What is facebook cost per click?

When it comes to social media advertising, Facebook offers a competitive advantage with its ownership of Instagram. Via Facebook, you can create Facebook and Instagram ads with ease, which saves your team time.

Instagram maintains the highest CPC when it comes to Facebook advertising costs. On average, companies spend an additional $0.80 per click to appear on Instagram. For Instagram Stories, the CPC increase is around $0.78.

The average CPC for ads on Facebook is around $0.30 less than Instagram. It offers a versatile platform for advertising your business. Your ads can appear not only on Facebook, but also Facebook Messenger, a popular messaging app for the social media network.

The Audience Network, which allows your ads to appear on websites and mobile apps, maintains an even lower CPC than Facebook and Instagram. In most cases, companies spend an additional $0.20 (based on the average advertising cost for Facebook) per click.

While you can modify where your Facebook ad appears, Facebook recommends Automatic Placements. This tool allows the social media platform’s delivery system to make the most of your ad spend by placing your advertisements on platforms that offer the most potential for results.

That’s why we’ve set out to clarify what each Facebook advertising acronym means. We’ll also offer some insights on when you should optimize for each cost metric.

Whether you’re a veteran Facebook marketer who needs a quick refresher or a new SMM getting buried under the weight of a million abbreviations, we’ve got you covered.

In alphabetical order, let’s run through the basic Facebook ad cost terms every social media marketer needs to know.

CPA stands for cost per action. Known on other digital marketing channels as cost per conversion, this is the price you pay for each action a user takes on your website because of your Facebook ad.

An action could be a purchase, a newsletter sign up, an app download, or one of several other conversions.

You pick the desired action ahead of time, then track user interactions with your ad that lead to that action. Facebook will then optimize your ads so you get as many actions as possible within your set ad budget.

CPC stands for cost per click. This is the price you pay for each click on your Facebook ad.

You can choose to optimize for CPC if you want as many visits to your website as possible. Facebook will try get you as many clicks as it can within your budget if you choose this option.

Here is the official list of clicks that factor into your cost per click on Facebook:

CPL stands for cost per like. This is the price you pay for each like on your Facebook page that comes from your Facebook ad.

You should choose to optimize for CPL if you want to grow your follower base on Facebook and cultivate a community around your brand.

If you select this option, Facebook will track interactions with your ad that result in page likes and get as many as they can for your budget.

How much does Facebook advertising cost? Research suggests that advertisers should expect to pay: $0.94 per click or $12.07 per 1,000 impressions. Facebook bills advertisers based on two metrics: cost per click (CPC) and cost per mille (CPM)—otherwise known as cost per 1,000 impressions.

Facebook may be a goldmine of information for marketers, but is it making your company's marketing budget too expensive?

In July 2021, 5 major social media platforms showed a dramatic increase in advertising costs year-over-year.

This year, despite the IOS updates, Facebook stays a lucrative platform for engaging with the audience and the cheapest social media advertising channel.

Also, the average CPM is  $7.19, while CPL is $1.07, and CPA is $5.47.But why are Facebook ads getting more expensive?

In 2020, with $20.000 spent on your Facebook ads, you might have been able to reach around 10.000.000 users.

Quite an impressive number.

But right now, the same budget will barely help you reach 7,500,000 users.

We need to tackle two main problems:

By the end of this article, you’ll have the answer to these questions. But first, let’s knock out some basics.

This year's analysis doesn't show drastic changes when it comes to average Facebook cost in regard to November 2021.

Here’s the average Facebook ad cost* in 2022:

Using a calculator only gives you an estimate based on the average costs, but it’s a handy way to prep for your Facebook ad budget.

Here are 3 free calculators you can use:

We’ve looked at the average costs of Facebook ads, but how are the costs determined?

There are two ways to define the cost:

In theory, if you only have $5 to spend per week, you could still run Facebook ads. But it’s not guaranteed to give you the right results without a strategy.

Also, some advanced ad types require a minimum spend.

If your currency is set to USD, AUD, CAD, SGD, JPY, NZD, TWD, EUR, CHF, SEK, HKD, GBP, ILS, NOK, KRW, DKK, you’ll need to shell out:

The minimum ad spend is slightly lower if you use a currency other than the ones listed above.

With Facebook ads becoming more expensive, it’s only natural to wonder if your results match up to the industry standard.

Although we recommend measuring slightly different metrics, for the sake of transparency, here’s some data from Wordstream that can help you benchmark your results against industry averages.

Typically, e-commerce businesses invest in Facebook ads because they drive great results initially and report a good cost-per-acquisition (CPA).

And then the following problem hits them:

CPAs start rising – but since their main customer acquisition strategies were pretty much based on Facebook, they have no other option but to continue with their campaign and spend more money.

Also, many other retailers and even small businesses went online due to the pandemic and continue to advertise on Facebook, increasing the competition.

Facebook adds more than 1 million new advertisers each year.

But retailers looking to make online sales aren’t the only problem.

eCommerce is the hottest new thing. With widespread access to fast internet, no-code tools, dropshipping, the barrier to entry is lower than it’s ever been.

These new businesses are going to fight to acquire customers mainly through hard-core paid Facebook ads.

That will result in a higher cost per 1000 impressions, putting even more pressure on performance marketing KPIs.

All of this leads us to one conclusion:

The Facebook marketplace is becoming oversaturated.

Since Facebook and Instagram aren’t “demand-first” marketplaces like Google, advertisers are battling for the same people’s attention.

This is a clear indicator that supply will definitely beat demand.

Facebook ads are also under pressure to deliver a better experience with the new privacy updates like Apple’s ATT and Google’s anti-cookie rollout.

Facebook can be picky. They penalize advertisers that don’t offer a good ad delivery experience.

And it’s not Facebook’s fault. If you had to provide the best user experience and optimal results to advertisers, would you pick generic ads?

Generic ads lead to ad fatigue.

You may not achieve a good return on investment.

Your conversion rates will stall.

At some point, you might even think of remarketing campaigns.

Bad experience from all these factors has one significant result.

High CPM.

Because of that, we can only expect rising Facebook CPMs costs (unless something worse than COVID-19 hits us, but let’s hope that won’t be the case!)

With rising costs, privacy updates making targeting difficult and no indication of when costs will decrease if at all, are Facebook ads even worth it?

Is it worth the effort and time to set up ads only to watch them get less than desirable results

Surprisingly, yes.

Facebook is the #1 platform when it comes to delivering ads. Despite the proliferation of social networks like TikTok, Facebook dominates the 25-54 age category, the age demographic with the most purchasing power.

26% of Facebook users purchase after clicking on a Facebook ad. So it still makes sense for advertisers to run Facebook ads.

The numbers are even more impressive when you account for Mega Sale Days like Black Friday and Christmas. With the holiday season round the corner, Facebook should be an integral part of your strategy.

Grab these 4 data-backed festive playbooks to help you win on paid social (Don’t worry, you don’t have to give up your email!)

According to Adespresso’s research:

That’s almost a 40% increase in one year.

Investing a larger amount of money seems like a logical move, but not necessarily the best one you can make.

Bigger CPMs don’t necessarily require a bigger budget. You just need the right strategy.

The answer lies in focusing on the buyer itself. Now more than ever before, buyers are in control.

Buyers are like judges on The Voice. They decide whether your ad is worthy of their attention or not.

To beat Facebook’s rising costs without investing more money, advertisers need to invest more time, knowledge, and effort into creating seamless Facebook ad campaigns and creatives that will improve our retention, customer experience, and customer lifetime value.

Despite wanting data privacy, users don’t want to give up on personalized ads. But with the newest privacy updates, personalization doesn’t seem like an easy thing to achieve.

A good workaround that’s easy and time-effective is to create great geotargeting ads and personalizing them for different languages (if you’re going after multiple markets).

When it comes to location, you can create different campaigns by using the weather as your personalization factor:

Or different cities:

Multi-language campaigns attract more customers than “generic” ads written only in English:

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) isn’t just more expensive when it comes to Facebook ads. It also grows in other marketing activities.

According to Allan E. Webber, acquiring a new customer costs 5x more than retaining an existing one.

And, Marketing Metrics reports that if a customer bought from you once, there is a 60% chance that they will make another purchase.

So instead of focusing on acquiring new customers, shift your focus on retaining the existing ones (or up-selling them).

Create loyalty programs or discounts for your exclusive customers, upsell, and offer early access to sales.

In the absence of cold-hard data, creative is the lever you need to pull.

In the attention economy, poorly designed or “generic” ads don’t work anymore. With only 1.7 seconds to grab your audience’s attention, you can’t expect outdated templates to do the trick.

And it’s not just your revenue at stake. It’s also your brand.

High-quality creatives don’t just help you acquire, retain, or up-sell more customers. They also improve your brand awareness and recall.

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At the moment, many of our clients are reporting slightly cheaper customer acquisition costs (CAC) on Instagram than on Facebook.

This is primarily because the ‘gram is still less saturated than Facebook, and CPM for story placements is inexpensive. And with immersive shopping experiences like Live Shopping and the ability to target different audiences, Instagram ads are hard to ignore.

In April 2020, Apple revealed their plan to release the Identifier For Advertisers (IDFA), or in short, iOS 14, the company’s latest mobile operating system update.

It was a huge setback for Facebook advertisers. Many are still dealing with the fallout of the iOS 14 Facebook tracking update, and with Google’s plan to phase out cookies, advertisers may continue to feel backed into a corner.

If you’re feeling the heat, check out how to adapt to privacy measures like ATT without giving up personalization.

We encourage you to focus on these 4 initial steps since you’ll have limited access to user data.

Read our detailed guide on the iOS 14.5 tracking update and the 4-step strategy for more context.

Acquisition channels like Facebook are fundamental to every eCommerce brand. But rising costs and privacy updates have made Facebook ads feel pretty much like Squid Game.

One wrong move can cost you your entire ad budget. Play by the new rules, and you have access to a thriving user base and ad network.

Advertisers need to adopt a growth mindset and constantly test and improve ad campaigns to remain profitable.