Here’s the thing: lowering the CPC cost can get you more clicks, and hence more sales, within the same budget. And I bet you have wondered how to reduce your Facebook advertising costs and improve return on investment many times.
Actually, everybody asks this questions and this is what we hear at SEMgage all the time, and the only one right and exhaustive answer is "it depends on a lot of different factors". In our experience we’ve had some clients’ campaigns where we’ve reached more than 1000 people on Facebook for just 7$!
It really doesn’t matter how big your business is, you should always be looking for new optimization opportunities on how to reduce your costs and improve return on investment.
In this post, we’ll give you 5 most useful tips you need to know about how to lower your Facebook Ads CPC and how to make your advertising budget work for you.
1. Understand Your Relevance Score
First things first, try to understand what a Relevance Score is because it directly affect CPC (cost per click).
The Relevance Score is the magic number that varies from 1 to 10 letting you know how relevant an ad is to its target audience. If your Relevance Score equals to 1, this is very bad because it means that your ads are not relevant to your audience and in order for Facebook to continue showing it, you have to pay extra dollars. And vice versa, if your Relevance Score is 8 or higher, it means that your ad perfectly matches the audience you target.
The components of the Relevance Score are fully based on expected positive and negative feedback. The more positive interactions you expect an ad to get, the higher the score will be.
Worth to know that the Relevance Score will be assigned only after your ad has been served more than 500 times. In case you have a low budget, it make take a while before you see the score.
How to check your Relevance Score?
It’s very easy. Open your Ads Manager, select a campaign and then select an ad set. In the "Ads" tab you will see the list of ads you launched, each of which will have its own Relevance Score.
Here are a few things to consider if you want to improve your Relevance Score:
- Be very specific with your targeting, try to narrow your target audience.
- Think about how your image and message will match with your audience.
- Always refresh your ads.
- Try showing different ads to the same audience, always test everything.
- Avoid using offensive and misleading content.
2. Ensure You Are Targeting a More Specific Audience
As it was mentioned in the previous chapter, be specific with your target audience: Probably, it’s one of the most important and useful tips you have to keep in mind while creating a new Facebook ad campaign.
Running campaigns with a specific and narrow targeting gives you a recognizable advantage: you know exactly who you are targeting so you can create special offers and ads that your audience will be interested in.
Moreover, by reducing your target audience you can significantly decrease the competition from other brands that target the same people. In this bidding war with dozens of other companies you have to only bid on people you really want to reach.
3. Focus on Increasing CTR
In order to lower your CPC, start focusing on click-through-rate (CTR). Increasing CTR, you will increase the Relevance Score which as you already know highly impacts on the cost of advertising.
There are a few tips to implement in order to increase your Facebook Ads CTR:
- Use a fascinating headline in your ads. The text of Facebook Ads is one of the first things that a potential customer notices, so try to be very direct and compelling with your ad copy.
- Make your image stand out in the News Feed. Choose high-quality images of your product or associated with your business, use bright and contrast colors, include people showing positive emotions while using your product.
- Use the right call-to-action buttons. As the research shows, using a CTA button improves CTR on Facebook by over 80%, so try to select the call-to-action which correlates to what you want your viewers to do.
4. Look for Audience Overlap
A huge problem running Facebook Ads campaigns is overlapping audience issues when you promote different ad sets to the same audience. The larger overlap, the worse your campaigns will perform, and the higher CPC you will get competing with yourself.
Don’t waste your money fighting for the attention of the same audience: use Facebook Audience Overlap tool to check if audiences are overlapping significantly — and, if they are, mutually exclude those audiences to avoid bidding against yourself.
How to check if your audiences are overlapping?
- Open the Ads Manager.
- Click the Tools drop-down menu and chose "Audiences".
- After that, click the "Actions" tab and choose "Show Audience Overlap".
You can select multiple audiences to compare and see the percentage of overlapping users between these audiences.
5. Don’t Neglect Conversion Tracking & Utilize Retargeting
Did you know that having Facebook conversion tracking set up accurately will help you lower the CPC of your ad campaigns?
Conversion tracking isn’t just about measuring your return on investment, in reality it helps you increase the revenue you generate from your Facebook Ads which is the primary goal of any advertiser.
And Facebook makes conversion tracking incredibly simple with Facebook Pixel. Once installed, the Facebook Pixel acts the same way that Google Analytics code does — it goes to all of your pages and helps you track anything you want in addition to being able to create any audience you want.
There are two most effective remarketing audiences you can create after installing Facebook Pixel:
- Customer File Audience: You can upload a list of your customer emails that Facebook will match to accounts for you to remarket to.
- Website Traffic Audience: You can create a remarketing audience based on previous websites visits.
Just an interesting fact for you to know — Facebook Remarketing Ads generate 3 times more engagement than regular Facebook Ads. If you have Ecwid’s Facebook Store, the new Pixel integration allows you to set up the Facebook pixel without coding and target right prospects and advertise to previous site visitors.
Conclusion
The information we shared in this post covers some useful tips you can start implementing today to see how much your Facebook Ads costs will change tomorrow.
There are a lot of factors that can affect Facebook Ads costs, including your audience targeting, bidding strategies, conversion tracking, and Relevance Score. Just knowing how to improve them, you’ll be armed with essential tools that will help to save your business a lot of dollars.