Lower Your Facebook Ads Cost in 2020 – The Complete Guide

Knowing the Facebook ads cost benchmarks is beneficial because it helps you evaluate campaign results and realize the potential ROI of running Facebook ads.

You wouldn’t buy a product from an online store without knowing its price. Why would you treat your Facebook ad campaigns any differently?

So if you’ve ever found yourself looking at your Facebook ad campaign results and asking, “Is the ad cost low or high,” this article will tell you.

By the time you’re through with this guide, you’ll have learned:

• What are the average Facebook ad prices in 2020?
• How does the Facebook ad auction work?
• What’s the best way to set up your Facebook ad bidding for success?
• How to lower the cost of your ongoing Facebook ad campaigns?

The theory behind Facebook Ads cost is one of the most important topics to understand before investing in Facebook advertising, so make sure you save this article and check back often to benefit from this full guide. 🤓

Let’s dive in!

What is the average Facebook ads cost in 2020?

While Facebook doesn’t disclose any data on the average advertising costs, there are, luckily, other kind brands that do: WordStream, AdEspresso, and most lately, Revealbot.

Here are some high-level Facebook ad cost stats:

• The ballpark Facebook CPC (cost per click) for most industries is between $0.70 and $1.01.
• The average CPM (cost per 1000 views) is around $8.00 – $10.00.
• The average click-through rate (CTR) for Facebook ads across all industries is 0.90%.

However, the cost of Facebook ads varies greatly per industry, country, and target audience.

Need some clarification? Let’s look at some charts to better understand the average CPC and CPM figures of Facebook ad campaigns.

💰 How much do Facebook ads cost on average?

In 2020, the average CPC of Facebook ads is between $0.70 and $1.01.

As you can see, the advertising costs dropped slightly at the beginning of the year and have been climbing in April and May 2020.

You’ll also want to note another metric many advertisers care about: the CPM, or cost per 1,000 views.

In 2020, it cost, on average, $7.90 – $9.90 to reach one thousand people with your ad.

However, the price can vary when you advertise certain content types. For example, if you’re promoting a catchy video, a blog, or some news articles, the CPM can be significantly lower. In contrast, we’ve also seen some cases with a CPM of $50, but the ads still paid off because the audience was very narrow.

What this means for your business is that, while knowing the cost benchmarks is useful for general evaluation, a high CPC or CPM cost doesn’t always mean your ad campaign is failing.

If you get a positive ROI out of running the ads, it’s still worth it.

But what about the cost per engagement? – How much does it cost to have someone liking, commenting, viewing a photo or video, clicking on, or sharing your Facebook post or ad? Remember:

Cost per engagement = the amount spent on ad delivery / all engagement actions involving your ads while they’re running

In 2020, the average cost per engagement of Facebook ads was between $0.06 – $0.07.

Facebook ads cost per country

According to an AdEspresso study, the US’s Facebook ads cost sits in the middle of the global competition. The average CPC in the US is around $1.10.

Based on AdEspresso’s chart and our own experience, it is relatively expensive to advertise in Northern Europe – countries like Sweden and Norway.

Facebook ads cost per campaign objective

In addition to cost variance linked to content type and geography, Revealbot’s 2020 data on Facebook ad results shows that the CPM and CPC can vary greatly depending on the campaign objective.

For 2020, the cost per impression is the highest for Conversions and Lead Generation campaign objectives, while Reach and Traffic campaigns have the lowest CPM.

However, look at the chart below, which shows the average cost-per-click of different Facebook ad campaign objectives. In direct contrast with CPM costs, Conversion-focused campaigns have a lower CPC, while the Reach objective has crazy high CPC figures.

The data may seem confusing but stick with me. The key to choosing objectives comes back to the goal you have for your business.

Consider these key takeaways from the two charts above:

• If your goal is brand awareness and reaching as many people as possible, you should use the Reach and Traffic ad campaign objectives.
• If your goal is to drive sales, you are likely to pay more per 1,000 ad views. However, the people who see your ad are considerably more likely to purchase or sign up.

Facebook ads cost per industry

In general, B2C brands tend to see lower cost-per-click and cost-per-engagement prices compared to B2B advertisers.

According to a WordStream study, advertisers in the apparel, retail, and travel & hospitality industries have the lowest Facebook CPC and CPM costs.

The highest Facebook ads costs are in the following industries: finance & insurance, B2B, and employment & job training.

This cost breakdown makes sense. People browsing Facebook and Instagram are usually in ‘leisure mode’ and disinterested in business products. However, this is not to say that B2B Facebook ads can’t have a positive ROI. There are plenty of SaaS and B2B companies successfully advertising on Facebook.

Don’t believe me? Read more: B2B Facebook Ads – The Complete Guide to Grow Sales in 2020

Facebook ads cost per time of the year

All Facebook campaigns are part of a huge global auction. Every second, millions of tiny calculations are made in the system, and the advertiser with the highest bid and relevance wins.

This means that when the competition gets tougher, your Facebook ads will get more expensive.

SocialCode analyzed the CPM of Facebook ads during the 2014 holiday season and discovered that costs increased across different bid types and ad placements.

Some of the seasonal holidays we notice inflated Facebook ad costs include Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving Day, and Post-Holiday Sales. Prices also increase during local elections.

Pro tip: If your sales are not tied to the holiday period (e.g., you’re selling B2B services), it may make sense to turn off your ad campaigns for a week or two to avoid skyrocketing advertising costs.

Alright…

Now that you know the Facebook ad cost benchmarks let’s learn how the Facebook ad auction works and what influences the price you pay to reach your target audience. 💰

How does Facebook decide the cost of your ads?

Many different variables impact Facebook ads cost: your bid, target audience, and the competition.

This visual illustrates how Facebook decides your ad cost:

Let’s take a look at what each of the items signifies. 👇

Advertiser bid – that’s the maximum cost-per-action that you can set on the ad set level. You can also use automatic bidding so that Facebook’s algorithms will determine the best sum to bid at any given auction.

(We recommend using the automatic bid, especially if you’re unsure how much an ad click should cost.)

Estimated action rates – This number shows how likely a person is to take the action you’ve optimized your ad campaign for. Facebook needs at least a couple of results per day to estimate your campaigns’ action rates. If the estimated action rates are high, you will have lower cost-per-result.

User value – The user value is an indicator of whether your ad and offer are relevant and useful to people seeing your ads. For example, if your ad has lots of negative feedback, it may decrease the ad’s total user value. On the other hand, getting many likes, shares, and clicks will increase the ad’s user value.

Every time a Facebook ad auction occurs in the background, Facebook will standardize the above three factors and combine them into a total competitive advantage. The ad with the highest total value wins and will be shown to the target audience.

The Facebook Relevance Score

According to Facebook, they try to balance two things:

• Creating value for advertisers by helping them reach people in their target audiences.
• Providing positive and relevant experiences for people using Facebook, Instagram, or Audience Network.

To improve your Facebook ad cost, try to keep a high Relevance Score.

Here’s Facebook again:

“The best way for us to do this is to hold an auction in which both interests are represented. That way, advertisers are reaching people receptive to their ads and users are seeing something they’re interested in. This is different than a traditional auction because the winner isn’t the ad with the highest monetary bid, but the ad that creates the most overall value.”

Want to win all the Facebook ad auctions? With the right bidding, masterful targeting, and high-quality ad creatives, you can! 🤜💥🤛

🏆 How to set up your Facebook ad campaign bidding?

When creating your Facebook ad campaigns, there will be many bidding and budget-related decisions you’ll have to make.

Once you start setting up a new campaign, you will have to decide about the following questions:

1. What should be the budget of your Facebook ad campaign?
2. Should you use Daily or Lifetime budgeting?
3. Is an automated or manual bid strategy better?
4. Should you use the Facebook campaign budget optimization?
5. When should you add spending limits to your ad sets?

So what are the best practices for Facebook ad bidding in each of these steps? Let’s explore and take a look at the full campaign set-up process.

1. What should be the budget of your Facebook ad campaign?

The first decision-making point will be your Facebook ad budget: How much do you want to spend?

In general, the higher your ad budget, the more results you will get. Also, ad campaigns with higher budgets tend to get better results at a lower cost – that’s because the Facebook algorithm will have more data to learn from.

According to a blog article on Facebook ad structure, it is better to have fewer campaigns, each with a higher budget.

You should split your ad campaigns per country, and could have the following Facebook ad campaigns:

• Prospecting campaigns
• Remarketing campaigns
• Brand awareness campaigns (optional, I don’t usually use them)
• Re-engagement campaigns (optional, I usually use them)

When it comes to the budget split, you should spend a specific % of the total Facebook advertising budget on each campaign:

• Prospecting campaigns: 60-80%
• Remarketing campaigns: 20-30%
• Brand awareness campaigns (optional, I don’t usually use them): 0-10%
• Re-engagement campaigns (optional, I usually use them): 0-10%

We recommend starting with at least a $50 daily ad budget for your first Facebook ad campaign. This should give you around 50 ad clicks daily, and you can evaluate the results in a few days.

2. Should you use Daily or Lifetime budgeting?

The next decision you’ll have to grapple with is the Daily v.s. Lifetime budgeting.

We recommend you use the Daily budget – it will also make it easier to run your campaign over a long period since you won’t need to extend the campaign duration or increase the total Lifetime budgets.

Additionally, a recent case study found that Daily budgets outperform Lifetime budgets, bringing a 300% difference in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

• WEEK 1: The brand used a Daily budget and didn’t use a custom ad delivery schedule.
• WEEK 2: The brand used a Lifetime budget and scheduled ad delivery for Mon-Fri, 8 am-6 pm. (The total spent budget is higher as we spent more during the reported Mon-Thu period)

As you can see, running Facebook ads with the daily budget resulted in more conversions and a higher Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

3. Is an automated or manual bid strategy better?

As you may already know, Facebook Ads Manager is an extremely flexible advertising platform, allowing advertisers to make detailed decisions about their ad campaigns.

Goes without saying that this also means that you’re able to set the bid for how much a result should cost.

Facebook offers several campaign-level bidding options:

• Automate bidding (default)
• Cost cap
• Bid cap

In case you select Cost cap or Bid cap option, you can go to each ad set and define the maximum cost per result you’re willing to pay.

In case you want to use a manual bid, keep this in mind: Facebook will usually suggest a very high bid. Make sure to change the sum in the box.

For example, if Facebook first suggests that you bid $3.10 per landing page view, you could bid $1.50.

However, if you set too-low Cost caps with the manual bidding option, Facebook might not be able to use the entire budget, and you will end up getting fewer results.

When you’re setting up a Facebook ad campaign and aren’t sure what the CPC or cost-per-result should be, we recommend using the automated bid.

Start running a new campaign with automatic bidding. After you’ve collected enough data about the average cost-per-result, you can update the bidding method to manual.

4. Should you use the Facebook campaign budget optimization?

A few years ago, Facebook introduced a feature named campaign budget optimization.

This feature is a real life-saver for advertisers who want to:

• Set a campaign-level ad budget while maintaining the flexibility of how that budget is spent across the ad sets.
• Receive the highest number of results possible from their campaign.
• Simplify their campaign set-up and save time by reducing the number of manually managed budgets.

As you publish a campaign with campaign-level budget optimization, Facebook’s algorithms will allocate your budget between the ad sets to get the most results at the lowest cost.

We recommend to always use the ad campaign budget optimization for all the reasons mentioned above.

However, should you want to assign a specific budget to each ad set in your Facebook ad campaign, you can easily toggle off the feature.

5. When should you add spending limits to your ad sets?

In case you decide to use the campaign-level budget optimization, but want to assign the minimum/maximum spend limit to some ad sets inside that campaign, it’s possible.

When editing your ad sets, you can assign each of them a specific ad set spend limit.

To add an ad set-level spend limit, you will need to click on “Show More Options” in the “Optimization & Spending Controls” section.

For example, you could use the ad set spend limits if you have multiple ad sets per campaign and want to limit the amount of budget being spent on the top-spending ad set. 😉

Key takeaways for setting up your Facebook ad campaign bidding

If the above five points sounded a bit too technical, here’s a quick recap of what we suggest:

• Use campaign-level budget optimization.
• Prefer the Daily budget to Lifetime budgets.
• Keep your Facebook ad campaign bidding automated.
• Apply some ad-set-level spending limits to have better control over how the campaign-level budget gets spent.
• If possible, have fewer add campaigns, each with at least $50 daily budget (remarketing campaigns can have a lower budget, starting from $20)

💸 15 tips to lower your Facebook ads costs

Now that you’re aware of the ballpark Facebook cost-per-click and CPM figures let’s explore some go-to Facebook ad strategies for lowering your Facebook ad campaign costs.

The upcoming suggestions can be categorized into three sections:

• Tips for reviewing and improving your existing Facebook ad campaigns
• Methods to optimize your ad campaign’s structure, delivery, and target audiences
• Ways to get a higher Facebook ad relevance score

⭐ 5 best practices for reviewing and improving your existing Facebook ad campaigns

If you have already invested in Facebook ad campaigns for a while, you can evaluate your results in the Ads Manager.

Up next, we’re going to share some of the go-to strategies that we use when working on our clients’ ad accounts at Linear Design:

1. Conduct a basic Facebook ad campaign review every week
2. Use different report breakdowns to understand your results better
3. Keep your eye on your Facebook ad campaign’s frequency
4. Re-budget and re-optimize your Facebook ad campaigns for better results
5. Scale the ad campaigns that get the best return on ad spend

1. Conduct a Facebook ad campaign review every week

The best time period for regularly reviewing your Facebook ad campaigns is one week.

That’s enough time for the campaigns to collect enough new data, and you won’t spend too much on underperforming ads, should the campaign fail to deliver anticipated results.

Facebook algorithms have a learning phase. This means that every time you make a change to a campaign, you need to wait for at least 48h to start seeing realistic results.

According to Facebook: During the learning phase, ad sets are less stable and usually have a higher cost-per-result.

Usually, with a daily ad campaign budget higher than $50, your campaigns should get through the learning phase in 7 days, meaning one week is a good period for reviewing your results and making improvements to your ad campaigns.

When doing your weekly review, here’s what you should check:

• What’s the cost-per-result of each ad campaign? Is it matching your expectations?
• How were your ad campaigns doing in the past week compared to the week before? Are the results getting better or worse?
• Are there some ad campaigns, ad sets, or ad creatives that are clearly outperforming the rest? Can you identify what makes them succeed, and could you apply this learning to other campaigns?

Pro tip: Customize your Facebook Ads Manager reports and set the new report as the default option. This way, you can see all the relevant metrics right away whenever you open the Ads Manager.

To keep your Facebook ad costs on a profitable level, you should take some action about each campaign with a negative ROI (return on investment). You could either pause it, lower the budget, or optimize it with better targeting, creatives, or other aspects.

2. Use different report breakdowns to understand your results better

If you see some campaigns delivering mediocre results, you can dive deeper to understand why.

The most useful breakdowns for improving your ad campaigns are:

• Age
• Gender
• Placement

For example, you might discover that 90% of your product purchases come from women. Or that ads placed on Instagram stories and feed deliver much better results.

Based on these findings, you could edit your ad set configuration and leave out some of the lower-performing audiences or ad placements, leading to better results and lower ad costs.

However, be careful not to over-optimize your campaigns! If there’s only a slight difference between ad placements or you notice that Facebook isn’t spending any budget in lower-performing breakdown categories, you can keep using the automated set-up.

3. Keep your eye on your Facebook ad campaign’s frequency

Everybody loves ice cream. But if you eat too much of it, you’ll get a sugar overdose.

The same rule applies to Facebook ads: if you see some brand’s ad too often, it will hurt your perception of the company.

One of the reasons that your Facebook ads cost is increasing could be a too high frequency. It just doesn’t make sense to pay to Facebook for reaching the same people for the 10th time.

To review the frequency of your Facebook ad campaigns, go the Facebook Ads Manager, set the reporting period to the past 30 or 14 days, select the “Delivery” report and review the frequency per ad campaign.

• A frequency lower than 3 points shows that you’re still reaching a fresh audience.
• A frequency between 3-6 points means that you may start to near the saturation of the target audience. Keep your eye on whether the CPC and CPM have gotten higher in the past seven days.
• A frequency higher than 6 points means that you need to make drastic changes to your ad set. You could either increase the target audience size or update your ad creatives.

4. Re-budget and re-optimize your Facebook ad campaigns for better results

If you review your weekly ad results and are thoroughly unhappy with the results, you might need to reshuffle your bidding strategy.

Here are some potential changes you could make to your Facebook ad campaign structure and bidding to get better results:

• Re-allocate your budget between the campaigns, adding more budget to the top-performing campaigns and reducing the budget of under-performing campaigns.
• Set the minimum spend limits to best-performing ad sets. This is relevant if you’re using a campaign-level budget and want to assign more budget to your top ad sets.
• Change the ad delivery optimization goal. For example, if you have optimized Landing Page Views, change it to down-the-funnel events like Registration or Purchase so that Facebook will show your ads to a more relevant target audience.

5. Scale the ad campaigns that get the best return on ad spend

If you are particularly happy with some ad campaigns’ performance, there’s no reason not to invest more in it.

Scaling Facebook ads is a fine art, and if you do it too rapidly, you might end up ruining the ad campaigns’ good performance.

Keep in mind these three best practices that we covered in detail in this article:

1. Increase your ad campaign’s budget gradually, not all at once.

To ensure that your ad campaigns’ learning phase is successful, add the extra budget in 20% increments every 24h.

2. Use Facebook’s automated rules to automate the budget increase.

Facebook allows advertisers to create custom rules. For example, one that increases the budget automatically by x% when an ad set meets certain conditions.

3. Increase your target audience by expanding interest-based targeting and adding Lookalike audiences.

We recommend keeping your Lookalike and interest-based target audiences larger than 20,000 people.

⭐ 5 tips for optimizing your ad campaign’s target audiences

One of the most important aspects of your Facebook advertising strategy is the target audience. If you accidentally target people with no interest in your product or service, you’re also unlikely to get any results.

For example, most fashion companies only target a female audience as they’re times more likely to purchase something.

Luckily, Facebook has the best target audience building tools in the industry. You can create broad interest-based audiences, Lookalike audiences of existing customers, and retarget people who have already engaged with your product.

🤩 Here are our five go-to Facebook audience targeting tips for lowering Facebook ads cost:

1. Use a mix of all three different target audience types across your campaigns.
2. Keep your audiences broad rather than narrow.
3. Use the “engaged shoppers” targeting option.
4. Create advanced remarketing & Lookalike audiences.
5. Match ad creatives with their target audiences

Once you apply all the above best practices to your ad campaigns, there’s a 50/50 chance that your results will improve. The rest depends on your ad creatives and landing page. 😉

1. Use a mix of all 3 different target audience types across your campaigns

On Facebook, there are three main ad targeting options:

• Saved Audiences
• Custom Audiences
• Lookalike Audiences

And frankly, if you’re not getting good results by using one of them, you should test all the different options.

To get a better understanding of how to target each of those Facebook audience types, read this guide: Facebook Ad Targeting in 2020 – Reach the Right Audience for Higher ROI.

Here’s our recommended ad campaign structure that uses all different Facebook audience types:

• Prospecting campaigns: Use a mix of up to 5-10 different Saved Audiences and Lookalike audiences, each in a different ad set.
• Remarketing campaigns: Target 1-3 various remarketing audiences to reach people in different marketing funnel stages.

2. Keep your audiences broad rather than narrow

While there are a thousand different options to narrow down your Saved Audiences, the general rule is that “less is more.”

Do not over-optimize your interest-based audiences.

A good Facebook Saved audience size for an ad campaign with a $500-$2000 budget is between 10k-50k people.

If you’re unsure who is your buyer persona, try asking yourself this question: Who is your ideal customer? – What’s their age, gender, social background, interests, and location (urban vs. rural)? Are they tech-savvy, what other brands might they like, etc.

Using the AND/OR audience targeting features, you can reach people interested in A, B, C, and D and…

However, we always recommend keeping the audiences rather broad and letting Facebook’s algorithms to the final round of optimization.

3. Use the “frequent shoppers” targeting option

One of the secret sauces of the leading Facebook advertisers is the “engaged shoppers” behavioral targeting option.

It allows you to target people most susceptible to buying after they see something promoted in ads. This is especially relevant to B2C brands selling low-cost consumer products.

You can find the “engaged shoppers” identifier when simply typing it in the interest-based targeting options’ search box.

In addition to the “engaged shoppers,” you can find interesting behavioral targeting options such as “frequent travelers” and “Facebook page admins.” Browse around to uncover the audience segments that are likely to be interested in your offer.

4. Create advanced remarketing & Lookalike audiences

Speaking of Facebook ads cost, the remarketing campaigns’ CPC and CPM are often more expensive than those of your prospecting campaigns. That’s because you are targeting a relatively narrow set of people.

However, when working on our clients’ ad campaigns, we see that remarketing campaigns usually have 2-3x higher ROAS (return on ad spend) than any other campaign.

A study by Adobe found that 40% of sales revenue in the US comes from remarketing or repeat purchasers, while they represent only 8% of all website and store visitors.

Once you have added the Facebook Pixel to your website, you’ll be able to target many lucrative remarketing audiences, including:

• The past 30 days’ website visitors
• The most engaged readers of your blog
• The previous purchasers of your online store
• People who added items to their shopping cart yet didn’t complete their purchase
• People who visited your website in the past 180 days, but not in the past 30 days

When it comes to Lookalike audiences, we recommend adding a few ad sets with Lookalike audiences to your primary Prospecting campaigns.

For some brands, Lookalike audiences bring the results at a lower cost. However, we have also seen cases where broad interest-based audiences outperformed the Lookalikes in terms of the number of results and cost per result.

Here are a few suggestions for high-performing Lookalike audiences:

• Create a 2% Lookalike audience of the 10% of your top-paying customers.
• Create a Lookalike audience of people who have made at least two purchases over the past 180 days.
• Test a 2%, 5%, and 10% Lookalike audience of your entire global customer base.

5. Match ad creatives with their target audiences

Once you get started with Facebook advertising, there is virtually no limit to how many new ad creatives you can test inside the ad campaigns.

Some advertisers prefer to optimize for quantity over quality, creating many different Facebook ad visuals, all with a similar message. This makes sense for brands like Lyft or Uber that have one specific product use case: ordering a ride.

However, once the product portfolio diversifies, brands need to start segmenting their target audiences. For example, when Uber launched the Uber Eats product, they created a separate Facebook page and a completely different set of ads.

Even if you don’t have significantly different product verticals, you still have multiple audience segments to show slightly different ads to.

Let’s take Shopify as an example. The e-commerce platform has a wide variety of different customer personas, from plant nerds to fashionistas to DJs.

The easy option would be to show a generic ad to a broad target audience. However, if Shopify would create 5-10 ad sets that each target people with different interests, they can also create a more relevant ad creative for each user group.

For example, below, you can see a Shopify ad that’s clearly targeting musicians.

And here’s another Shopify ad that is clearly addressing online food businesses.

Pro tip: Create multiple Facebook ad sets under one campaign, each targeting an audience with different interests. Then, add to each ad set creatives that are relevant to those particular audiences. Your Facebook ad costs are bound to go down. 📉

⭐ 5 suggestions for lowering your ad cost with a higher relevance score

Now that you’re aware of all the technical aspects of Facebook ad budget optimization and the most profitable target audiences, let’s take a look at how to create stronger ad creatives and landing pages.

We have seen Facebook ad campaigns where changing the creatives helped improve the CPC and cost per result 10x. So it’s no small deal to get the best-in-class Facebook ad visuals.

Consumer Acquisition’s study found that images are the most influential part of your Facebook ads. They’re responsible for 75%-90% of performance. If your Facebook ad creatives fail to grab attention, you won’t get any sales.

So… Are you ready to crack the secret to high Facebook ad relevance scores?

Get started with these five best practices:

1. Add the key value proposition to your ad image
2. Promote discounts and limited-time offers
3. Create Facebook ads for all placements, including video
4. Update your Facebook ad creatives regularly
5. Improve your landing page and make sure that it matches with your ad

For a full crash course on Facebook ad scores, read this article: Facebook Relevance Score & Quality Ranking – 136-point Guide

1. Add the key value proposition to your ad image

One of the gravest mistakes that Facebook advertisers make is being unclear what’s being promoted.

According to the advertising legend David Ogilvy, writing a good advertisement starts by studying the product – you have to know what makes it beneficial to the user and different from your competition.

A strong Facebook ad value proposition is:

• Short, up to 50 characters: it has to fit into the ad image.
• Clear and straightforward: so that anyone can understand what’s the benefit that you’re advertising.
• Amplified by the ad creative: your ad’s value proposition and visual need to match.

Let’s take a Facebook ad by Jobbatical as an example.

The ad features a logo (always include a logo in your ad creatives) and a captivating offer: “Travel. Work. See the world.” Now that sounds like a nice deal.

And on top of having a strong value proposition, this ad is featuring beautiful Paris panorama. It would be hard to find a better example of ad copy and image working together so well.

Aim for Facebook ad creatives where text + image amplify each other.

2. Promote discounts and limited-time offers

If your Facebook ads have a low CTR (click-through rate), it ill also lead to higher CPM and CPC costs. That’s because Facebook will think that your ad is irrelevant to your target audience.

One of the surefire hacks to improve your ads’ engagement rate and relevance score is… You guessed it! – Promoting a special deal.

For example, Cos is promoting a summer sale with up to 50% off.

You can even do a 1-week test to see if a promo offer helps lower your Facebook ads cost.

Here’s how to set up a 7-day discount campaign test:

1. Select a Facebook ad campaign that has already been running for at least one week.
2. Editing the exact same ad creatives, add to them a discount offer, both to the ad images as well as text.
3. Make sure that you also activate the discount offer on your website!
4. Run the campaign with new ads for at least seven days, then give it a short 3-day cooldown period before you compare the results.
5. Check the Facebook Ads Manager reports and compare the two weeks’ results: did your key ad metrics (CTR, CPC, the number of purchases) improve?

3. Create Facebook ads for all placements, including video

Most advertisers only upload the ad creatives in one format: landscape or square.

However, with Instagram Stories soon outgrowing the feed placement, you should also work on a unique ad creative for the Stories.

Most of the big global brands create custom ads for Instagram and Facebook Stories.

Take Spotify, for example: they have plenty of ads in 1:1 square format that is perfect for Facebook and Instagram feeds…

… And they also have custom-made ads to be shown in Instagram and Facebook Stories placements.

Here are the top Facebook ad sizes that cover almost all placements:

• Landscape: 1200 x 628 pixels
• Square: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Portrait: 1080 x 1920 pixels

You can upload multiple ad creative formats when editing your ads in the Ads Manager.

What about video ads? 🤔

We usually recommend that advertisers add at least one video creative per ad set so that they will get access to all the available ad placements.

In a recent LinkedIn post, a brand shared its surprising story with Facebook video ads, showing how much different creatives can affect the Facebook ads cost.

While some video ads resulted in $1.30 cost per app install, others cost 3x more.

The key takeaway?

Always be testing new ad creatives to find ideas that work.

4. Update your Facebook ad creatives regularly

In the Facebook Ad Library, advertisers can see the ads run by various brands.

We did a quick research to see how many different (active and inactive) ad creatives some of the well-known brands have.

• Spotify: 140 ads
• Uber: 240 ads
• NFL: 650 ads
• Starbucks: 400 ads
• Amazon.com: 1,200 ads

This means that they are constantly testing new ad creatives and pausing the ones that underperform.

If your goal is to lower the Facebook ads cost, you should upload new ad creatives regularly.

Simply upload your new ad creatives into the existing ad sets and pause some of the older ones that are not performing too well.

5. Improve your landing page and make sure that it matches with your ad

Getting people to click on your Facebook ads is only half of the deal.

The post-click experience, meaning the landing page, contributes to your Facebook ad Quality Score as well. Also, it affects your overall ad campaign results and ads cost.

But what does a strong Facebook ad landing page look like?

First and foremost, your landing page’s key message must match what you propose in your Facebook ads.

For example, Lyft’s Facebook ad that invites people to become a driver offers a $2,500 bonus for all new drivers.

As you click on the ad, you will land on the landing page that echoes the same value proposition.

Another great thing about Lyft’s landing page is its simplicity. It guides you directly to the signup process.

The most common landing page sections to include are:

• The hero section
• Social proof section
• Features section
• “How it works” section
• Footer section

If you’re just getting started, make sure to include all of the above elements on your Facebook ad landing pages.

For more tips on how to improve your Facebook campaign landing pages, see this guide: 35 Landing Page Trends Worth Testing In 2019

Quick recap

Congrats! You’ve made it through the guide and should now have a significantly better understanding of how to evaluate and lower your Facebook ad cost.

Here’s a super quick recap…

The average Facebook ad prices in 2020 are:

• The average Facebook ad CPC (cost per click) is between $0.70 and $1.01.
• Facebook’s average CPM (cost per 1000 views) is around $8.00 – $10.00.
• The average click-through rate (CTR) is around 0.90%.

Your ads cost is affected by a lot of various aspects, including:

• Campaign objective
• Budget and bidding method
• Ad placements
• Target audience
• Ad quality

For more ideas on how to improve your Facebook ad results, check out this guide: 52 Facebook Ad Strategies & Tips for High ROI.