How to Lower Your Facebook Advertising Costs

As we wrote in a previous blog post, the Facebook advertising service can be a difficult monster to tackle. But the Facebook team has made improvements to the service over the past few years. But it isn't intuitive, figuring out how to save money on the ads.

It never ceased to amaze me how often the Facebook ad price would soar even higher than Google Adwords CPCs ! Even for the exact same ad campaigns and keywords! Our SEO team has suspected for quite some time that there must be a catch to it. Furthermore, when you Google "how to lower your Facebook advertising costs", or "why are Facebook ads so expensive", the selections of advice aren't the greatest.

That's what this post is about: showing you precisely what we did to bring our Facebook ad prices down to a manageable price, while at the same time not completely losing all ad impressions.

If you don't keep a close watch on your Facebook ads, if if you only use the Facebook "suggested CPC bid" feature when bidding, you're going to be disappointed. You'll find that your ad prices will quickly skyrocket, and you'll be doubly disappointed, since your CTR will be so shoddy. So, here's a step by step on how to lower your Facebook ad spend.

1. Don't use CPC; use CPM

Though you'll get fewer impressions, your spend will be much less. And you'll still get clicks.

2. Don't listen to the suggested bid price

We've found that Facebook exaggerates and inflates what you have to spend to get impressions and clicks. Here's what to do: take the average of the low and high bid suggestions. Then divide by 2 and set your bid at this price. It still works.

3. Make sure to "overtarget" demographics
Don't go for the whole Facebook community. Overtarget. Brainstorm every possible keyword, group or fan page that could possibly be remotely interested in your ad, and add that keyword to the list. Also, we don't target anyone younger than 27 or older than 44. Also, we target only those who graduated from college. And only those single or married. Not saying you have to follow these guidelines, but the more narrowly focused your demographic target, the cheaper the ad price will be.

4. Sometimes you have to pause and start over

If your ads stop getting impressions due to a low spend, pause the campaign, wait a few hours, and resume. After resuming, bid over again.

If you follow these guidelines, you can reduce your FB ad spend, sometimes dramatically.

More on Facebook Advertising

Oy vey! I don't know, I just don't know. We're running a Facebook Ad for one of our business services, and I just don't know if it's worth it. The ad has only been running about a week. We've gotten a few clicks. But as the campaign rolls along, it is still unclear as to whether there's any real benefit to it.

First off, the analytics needs some serious overhauling. I can't find detailed information on really ... well ... anything. They don't tell me who clicked the ads, or where they came from, or what the referrer URL is or which keyword was searched... None of this!

The Times published an article in December basically stating that Facebook advertising doesn't work for many brands. I'm starting to think that assessment may be correct.

What has been your experience with Facebook ads? Inquirng minds want to know.