How Much Are Facebook Ads – Social-Media Promo Explained

Facebook Ads cost has been the talk of the internet for years now. Currently called Meta Ads, it’s one of the two biggest ad platforms on the market, with Google Ads being the close leader. Facebook Ad has proved to be one of the most effective ways to advertise your business online, with millions of users benefiting from the reach that Facebook provides them with.

Facebook Ad costs are some of the most interesting for many advertisers, even if the platform is not hip anymore. Facebook still has billions of people, with thousands of businesses you can follow and share. Getting to the right audience is critical when running a successful business, so it’s unsurprising that many enterprises turn to Facebook to promote their businesses on this platform. 

You can choose your ad placement, ad spend, and quality, run different campaigns simultaneously, and even utilize the ad auction to fulfill the campaign objective. Additionally, this type of Facebook advertising is great if you want to reach your target audience, as Facebook is known for collecting loads of data (some necessary, some less). 

Facebook advertising costs have varied in recent years, so we are here to help you understand what can influence your spending, how to lower Facebook ad cost, and the best way to reach your campaign objectives. So, if ad quality is something you may be interested in, as well as tricks to lower Facebook ad costs, we are here to help! Without further ado, let’s dive in!

What Are Facebook Ads?

First, let’s talk briefly about the main topic of this article – Facebook Ads – what are those? If you want to create brand awareness campaigns, boost your sales, get more likes, or increase your social media presence, there is little to no better way than with Facebook ads. As the whole Meta Ads conglomerate, it’s the biggest social media platform to advertise on, occupying close to 25% of the market share of digital marketing, including Google Ads!

An average Facebook Ads campaign has one of the best targeting options on the market and the most significant reach out of all platforms regarding dollars spent on advertising costs. Ad creatives worldwide are trying to find a key to advertise on Facebook more efficiently, thanks to advanced ad campaign possibilities. 

Additionally, you will gain access to some of the most popular social media apps and the most popular communicator worldwide, WhatsApp. There are plenty of ways to utilize Facebook Ads; costs are not that high, so your ad budget will probably be acceptable, and with the advanced audience targeting, your average prices per reach are pretty low, the same as the average CPC and CPA.

Additionally, fortunately for you, as an advertiser, not so much for the rest of the world, Facebook is known for hoarding users’ data for years and essentially spying on them to provide even better advertising service, so you can imagine how well they are performing in the grand scheme of things. 

In conclusion, Facebook advertising costs are pretty low (see the diagram above). There are plenty of Facebook users worldwide that the company knows everything about, and social media advertising is one of the most efficient ways of advertising – period; so, as you can imagine, it’s a pretty big thing overall. Facebook also offers a wide range of services, so check your advertising budget, get your ad strategy ready, and go for the maximum bid!

Facebook Ads Benefits

Now, let’s go over some of the main benefits of Facebook ads. Of course, there are plenty of them, and we will focus on the most common ones, but if you are running Facebook Ads, you will likely experience those benefits in your work. 

However, you need to create a well-drafted ad, as you will not share most of the benefits we will discuss in this article without proper technique. You can reach your ad objective easily with the right ad relevance or simply create an audience network of strangers uninterested in your product. How you will do it is entirely up to you, and so will the consequences for you as an ad manager. And now, let’s dive into the Facebook Ads benefits.

Good For Budget

As we have mentioned before, Facebook Ads are great for different budgets. Advertisers on this platform have much more control over their spending and can control their daily or lifetime limits. Additionally, Facebook offers lots of efficient strategies when it comes to bidding so that you can automatically or manually set what is best for you. The value of your ad expenditure is much higher than what you can expect from most other platforms.

Targeting Precision

Additionally, Facebook Ads has targeting unparalleled to what you can see on most social media platforms. With the Facebook ad platform, you can swiftly get into your demographics of interest, such as age, gender location, hobbies of your target audience, their purchase history, and all of the other relevant that you may be interested in. With that advancement, you can quickly get new customers from your conversion campaigns, and your daily budget will not destroy your ability to advertise effectively.

Extensive Reach

Let’s face it: Facebook is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, if not the biggest one. It has nearly 3 billion active users monthly. Who can pass on this kind of potential in this day and age? With ads being relatively cheap and the automated targeting being that precise, your ad delivery is one of the best on the market. It is no surprise why people worldwide mainly choose Facebook and Google for their digital marketing purposes.

Multiple Ad Formats

Additionally, with Facebook Advertising, you get a lot of different ad formats to use for your campaign. Facebook is a massive social media platform, so you can imagine many ways to advertise your products there. From photos, through videos, banners, or whatever you can imagine – Facebook has it all. So, if you want to try building brand awareness with some excellent Reels or keep existing customers happy with some friendly sales, you can do it with Facebook Ads.

Retargeting Options

As we have seen many times before, Facebook is essentially spying on all of us. So, to use this somewhat problematic situation to our benefit, it’s best to try to utilize this data. Hence – retargeting options on Facebook. As one of the biggest advertising providers worldwide, there are plenty of retargeting options with Facebook Ads. You can either take advantage of it, as it is proven highly effective, or don’t try to convince people who have already visited your page to check it out again. The choice is yours; we recommend using it to generate sales and get more likes.

Local/Global

Whatever you need – Facebook has it. Whether getting started with your local game store or trying to conquer the world of software globally, you can accomplish all this with Facebook ads. There are people from all over the world and all walks of life here, so you can check your target market quickly with a highly targeted audience that can build brand awareness about your online store in no time. Of course, how effective it is depends on your skill in setting up your campaign, so be sure to do it the right way!

How Does Facebook Determine Their Prices?

So, how does Facebook do its calculations? The average Facebook cost is based on plenty of factors that can influence the end cost. It can be anything from the type of ad you want to run, Facebook marketing tools you would like to use, some additional ad creative you would like to run, special targeting groups, and such. 

In this section, we will review some of the essential elements of Facebook ads to present the most precise data on what exactly you are paying for (at least – at the moment of writing this article in the second half of 2023).

But how does it work in practice? The most basic system is a marketing auction. If you have any PPC advertising experience, you will probably know how it works. If not, it’s pretty simple: 

• You select a target audience that you want to reach. 
• Then, an ad placement, your target audience location, and all the other factors necessary for your particular advertising style. 
• Next, you select how much you will pay and for what period. As you can imagine, plenty of other advertisers will do the same thing elsewhere. 
• You will be bidding for the spot in front of your audience with them. Usually, the highest bidder wins.

For beginners, we highly recommend using automated bidding, as you will have some issues with how to run ads, ad placements, and whatnot. If you get more advanced, you can try to tweak things to maximize your landing page visits or online visibility. Or any other goal you set for yourself. With that in mind, let’s review some critical elements regarding factors that affect Facebook ads.

As you can imagine, how much exactly you will pay for a Facebook ad will depend on multiple factors, but you can use the pricing below as a kind of roadmap to better understand how it works. This applies only to the US market (via businessofapps.com).

• Facebook Ads CPM (Cost Per 1,000 views) – $14.9
• Facebook Ads CPC (Cost Per Click)  – $0.44
• Facebook Ads CPI (Cost Per Install) – $1.97
• Facebook Ads CPA (Cost Per Action) range – $8…$55

Audience Targeting

Let’s start with the obvious thing – audience targeting. You will have much more or less expensive ads depending on who you want to reach. Think about it this way – if you have 100 people you want to target for your local game store, it would be unwise to add all the people interested in gaming, right? But, to get those people, you must pay a few times more than you would if you targeted everyone. On the other hand, you can count on conversions from people near your location rather than some gaming enthusiast in Germany.

So, you will pay much more for a highly specified audience than a wide spread of people who are just interested in the activity you are promoting. Remember that, in the end, those are just machines, so no targeting will be perfect; nevertheless, it is much easier to do it this way than any other way.

Industry Specific Ads

Like with the demographics targeting, your industry will also affect the price of Facebook ads. As you can imagine, selling someone a game is a much easier job than convincing them to buy real estate as an investment. And, for that, you will pay more. The higher the product price can potentially be, the higher will be the overall cost of advertising on Facebook. Additionally, if you run a business that not many people are interested in, it will cost you more, as you will have a particular demographic you will target. But that’s just the game, and you can do nothing about it.

Time

Simply – it’s a matter of time. As you can probably guess, some dates are much more expensive than others. It’s like with the Super Bowl! Normally, you would pay a 1/1000 of the price, but because it is being played during one of the most popular events in the world, the audience capture is much greater. Similarly, Facebook also adds some costs to the price of an ad if you would like to put it during a special holiday, maybe Black Friday, and even the whole month of December.

But that’s not even the half of it. Similarly to the concept from above, you will pay much more for a Facebook Ad during the rush hours. So, the cost of an ad being played from 12:00 AM to 6 AM will be much lower than when people can view this ad.

Location

Where you live will also influence how much money you will pay for the ad space on Facebook. It’s the same thing as with games. Some countries have much lower per-capita earnings, so they could not bear the same price as Americans for a match. But they would like to play it. So, developers set up different prices in different environments to stop piracy and earn a buck or two from poorer countries. The same rule applies to Facebook ads. The cost of Facebook ads in the USA will be much higher than the cost of Facebook ads in India, as people there are much poorer and would not be able to pay that much. 

Competition

As it is all based on bidding strategies, and the winner takes all, you may presume that the more popular your industry is, the higher bids you will have to make to be higher than your competitors. So, if you want to start your own animation business, you may be “pleased” that Disney is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Facebook ads. So yeah, tough luck for you in this case.

Of course, there is always a way and angle you can use to get your message across. But, it will be more expensive if you compete with some financial giants with 10 bucks a day to spend on Facebook ads.

Bidding

How well your ads will perform and how much you will pay for them will all depend on your bidding strategy. There are a couple of ways to set up your campaign correctly. You can, for example, start by deciding whether you want to do it manually or automatically. As we have mentioned before, you should instead opt-in for the automatic bidding if you don’t have experience, as you may be losing money in the process, and that’s not how your ROI should look.

There are a couple of strategies that you can utilize to maximize your potential. For example, if you are on a tight budget, it would be wise to find the highest amount of money to make as many conversions as possible. Go straight for the jugular rather than doing all the brand awareness stuff.

If you need to accomplish some specific goal, be sure to focus on how much you are willing to spend in order to accomplish the goal. Here, you should be focusing on the ROAS – return on ad spend – factor, as you can be sure that your efforts are actually bringing in some results.

With manual bidding, it’s a good idea to thoroughly research what you are trying to accomplish. You can either create something incredible that will change the outlook of your life or completely lose everything in the process.

Ad Format

The next thing to keep in mind is that the ad format you are promoting will influence the amount of money that you will pay for your Facebook ad. And, it’s not like there are some major differences between video and pictures regarding advertising on Facebook. Rather then – you will pay more if you do not choose the right path forward with your advertising efforts. Choosing the wrong way of advertising will likely result in worse results, hence – higher costs.

Ad Quality

Next, as with all digital advertising, the ad quality is something that matters greatly. So, if you have a completely tragic ad copy, you will probably have a much more problematic situation regarding getting the quality score for your Facebook ad. The platform also pays much attention to what its users are trying to search for. So, if you are not providing them with quality and impressions, your ads will not be displayed to the wider audiences. There are three things to keep in mind in that regard:

• Quality – be sure that your ads are relevant to your audience, and that your potential clients will surely be interested in your product. Additionally, take care of the overall quality of an ad, as putting out something that is half-baked is never a good idea in the end.
• Engagement – The next big thing is the amount of engagement your ads get and how it compares to the other players in the market. Be sure to make your ad as competitive as possible in order to maximize your results.
• Conversion rate – additionally, you will also be judged by how your conversion rate is doing compared to the other advertisers. If you are not bringing the conversions, you will also be judged more harshly.

Ad campaigns are mostly focused on the audience’s expectations, so if they are not getting it, the platform will punish you for that. So, if you want to stay competitive, be sure to just deliver a good product and create a good ad copy to pair it with. You will be surprised how it can affect your ad being displayed to a wider audience.

Campaign Objective

The next thing you need to keep in mind is your campaign objective. Whether you want to just get more impressions or some advanced conversions with potential customers buying something from your website – all of those will be priced differently based on the difficulty of said action; there are essentially five categories of objectives you can focus on:

• Impressions – those are the likes or other impressions that you will have under your posts, like comments or shares. It’s pretty easy to get, so it’s not that expensive.
• Reach – easily the cheapest of them all; you can get lots and lots of reach that means nothing for a reasonably small price. If you want to get reach that matters – you will have to try a bit harder.
• Lead generation – this is where it gets a bit more expensive, as the lead ads will cost more because they potentially bring money to the advertiser. 
• Conversions – on the other hand, nothing gets you more direct benefit than simply getting conversions. It’s one of the most expensive ads, as you directly benefit from Facebook efforts.
• Link clicks – and finally, we have the ability to set our campaign so that people are clicking our links. As you can imagine, it can also be a tad expensive, as you will make the potential customers leave the website, and that’s something that no social media platform would want.

Organic/Paid Traffic

And finally, we have what we call – the popularity contest. If you have lots of organic traffic, it will be rather easy to boost it with some additional advertising. On the other hand, if you have little to no traffic organically, you will have trouble figuring out your advertising budget, as you will have to push through quite a lot of pushback. So, be sure to build community around you so that you will not be left alone with advanced issues with advertising.

How Much Are Facebook Ads – Conclusion

So, here we are at the end of our road! As you can see, Facebook is a wonderful platform for multiple purposes. From such simple elements as locally promoting your business, growing your brand awareness, trying to get more likes or shares, or even selling your products on Facebook. As you can see, there is no specific dollar amount that we can provide you with, as there are many different factors that will impact your price. It can depend on the place where you live, what kind of business you are running, and even the price of the goods that you are selling. There is no single solution to lower the price of your ads, but if you get into the weeds of it, you will surely be able to drop a couple of zeros from your bill.

Thanks so much for checking out our article! If you liked this one, there are plenty of other ones on our sites, with topics from office-related problems software, and even gaming. There are plenty of those out there for you to check out, so we are positive that you will find something to your liking. Additionally, if you have any questions – feel free to ask. We will be more than happy to help you out with that. That’s it for today; stay safe, and we will see you in the next one!