Saving money by reducing your Facebook Ads cost is something all businesses can benefit from. After all, if you’re able to run ads for cheaper and get the same (if not better) results then why wouldn’t you?
There’s no reason for not saving money where possible. By reducing costs you can either spend less and maintain the same amount of results, or use the money you’ve saved and invest it in getting more conversions.
When it comes to saving money on Facebook’s ad platform there are a number of things to try. So, take into account the following tips and start spending your budget more efficiently.
Top Tips to Reduce Facebook Ads Cost
1. Keep Your Ads Simple
Straight away you want to avoid overdoing it. Having many contrasting colors, too much text, or a long video, will discourage people from engaging with the ad or reading/watching the whole thing.
If you pile on too many visual elements that they need to process, more people are going to scroll past your Facebook ad.
The same goes for the landing page your ad directs to.
One exception to this would be if you’re promoting an eBook or an article. In that case, having a short excerpt is acceptable.
2. Target Super Relevant Audiences
After putting in a few details about the campaign you want to run, Facebook will generously show you the huge audience you can reach through the ad platform. Don’t fall for this trick which drives the Facebook Ads cost up!
Targeting a sizeable audience is a surefire way of funnelling money down the drain. Your focus should be on very relevant audiences.
If you want to use a professional technique, use a Facebook lookalike audience.
Ad Reach
When you tell Facebook the budget, they’ll present the number of people you can reach in your chosen audience. Let’s say for $4,000 your campaign will reach 365,000 users from the pool of 3.5 million. That latter figure definitively tells you that the audience needs to be much broader.
At the very least, that pool needs to be below 1 million but preferably even lower. A broader audience increases the interest shown in your ads.
How to Reduce Facebook Audience Size
Reducing a Facebook Ads audience size isn’t difficult. Face the fact that targeting millions of people is a waste of resources. Facebook give you a lot of control making it easy to target a specific type of person with your ads. The main targeting factors include:
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Language
- Interests
- Behaviors
…so there is no excuse for not narrowing down your audience. Think about where your ideal customer lives, what age they are, and basically work through this list. It’ll take a creative mind to pinpoint those perfect interests and behaviors, but it’s worth it.
3. Don’t Run Ads Constantly
Having a Facebook ad campaign running all the time, day and night, is a rookie mistake. For one, it needlessly increases Facebook Ads costs.
Think about your target audience for a second: are they going to be on Facebook in the middle of the night? Probably not. For that reason, it’s a good idea to have your campaigns on a schedule.
Fortunately, Facebook has a scheduling feature on its platform and using it is pretty straightforward:
How to Run Facebook Ads on a Schedule
- Step 1. Open the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard and edit an ad you want to schedule.
- Step 2. Under Budget and Schedule, click on Show More Options and select Ad Scheduling > Edit.
- Step 3. Click Run Ads on a Schedule and adjust the time schedule accordingly.
After adding this setting your ads won’t needlessly run all the time and there will be more interaction due to ads only appearing during your audience’s active hours.
4. Landing Page Design Matters Too!
You can have a fantastic ad with the perfect design and a promising conversion rate, but it isn’t enough. The landing page design that your ad takes users to is just as important.
A few tips to help you with your landing pages:
- The landing page should be relevant to the ad’s content
- If you target mobile users, make sure the landing page is optimized for mobile devices
- Check out our landing page design breakdown guide
So, before even running a campaign and attempting to reduce Facebook Ads cost, make sure that your landing pages are the best they can be. A good landing page will have a significant effect.
5. Split Test the Right Way
Split testing should never be overlooked. You can test different locations, interests, landing pages, or go as simple as the color scheme, among a handful of other testable elements.
But it’s easy to jump into this stage of the process and go about it the wrong way.
- Don’t split test too many elements simultaneously
- Let ad variations run for similar lengths of time
- Similarly, spend around the same amount of money on each variation
- Don’t shy away from minor changes (e.g. colors and phrasing)
- Test landing pages as well as the ads
Going through this process will help single out the best performing versions of an ad. Of course, you can then invest money more responsibly.
6. Give Your Ads Time to Perform
First time running ads on Facebook? I can appreciate the urge to see a high-performing ad within a day of creating it, but this isn’t realistic. You have to give your ads time to perform to gauge whether the Facebook Ads cost is worth the results.
Noticing no conversions, few interactions, and your money draining can also be demoralizing. But again you must give your ads time to perform.
Even if the stats don’t look great, it’s worthwhile leaving the ad running for up to 48 hours or so (remember to have the scheduling set up too!). Doing this will give your ads time to generate enough results so you can decide if the ad:
- was a complete flop and should be scrapped
- got acceptable results, but obviously needs improvement
- was a clear winner!
7. Don’t Forget the Ad Text
Copywriting has to be done carefully and this is often forgotten about. Trying to brainstorm the right message to accompany your ad can be challenging. No doubt about it.
- Don’t settle on the first idea you have, find and settle on the right message
- Triple check for grammar errors (there’s not a lot of text in an ad, it’s not worth the risk of looking unprofessional)
- Split testing with the ad text is acceptable!
- Aim to have a message that relates to potential customers
With a strong message being conveyed, your ad costs will directly benefit from the conversion rate.
8. Consider Different Types of Facebook Ads
Facebook offers a nice selection of ad types to choose from, and your audience will respond to them each differently. The obvious impact of running too many different types of Facebook ads, or even not having enough variation, is the impact it will have on your ad spend.
On the one hand, it’s important to try different formats. Some are going to perform better than others and if you don’t do enough testing, you could miss out on discovering the most effective format which your audience responds to.
Here are a few examples of the Facebook Ads. There’s a Video Ad, Mobile App Ad, and a Carousel Ad.
But there’s also the risk of spending your budget too broadly. If you spread your Facebook Ads costs across too many different types, rather than focusing on just a couple, there’s a high risk of wasteful spending.
If you do the testing to discover which ad types perform the best, you can also redistribute your Facebook Ads budget. In turn, this would allow more investment in those ads that are delivering higher conversion rates.
Reduce Facebook Ads Costs with KonvertLab
Running PPC ads without experience can be difficult, and minimizing Facebook Ads cost without negatively impacting your conversion rate is a challenge.
By considering our tips above you’ll have the extra knowledge needed to make adjustments to your strategy and reduce spending where possible.
On the other hand, why waste valuable business hours on this when an experienced Facebook Ads agency can take care of it? Get in touch with the experts at KonvertLab and let us put a top-notch strategy in place for your business.