Facebook’s ad system is one of the most powerful pay-per-click (PPC) platforms. It can give you incredible reach, helping even small businesses with tight budgets increase brand awareness, lead generation, and potential sales.
But how much do Facebook ads cost? Does the ad system work for every type of business? And how do you know if Facebook ads are actually worth it for you?
In this post, we’ll go over everything you need to get started (and find success!) with Facebook ads, whether you’ve used the Meta Ads Manager platform before or not. Here's what we'll cover:
Facebook Ads — sometimes called Meta Ads — is the ad system Meta uses to place ads throughout the Facebook desktop and mobile app. As users are scrolling through their feeds, watching videos, or even checking out their friends’ stories, they may see paid ads from brands and businesses they don’t follow.
Facebook ads look something like this:
Facebook ads and Facebook post sponsoring are both paid promotions that you can run through Meta, but they work a bit differently.
Facebook Ads allow you to generate new creative copy, images, and visuals in a variety of formats, and run them as part of targeted campaigns across Facebook. You can get exceptionally detailed control over bidding strategies, optimization, and audience targeting.
Facebook sponsored posts allow you boost an existing organic post that has already been published on your page. You can pay to promote this, and you can still set your budget, schedule, and audience targeting.
If your goal is to boost reach and visibility on a high-value organic post, sponsored posts can be an invaluable asset. However, if you want to develop full-fledged campaigns with expanded targeting abilities and better chances of clicks to your site, ads are the way to go.
Loomly makes it easy to create and manage sponsored posts through our streamlined dashboard
Having worked with small businesses and startups on Facebook ads for nearly a decade, this is a concern I hear a lot: Will they actually work for me?
While there’s no guarantee for positive return on investment (ROI) with any marketing campaign, there are many small businesses who have successfully run and profited from Facebook ads even when they have limited experience and budget.
Keep in mind that Facebook currently has around 2.9 billion monthly active users, and their ad system helps you reach them. A good or average click-through rate (CTR) is around 2.5% on Facebook, which means that 2.5% of all users who see your ad will click. While 2.5% of users seems tiny, if you’re showing your ad to thousands of users a month at a relatively low cost, this can deliver meaningful results over time.
Also worth noting is that you’re paying for guaranteed visibility and, depending on what you’re bidding on, specific outcomes. Facebook only charges you when users take the desired action that you've outlined for your ad. This may include receiving around 1,000 views, video views, clicks to your site, or a conversion sale action.
While clicks to your site don't guarantee a purchase, it is a good start — especially since Facebook does uses machine learning to show your ads to relevant users who are most likely to take your chosen conversion action. When you first launch your campaign, Facebook will test how your ads perform with different audience segments across different placements. This helps them find which users are most likely to take the action you want, such as clicking on an ad, or watching a video. They’ll then optimize ad delivery to similar users to improve your visibility amongst the right audience.
There are multiple factors that impact the cost of Facebook Ads. You’ll notice that even in a single campaign, your cost per action (CPA) and cost per click (CPC) will change from day to day.
This is because Facebook works on a bidding system. If there are other advertisers trying to reach the same audience, you end up bidding against each other. The ad that Facebook deems most relevant and that has a more competitive bid will score the placement. Keep in mind that more relevant scores have a direct correlation with more placements and lower ad pricing.
All this said, here are a few solid benchmarks that can give you a very baseline idea of what to expect with Facebook ad cost:
There are two more things to consider when it comes to cost. You can set your total or daily ad budget, which limits how much you’ll spend in total. You can also choose to set limits or target values that tell Facebook how much you’re willing to spend for certain types of actions. Fore example, you could set limits to spend only $.30 per click and a total of $25 per day. In other words, your ad spend doesn't have to be a surprise at the end of the month — you can set limits to keep Facebook ad costs within your budget.
When people want to know about different types of Facebook ads, they’re typically referring to one of two things: Facebook ad formats, which determine how the ad shows up, or Facebook ad placements, which determine where the ad show up.
Let’s look at each.
Facebook offers a plethora of creative ad types, but there are four core ad formats you should know about:
Stories are used by more than one billion people every day across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Users spend between 24 and 32 minutes watching Story-based content each day.
Statistics also show that:
This means there are a lot of engaged eyeballs there, making them an excellent place to share your ads.
Photo ads are quick, easy, and effective. By creating intriguing creative assets, you can drive high levels of clicks and traffic.
At a high level, there are three key things to remember when creating Facebook photo ads:
Video ads can be an advertiser’s secret weapon. Research shows users spend up to five times longer looking at video content on Facebook and Instagram than they do static content.
Facebook’s carousel ads are a fantastic storytelling tool. They are best used when your ad has a focus on:
Because these components would be restricted by both photo and video ads. Here is how a carousel ad looks in action:
Much like Photo ads, you need to create contrast and use high-quality digital assets to grab your audience’s attention. You can use multiple captions to tell a follow-along story.
We find this four-slide strategy to be effective:
There are multiple different ad placements, which determine where your ad will appear on Facebook or Instagram. On-platform placements include the following:
In most cases, it’s best to leave all platforms enabled when creating ads — this is the default setting. It allows Facebook to find the right balance of high engaging and cost-effective placements to drive results at your target cost per action (CPA).
Running Facebook Ads comes down to three key steps: Setting up your Meta Pixel (it's easier than it sounds), creating your campaigns, and tracking progress and optimizing campaigns.
Let’s go through the process.
Your Meta Pixel is a snippet of code you place on your website that lets your website and Facebook communicate with each other. When users click on your Facebook ad, that code fires on your website and it tells Facebook which users clicked. This can help you track conversion data, which can in turn help Facebook send more relevant users your way. You can also set up the tracking pixel to record events that are meaningful for your business; for example, a retail business might record when users add something to their cart.
The Meta tracking pixel can also track users who visited your website for retargeting repurposes. You can target users who visited certain product pages via specific ads, for example.
You can also set up Facebook Conversions API, which pulls data from your own first-party tracking and doesn’t rely on Facebook’s Meta Pixel.
Here are guidelines for how to install both features:
Creating an ad on Facebook has never been easier, as the self-service campaign creator really walks you through every step.
First, you’ll choose an objective. This tells Facebook what you want this specific campaign (and all of the ads within the campaign) to do.
Think about the immediate action or result you want to drive — that may be awareness, traffic, or sales. Facebook will show your ad to users most likely to take the chosen action. For this example, we’ll create an Awareness campaign.
The next step is to create your Ad Set. This is the backstage stuff that plays a crucial role in the success of your Facebook ad:
Before you play with these controls, you can choose to run A/B tests on your campaign. This is often a good idea, especially when you’re getting new campaigns up and running.
You’ll be asked to name your campaign. I strongly recommend choosing something descriptive that will be easy to organize as you scale your campaigns, like “Black Friday Campaign_Bundle Sale.”
Now it's time to set a daily or lifetime campaign budget. You can also choose to enable an Advantage campaign budget, which distributes budget across ad sets based on potential results.
Daily budget refers to the average amount of money you want to spend, per day, for the duration of your campaign. Let’s say you want to run an ad for seven days with a daily budget of $10. Facebook will take the $70 allocated for this ad set and spread it evenly over the next seven days.
Lifetime budgets work with a similar process. You first select the duration of your campaign — this can be any number of days, weeks, months, or years. Then select the budget you want to spend over that time period. For example, you want to run an ad for one month with a budget of $500.
Facebook will use that $500 and spend an amount of it each day. The amount will change based on the quality of opportunities available, such as high or low traffic days. You could spend $50 in one day and $20 the next, but you will never spend more than your budget.
You can also set a start date and, if you want, an end date.
Once you’ve defined your budget and schedule, you’ll choose your audience controls.
For audience targeting, you have multiple options, including the following:
You can choose to include or exclude certain audiences. If, for example, you want to exclude brand-aware audiences from seeing an ad meant for new customers, you can do so.
As you adjust your audience controls, keep an eye on the Audience definition. This tells you your estimated audience size, and how broad or targeted it is.
When choosing placements, you can use Advantage+ placements, which is the default setting. Meta will automatically use as many placements as possible. If you choose, however, you can select only manual placements.
You can also choose to customize your bid. Many users will skip this, leaving it up to Meta, but you can choose from different bidding strategies.
Finally, it's time to create the ad itself. You’ll be asked to choose ad formats, and enter in the relevant copy, images, and/or videos. You’ll also select a CTA button and add the URL you want to send users to. Keep reading for tips on developing your ad creative.
Once you do this, preview the ad campaign, double check for typos, and submit it for approval!
Once your ads have started running, it’s important to track their progress often.
You can access your ad analytics through your Ads Managers. The default dashboard shows common KPIs like cost per click (CPC), total campaign cost, number of clicks, impressions, and metrics like frequency (which tell you how often users have seen a single ad). You can learn more about Facebook Ad metrics here.
Looking for inspiration to help make your ad campaign a success? Let’s look at a few more best practices to get the most out of your campaigns.
To give you some inspiration, we’ll be using examples from the Facebook ads library, which is a great resource to tap when you're writing and designing ads. You can look for ads within your industry and if you're lucky even examine your direct competitors' ads!
Audience targeting is complex, so testing is an important part of the process. That said, here are a few tips to keep in mind:
Sometimes you spend so much time fiddling with audience controls that you forget what your audience is really seeing: your ad creative. Here are some best practices to keep in mind.
Start your ad copy strong with a great hook. Put a key benefit or pain point right at the beginning of your copy to draw users in and make them feel seen.
Facebook has long had their infamous 20% rule, which required that an image shouldn’t be made up of more than 20% text. While that rule is long gone, it’s still considered a general best practice for engagement purposes.
Research shows that ads containing social proof have 300% more conversions and spend less to achieve their marketing objectives.
Social proof is basically a third-party endorsement of your product or service, like a testimonial or a statistic that showcases results you can deliver.
Brand consistency is a proven way to build trust and recognition with your audience. It's also one of the most crucial factors for consumers when choosing which brands to buy from.
For Facebook ads, this means that the branded elements your users see in your ad should reflect what they see on the page they click through to. These elements include:
They do not need to be a one-for-one match. But your site should look and feel like what users have experienced on Facebook.
It’s critical to ensure that each ad matches the landing page it sends users to once they click. This sounds easy, but it can get confusing if you've built multiple landing pages for different audience segments or offers.
If users click on your ad, the landing page they arrive on should make sense. Make sure these elements are aligned:
When considering spending and ad duration, these are the best practices to keep in mind:
When it comes to measuring, assessing, and optimizing your campaigns, keep these tips in mind:
Regular A/B testing is at the backbone of Facebook advertising. A/B testing Facebook ads is when you run two versions of the ad with minor differences in creative or targeting. The winning ad helps you determine ad elements that you can apply to your entire campaign or across the board.
It can be useful to start with a smaller budget and test the following criteria, but make sure you only test one factor at a time to understand what impacts ad performance:
Most experts recommend allocating a certain percentage of your budget to tests. The most common number I’ve seen from multiple agencies is about 10% of the budget once you’ve got some solid campaigns established.
While Facebook ads require upfront investment, it’s a pay-to-play platform with an extremely user-friendly self-service platform. Even small businesses without technical ad experience can run campaigns on a tight budget.
Make sure that you account for a ramping up period, giving new campaigns an average of two weeks to a month so Facebook’s machine learning can figure out who to show your ad to and when. After that, you can start making adjustments, run more tests, and switch up your strategies.
Want to dip your toes into Facebook ads with a few quick boosted posts? Get started with Loomly’s post sponsoring here!