How To Lower Your Facebook Ads CPC

Have you noticed your Facebook Ads cost per click (CPC) increasing recently?

Maybe you’re just not happy with amount you’re paying per click on the platform.

You’re not alone; in fact Facebook Ad costs have been rising around 90% year on year.

Well, in this article I’ll be showing you exactly what you can do to reduce your CPC, but if you stick around to the end, I’ll also be showing you why a higher CPC, might actually be more desirable.

The first thing to mention here is that there are two primary factors that will affect your Facebook ads CPC; one of which you can control, and the other you can’t.

But before we get into which is which, we first need to understand the basics…

How Do Facebook Ads Actually Work?

The first thing to understand here is that Facebook Ads ultimately work on a bidding system, similar to Google Ads.

As such, the average CPC for Facebook Ads can fluctuate on a daily basis depending on the amount of other advertisers bidding on the platform at any given time.

Bidding System & Natural Fluctuations (out of your control)

Naturally the average CPC on Facebook has risen over the past 5 years as more and more advertisers start using the platform:

This can also heavily fluctuate across different seasons or promotional periods too.

Facebook do give you the ability to set a specified or target CPC. However, unless you’re an experienced advertiser and have a lot of data, you’re best off choosing an automated bidding strategy.

This is where you let Facebook do automatic bids based on your campaign objective (whether you want to generate leads, engagement, video views, etc…).

This means if you were to have a conversion campaign for example; Facebook may bid higher to show the ad to a particular user if they think it’s more likely to result in a conversion.

Facebook Quality Ranking & How It Affects CPC

Another factor that can significantly impact your Facebook Ads CPC is the quality ranking (also known as quality or relevancy score) of your ad.

How Your Facebook Ads Quality Ranking Is Determined (within your control)

Ultimately, campaigns with a high quality score are rewarded with lower CPC’s.

They currently measure this score from 3 primary factors:

Quality – This can be negatively impacted by things like people choosing to hide the ad or report it.

Engagement – This is impacted by the amount and type of engagement your ad receives. For example, low, or even just negative engagement can result in a low engagement score.

Conversion – If your landing page is getting a poor or below average conversion rate, this signals to FB the ad is not relevant for the audience and will thus impact the score

To improve all of these, you’ll want to make sure you’re delivering the right message to the right people and also that your landing page is congruent and consistent with the ad.

The best advertising campaigns create an enjoyable experience for the user. The worst create a negative experience.

As such, you’ll want to make sure your entire campaign (ad through to landing page) delivers a great experience throughout and that your targeting is on-point.

Why A High Facebook Ads CPC Might Actually Be A Good Thing…

As advertisers, we all want to reduce our costs as much as possible.

However, we have to remember, the ultimate end-goal behind most campaigns is profit, NOT just clicks.

The funny thing, you’ll sometimes find campaigns that produce phenomenal results in terms of click or even leads at an extremely low CPC.

Sounds great on paper right?

But here’s the thing, we want to find BUYERS, and not just any buyers; we want the people who are going to come back time and time again and spend a lot of money with us.

Sometimes getting fewer clicks at a higher spend, can actually result in a better quality of lead.

This is particularly prominent with Google Ads when you’re picking the right keywords to target. But it’s also the case with Facebook when targeting certain profitable audiences.

Ultimately, the key is to test, test and test again.

Don’t get too trigger happy when it comes to shutting off campaigns or ad groups in your Facebook Ads Manager.

Especially if you run a business that generate leads and appointments, prior to a sale being made!

This will allow you to make a judgement on the quality of leads coming through on each campaign.

We also wrote an article recently that covers how to scale a Facebook Ads campaign without breaking it; which dives into this premise in more detail.