According to an eMarketer study, over 95% of social media marketers consider Facebook advertising the most effective paid option when measured against all other social networks. People are spending an average an hour every day there, so if you want to increase your customer base, you need to advertise on Facebook.
What is Facebook Advertising?
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Facebook ads are paid messages that businesses write to reach their target market, often with the goal of getting more people to visit their website. Other objectives may be to create impressions or conversions. Regardless of your goal, you choose the images, text, and target audience with your ad.
How Much Does It Cost?
You can spend any amount you want to for a Facebook ad. You can spend from as little as $5 a week, $50,000 a week, or anywhere in between. You decide how it fits into your advertising budget. However, there are varying factors that determine exactly what your Facebook advertising costs will be. Once you’ve decided on your budget, Facebook will try to get you as many results as possible.
In 2016, the average Cost-Per-Click (CPC) for Facebook ads was $0.27. That same year, the average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) for Facebook ads was $7.19.
Unfortunately, it’s not that cut and dry. Here are some of the variables that determine cost:
Audience
Who is your audience? In general, the more relevant your audience, the lower your cost will be.
There are more than 350 audience attributes you can select and combine. That is overwhelming for the typical business owner; you don’t want to waste your money choosing and manipulating the options to reach your perfect audience.
For example, if you have a landscaping business and choose “interested in landscaping” as a qualifier, your ads will be shown to everyone who has ever indicated they like some form of landscaping. The result will include many, many people who aren’t in your target audience. You want your ads to reach homeowners or builders who want to buy your services and products.
Ad Quality
Keep in mind that Facebook is a place people hang out to see what other people are doing. They don’t usually go there with the intent of necessarily doing anything, like buying.
So, your ads need to be visually appealing and exciting enough to capture someone’s attention. Additionally, they must evoke emotion and have the ability to move someone to immediate action.
Your Industry
Your industry and your product have a lot to do with your ad cost. For example, in the Food & Beverage industry, you may spend $3.99 for CPM and $0.16 for CPC.
In Professional Services, you may spend $13.35 for CPM and $1.01 for CPC.
Your Ad Objective
Facebook offers different goals or objectives that you can choose. Each goal and type of ad has different KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, that will be shown to a select group of people based on the outcome you want. Your objective determines who Facebook shows your ads to, which will affect the cost of the ad.
Objectives may include:
Get traffic to your website
Within your target audience, Facebook will select the person who clicks on a lot of ads.
Get leads
Facebook will select the person who, based on past performance, will be more likely to convert.
Also, in general, the cost will rise in proportion to the size of your pool, i.e., the smaller it is, the more it will cost. The exception is in highly targeted and highly relevant campaigns, such as showing 8-months pregnant woman ads for discount diapers.
Other types of goals for your ads may include:
Make Conversions
These kinds of ads encourage people to make a purchase or take another specific action.
Build Awareness
Just like it sounds, this kind of ad builds top-of-mind awareness and interest in your product or service.
Consideration
Consideration objective is to get people to begin thinking about your product, service, or business, and start looking for more information about it.
Bidding Type and Amount
When Facebook shows ads, they want to achieve two things:
- Create value by helping people reach their target audience and get results.
- Provide positive and relevant experiences for everyone using Facebook.
They believe the best way to do that is to hold an auction that will represent both interests.
How Do I Set Them Up?
You’ll need to build a Facebook sales funnel, which means creating a series of inter-related campaigns with different objectives that ultimately work towards the same end: conversions. Start with Facebook Ads Manager. And if this is your first Facebook ad, keep it simple! Better yet, hire an experienced social media professional to do it for you, saving you time and money.
Here are the necessary steps to setting up ads on Facebook:
- Set your budget. Decide if it’s going to be a daily budget or one for the lifetime of the campaign, and how often your ad will run.
- Make sure you have a brand Facebook page. Facebook ads can only be attached to businesses.
- Set up your Facebook ad account.
- Choose your objective for the campaign.
- Select your target audience.
- Create and name your ad. You get to choose the layout, write the copy, and add pictures or videos.
- Run the ad, evaluate, and modify as needed.
Setting Up Your Facebook Ads
Of course, that is oversimplifying things, but it gives you an idea of what is involved. Creating Facebook ads can be very time consuming and expensive. The best way to get the lowest Facebook ad cost is to hire an expert. Trying to figure out all the nuances of Facebook advertising isn’t for everyone, and unless you have an experienced in-house marketing team to support you, you may not get the results you want.
At BizIQ, we offer flexible and affordable Facebook advertising packages that will get you the results you want from advertising on social media, and elsewhere. You know your customers are on Facebook. You just need to get them to see you. Contact us today to see how we can make that happen!