebook. Have you seen anything similar recently?
My only targeting is to exclude people who already engage with the brand, and I’ve segmented the ad groups by placement, so it should be broad enough that I’m not seeing jacked up rates for super specific targeting. Screencap of Facebook’s recommended prices vs our manual bid amount: http://screencast.com/t/8zjPZzomeCQ
Thanks for any insight and feedback.
So much great info in this post. I’m always getting asked this question by clients. Thanks for summarising it all for us to geek out over 🙂
Hey,
Nice Article.
Just wondering if you could elaborate a little on the even spend per weighted for each ad you’re testing in a an adset.
Do FB weight spend evenly for a certain time then optimise. I notice that some of my ads when testing are served twice as much as another, but have a poor CTR subsquently high CPC. While other ads have an excellent CTR, high relevance score and low CPC – yet FB still serve the other underperforming ad?
It’s like they optimise too early. Does anyone find this?
I’m doing paper for a college assignment and this site is kick ass I have to compare social media services to see which will be better to advertise on for my “Company” and provide a contrasting essay or Informal report to my “employer” so this site will at least give me a great start to figuring out which social media site is best and will get our company name and product to the right audience… thanks Ad Espresso if I use any of your info you will be cited and all credit to you.. Fb page was confusing thanks again
Thanks Quincy, we’re so glad to hear this post helped you!
I’ve just begun to educate myself about FB advertising. Would you please explain the difference between “CPI” and “Spend” in your “Hourly Cost Per App Install 2015-1016” chart? Why doesn’t “Spend” track “CPI”?
Great and in depth article, if I can add my 2 cents to the topic, I think the most important part to be successful in general with media buying/PPC is being granular. Yes it is a lot of work setting up one ad for one demographic group, targeting and lading page, but this is the only way for truly uncovering the best ads/keywords/landingpage/audience combinations. You don’t even have to spend thousands of dollars, just set up a small budget for each ad to get some impressions and first glimpse of performance and the optimize further.
Hi! Thanks for tracking and sharing the data. One thing I noticed is that Singapore dropped from being the most expensive country in Asia Pac in 2016 with CPC of ~$0.80+ almost 3X higher average. However, In Q2 2016, this dropped significantly to about $0.40, which is below average. Do you know what is driving this decline? YOU did mention in your post that CPC has declined, but from #1 to below average is a massive change. Thanks!
Hi Deborah,
Good eye! I’m not sure what caused such a massive dip in CPC for Singapore – it does seem out of the ordinary. I’ll be asking our Marketplace Services team about their theory on this!
Tim
Hi Tim,
Any update on the SG cpc? I’m from Malaysia so this data is actually quite surprising would like to know what they did to achieve this.
Hey Cyrus, these are aggregated data on thousands of advertisers, we cannot provide specific insights on what was done the campaigns.
Max
What about the massive discrepancy between what facebook calls a click and what google analytics calls a visitor? Shouldn;t this factor in?
And if so, is there an aprox. across the board premium (ie multiple ) that you could boil down from your research? For instance, in our case we see 3302 facebook clicks translate into 503 referrals in google analytics.
We see very few trackable conversions coming facebook however we assume that this traffic has “top of our funnel” value and we may gain sales from some sales from those visitors through retargeting.
If you have any thoughts or links on attribution models for this, that would also be appreciated!
Thanks!
Jeremy
Hey Jeremy, have a look at this article on fake clicks. We did a pretty comprehensive experiment on the discrepancies between Google Analytics and Facebook, hope it’s useful!
Thank you for a great post!
I am a new marketer and you just got a new fan 🙂
I would love to see an article about targeting for local/small businesses.
Thanks for this useful article.
I have one question.
Can you tell me how can I reach to maximum audience in less money. Means which country or location, age group, gender, etc have to select for maximum like or post engagement in my facebook page.
If you show any graph who tell maximum reach through country wise, age group wise, gender wise etc in fixed money (i.e. $5) then its good.
Thanks
Hi Massimo Chieruzzi.. geat work.. wanted to ask one thing..if i have a low budget ad runing and its performing well and i want to increae the budget but scale it rite how an i increase the budget of a good performing ad??
Any chances that the estimated number of likes (for Page promotion) will decrease if I compare same adverts published on a regular weekday VS the same advert published on a weekend? All of the choices remain the same (image, text description, demographics, etc) but I get different estimated number of likes on a Thurs vs a Friday.
AdEspresso articles seem to be invaluable, so many insights! I have a query and would be grateful for your thoughts:
If the ultimate objective is for people to create an account on your website, is it better to optimise the ads for conversions or website clicks?
Also, what’s the best objective to run video ads?
Great article, read it all the way through!
One complaint though –
“Cost per click (CPC): You are paying only for each user that clicks on your ad. They do not have to complete the conversion and purchase on your site or sign up on your landing page; they just have to click. That being said, you aren’t paying for users who viewed your ad and didn’t convert.” –>You say users don’t have to convert, yet you’re not paying for any users that visited the ad and didn’t convert. Sooo in reality, aren’t you effectively paying only for users that convert?
Thank you for publishing and sharing a much needed benchmark.
Just curious, did you see a strong correlation between CTR and relevance scores? From my much smaller data of a few million we saw that CTR had no statistical correlation, so I am wondering if it has to do with other factors.
Hi
Thx for the great article.
I have a question thought. What do think of dramatic variations on CPA, from one day to another, running exactly the same ad.
Example
Day 1 : CPA = 12,5€ (made 40 conversion and spent around 500€)
Relevance score = 4
Day 2 : CPA = 55 €, (made 3 conversions and campaign seem to stop delivering at 10 am… ).
Relevance score = 6 !
No changes made on the campaign beetween day 1 and day 2.
Note: i have been running the same campaign for 1 year with stable results from one day to another.
Since october I have variations like this almost every day (seems like there is no historiscal data used to optimize the delivery).
I use ocpm campaign.
No doubt, a great information.
Hi Ana,
I am running Facebook campaign from last two months, i just want to know “why Facebook campaign CPC (Bid) high on week days”, Please suggest me how to keep it same as weekdays.
Thanks
There is a easy way_Allavsoft which can download all facebook 360 videos and other Facebook videos to any video format with any video resolution.
It may sound odd, but we’ve found last year that the Page Category has an impact on CPCs. We discovered it by mistake, when we had to change the Page Category of one of our clients because it was not accurate. We had the surprise to see the CPC go up instantly.
We run the same experiment many times with other clients and saw the CPC fluctates everytime.
THX for Information
Hello,
Does anybody have a list of the lowest cost per click cities or zip codes in the U.S.?
Is there a limit on how much you should spend on each ad set? also what should your limit spend be per 1million people? example would it be pointless to spend 5k on reaching a million people etc..
This is fantastic info however i’m still left with the question i came here to solve, i am hoping this comment will help. Why is it that everyone keeps stating such low numbers when referring to optimising for conversions but when i create an audience of 11 million or 11 thousand of specific niches or completely broad i cant get the Facebook suggested bid price below $15 per conversion for multiple sites in multiple industries. It seems no mater how much i experiment to find how to get it as low as website clicks i just cant see a viable number. However everyone who is selling Facebook ads training or FB ads software states number in the cents range. If you could point me in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated. Cheers
Can Facebook tell me how many total US users have specified sur-names, based on a list of sur-names I provide? If they can tell me, can they then tell me the cost(s) of as Ad campaign to touch them?
Hey, great article!
Just wondering, do you have any specific data about video costs on FB? Would be nice to get a CPM benchmark for the video views objective. Anyone with a rough average?
Thanks
Hi! I live in Australia and I see the costs are much higher here. However it is not obvious from your graphs whether the cost is drawn from advertisers who run their business from Australia or the cost is for targeting Australians. In many cases this may be the same, but not always. Please could you clarify?
Lovely and great post here Josh. I am inclined to believe that this will work totally. Because I am giving it a trial ritght away. Some folks who claim to be expert suggested I target the high ranked countries like the US, UK Canada directly by duplicating post with 0.005$ CPC. But with this honest and sincere guide, it shows total truth without selfishness. I must confess most successful entrepreneurs will not display this secret. Once again thanks so much
Hi, I have a question, I’m trying to create a traffic ad, and I’m wondering why the suggested bid by FaceBook is so high compare to this study?
So here is a test to show you what I mean:
Audience: United States, 18 to 65+, All gender,
Potential reach: 197 000 000 people
Suggested bid by FB: $2,10 USD or this gap: $1,62-$2,88
In this study, the CPC is $0,26 for US, so why the suggested bid by FB is near to 10 times bigger?
Thank you for your answers!
I think i am doing ok – i am a new page 1 year old, first 100 likes cost approximately 50p per like, grew the site with content and the next 200 likes cost me £20. I am at 380 likes now and spending just £3 a day at 10p per like. My likes are from the UK only. Email list is also growing slowly – Question is, it seems like i can buy 100,000 likes for £10,000 (at current running rate). Is there any resale value in my UK based Facebook page? I am also on google adsense and website is monetised. I want 100,000k fans to sell to.
Most of the comments here are of January 2016 and the data is of Q42016 – how is that possible? Also what could be the reason that the Q1 CPC be higher than the Q4CPC?
Really Informative. Thank you.
This is very helpful – are the figures all in US dollars or the local currency?
US dollars Paul
Great article. I didn’t take a deep dive into the Facebook auction till now. Very helpful
Hi all,
I’ve been comparing the estimated reach between the Brand Awareness campaign and Traffic campaign (CPM) and I’ve found that the figures presented were strange. The estimated reach for Brand Awareness campaign were always lower than the Traffic campaign (see below for e.g.). I’ve tested this using different saved audiences. I just want to know, why are the numbers between the 2 campaigns different? and what makes them different?
Brand Awareness (CPM): Est daily reach results up to 46,000
Traffic (CPM): Est daily reach results up to 340,000
Could you please explain me this:
1. Impressions (CPM): You’re paying for cost per 1,000 impressions. The cost per impressions is much lower than a cost per click, and when you want to get a lot of eyes on your ad, this can be a good way to go.
2. In just the USA, the average cost per click (CPC) of Facebook Ads in Q3 2016 was 27.29 cents (and 27.40 cents for ALL objectives). The cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) based on Q3 was $7.19 (and $7.34 CPM for ALL objectives).
So, you’re firstly telling us the CPM cost is much lower than CPC, and then you’re telling us that average CPC is $0.27 while CPM is $7.19. It appears CPM is 26x higher than CPC.
Which is true?
CPC is cost per 1 click
CPM is cost per 1000 impressions
For 1000 clicks you’d pay $272.9, which is 38x higher than 1000 impressions.
Dear Massimo/Adespresso team where can I check average CPC for México
You say that Q4 is the most expensive because of big brands using it for winter sales but the graphs and numbers seem to indicate different … How did you come to the conclusion then?
Great informative article which is perfect for our audience of new startup companies. I will definitely share this with our growing community of entrepreneurs who can absolutely benefit from your studies and the ebook. Thanks!
Hello,
I want to know what will be the average cost of like on the facebook page.