Facebook advertising is one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways to reach your target market, engage potential customers and drive conversion. However, not everyone enjoys a smooth ride on the Facebook advertising journey. Some marketers barely break even, while others always obtain a great ROI for each campaign.
Reducing Facebook advertising costs is a complex issue. You may be tempted to bid less or run fewer campaigns for a shorter time. This is not a great idea, because if you “mutilate” your Facebook ad plan, you lose the chance of engaging the expected number of people in the expected manner and with the expected results. In short, it is as inefficient as not running Facebook ad campaigns at all.
So, which are the right ways to improve your ROI and pay less for your Facebook ads while getting the same results in terms of engagement and conversion? The five tips below will help you create better ads, improve your targeting and ad planning skills and reduce your overall Facebook advertising costs:
1. Select the Adequate Ad Objective
This is how Facebook ads work: you select the type of behaviour you expect to obtain from people who see your ad. Every time a person takes the respective action, you have to pay. This is why setting the adequate ad objective is critical if you want to spend your ad budget efficiently.
If you want to increase your sales but your ad objective states that you want people to go on your website, then you pay each time someone browses your website starting from an ad, even if they do not buy anything. However, you must remember that the more targeted and complex your ad objective is, the more expensive the cost.
2. Perform Split Testing
You are not born an expert, so you need to try, test and optimise. Split testing works in a very simple way: you create a duplicate of your ad with one changed element. This element can be the photo, the call to action, the copy, replacing the photo with a video, etc.
In order to create relevant results, you need to run the ads for the same exact amount of time, to the exact type of audience. Compare the analytics and see which one of the two ads performs better.
3. Target, Target and Target Again
Refining your audience targeting works wonders. If you are paying for a click on website link campaign and you show this ad to people who are merely curious to see what you have to sell, but do not really need your products, then you are wasting money on lots of empty traffic.
Filtering your audience does not mean that you are showing your ad to fewer people, but rather to the right kind of people. Your final ROI is calculated based on how much it costs you to reach your objective. This means that if most of the people who click your ad are already pre-qualified as potential customers through targeting, your ROI is higher.
4. Use the Right Ad Frequency
Ad frequency means how many times one user is exposed to your ads. You can calculate it by dividing the number of impressions (total ad views) to the reach (total number of unique viewers). If you have a high ad frequency, it means that the same people see the same ad over and over again. After the first two or three times, people will start ignoring your ads.
5. Monitor and Analyse Data
This is the best possible advice: keep your eyes on the analytics, monitor each ad and each campaign and tweak underperforming ones until you get the right response for them. However, you must have a clear view of all the numbers: what your objectives are, how much you are spending per ad and how well your ads are doing at helping you reach these objectives.