Facebook isn’t just a place to post your beach selfies and scroll through memes. Okay, maybe it is used primarily for that most of the time. But if you have your own business, Facebook can also be a wealth of advertising resources too. And naturally you may be wondering how much it costs to advertise on Facebook.

Think about it, there were over 2.8 billion active user accounts on Facebook in 2021 and over 2.9 billion Facebook monthly active users in 2022, of which over 261 million are located in the US. If you could snag even a small fraction of that as a customer base for your business, you’d be ballin’ with Kim K herself in no time.

But you’re probably thinking, “How much do Facebook ads cost? They’re probably too expensive.” Well, have no fear. I’m here to give you all the deets for using Facebook ads to up your eCommerce game with my handy Facebook ads cost guide.

• How Much Do Facebook Ads Cost?
• How Does the Facebook Ads Platform Work?
• What Is Your Desired Facebook Ads Objective?
• Who Is Your Audience?
• How Can You Reduce Your Facebook Advertising Costs?
• Facebook Advertising That Just Clicks

• Your target audience
• Your individual site traffic goals
• Your level of preferred engagement
• Campaign/marketing objectives
• The amount of competition you may have for the same product or service
• CPMs (cost-per-thousand-impressions)
• Conversion rates on a website’s landing page, such as email address leads, purchases, and add to cart actions
• Your relevance score

Whether you are advertising to a highly competitive audience

With all of these variables to consider, a better question to ask yourself is: “What is my end goal? What do I need my cost per purchase to be under in order to be profitable?” And then work your way backward from there.

How Much Should a Small Business Spend on Facebook Ads?

If you are a small business, you can spend a smaller budget on Facebook ads. If you are a locally-based, brick-and-mortar business, you can spend as little as $5-$10 a day on Facebook ads and still hit your target market.

Believe it or not, you can actually spend less on Facebook ads daily than you are required to spend on TikTok ads. The least amount you can spend per day on a TikTok ad is $5, whereas, on Facebook, you can spend as little as $1 per day on ads.

Not that $1 a day is going to give you much traction, but if you truly are a small business, Facebook can be an affordable ad platform for you to start with due to the lower up-front investment requirement.

By using Facebook’s Ads Manager, you can be in control of your advertising needs. You create your ads and then submit them to Facebook’s ad auction. Once in the ad auction, you bid on that ad by setting the price you’re willing to pay each time someone may see an ad on their feed or engage with it.

For advanced advertisers, Facebook allows you to budget out the maximum cost you’re willing to pay for a specific action, such as per view or click. But most marketers will use automatic bidding, allowing Facebook to adjust their bid up and down, depending on many various factors.

You only pay for the action or objective you indicate when you create the ad. You can choose to set a budget for that particular ad and its actions or you can set a total budget that Facebook will spread out over the run of that ad. The higher the value the objective is to your business, such as a purchase conversion for example, the higher the cost is to run your ad (as a general rule of thumb).

Ad auctions are held whenever it is possible to show an ad to someone. Ad auctions are based on predictions of what ads will be relevant for a specific individual. In other words, ads that are more relevant win ad auctions at lower prices.

The advertiser can estimate whether a person will take the desired action after viewing the advertisement using relevance predictions. By using ad relevance diagnostics you can better understand if the ads you ran were relevant to the audience you reached.

Average Order Value

While you may be able to spend as little as $1 per day on Facebook ads, less than you spend on your Starbucks Venti Frappuccino, it is recommended that you make sure your AOV (average order value) on your site is at least $75 minimum.

The average cost per purchase on Facebook in 2022 is about $30-$40 in the US, and that is a very broad oversimplification of a basic eCommerce purchase under $100.

It can vary widely depending on many different factors. So, at the very minimum, $75 is the desired AOV goal for eCommerce to have a good chance at running Facebook ads profitably for an eCommerce purchase under $100.

If your average order value is $50 or under, it will be much more difficult to make a profit through Facebook ads. You will find that your ROAS is likely between 1X and 2X, which just isn’t profitable for most businesses.

This is why focusing on increasing your website conversion rate and your average order value is critical when running paid ads.

If either of these is too low, you will struggle to run ads profitably on Facebook.

Another factor to consider is what your desired ad objective or goal is. It is important to look at your ads to make sure people are taking the desired action on your ad. Everyone has a different objective they are looking to achieve through their ads.

With Facebook ads, you may have to pay based on the action you want to accomplish through your ad and the level of engagement the ad receives. Do you want your ad to reach a certain number of video views or are you trying to drive traffic to your site? Do you want to acquire a certain number of purchase hits or add to cart actions?

Sometimes it’s about drawing more people to your Facebook business page to grow your brand. If your ad’s purpose is just to get likes or follows to increase brand awareness, this may be a more cost-effective way to go. You can always view page engagements such as likes, follows, shares, and comments through your Facebook Ads analytics dashboard on your page manager.

Your Facebook ads cost also depends on the audience you target. If you target a smaller, more competitive audience, your CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions) will rise, increasing your cost-per-click as well.

If you target a more broad audience, your CPMs tend to be a little lower, often making your cost-per-click more affordable.

Both strategies have their pros and cons. If you target a smaller or more competitive audience, likely they are more qualified and harder to find, making your ad costs rise. You pay a premium in order to get in front of them.

On the opposite end, when you target a more broad audience, they are less qualified and competitive, thereby decreasing your costs. In this example, you incur a discounted rate to get in front of this audience.

So it is important to ask yourself, how big is your targeted audience? Are you trying to find a large audience or a very niche group of people to advertise to?

How competitive is your audience? Is your product or service in an industry that has a lot of other competing sites? Or are you one of only a few other sites looking to advertise to this group?

How difficult is it to find your audience?

One of the Facebook ads benefits is the ability to target specific groups or demographics of potential customers. However, if you are only targeting 40-year-old women who like to crochet in Southern California, this is going to cost more in advertising due to the very specific ad targeting parameters you are using.

Women overall are a more costly target audience than men. If you are trying to target a higher-income market, this will increase your Facebook ads cost. Advertising to a highly competitive audience or a more niche audience will also drive up your Facebook ads cost.

When pursuing leads, email address opt-ins, advertising can cost as little as $0.50 or involve using a free giveaway item for a sign-up. But it can skyrocket up to as much as $50 for a $1,000, $2,000, or $5,000 course or service.

To reduce your Facebook ads costs and ensure you are running profitable ads on Facebook, you can first split-test with varying ad copy (text) and creative (images and videos). This means you simply change out creative ad copy and images or videos within your ad to ones that get more engagement. We lowered the cost by 60% per click for a client just by swapping out the ad with a new video and ad copy.

By keeping your ads fresh, you can attract more engagement over time. Find what works and what doesn’t. Showing the same content to your target audience at a higher frequency over a short period may cause them to lose interest, ignore it, or flag it as spam.

The time of year may also increase your Facebook ads cost. For example, during Christmas and the end of the year, more businesses are going to be advertising on Facebook to boost potential sales, so there could be an increase in advertising costs because of this.

Here are some other strategies you can use to lower your Facebook ad costs:

Expand your audience targeting to include a broader base and use other marketing tools, like email marketing. Increase your conversion rates on your landing pages and website.

Maintain low-frequency scores so your content isn’t being repeated multiple times in a short period ad campaign and raising your CPM rate. Instead of targeting 7-day website visitors, open it up to 14 or 30-day visitor rates to lower your CPM and make it easier for Facebook to find your target audience. This will help lower your CPC, or cost per click.

You can turn to manual bidding for more advanced options instead of relying on Facebook to use your budget to bid for you across your campaign. Check your ad sets and analyze which ones are underperforming and decrease or cap your bid at the ad set level.

What Are the Best Strategies for Facebook Retargeting Ads?

You may be wondering how retargeting is done on Facebook and what the best Facebook retargeting strategies are. This is a great question since retargeting ads on Facebook tend to have the highest ROAS (return on ad spend).

Here are three retargeting strategies you can use on Facebook:

• Combine your 30-day, 90-day, and 180-day warm audiences into separate ad sets. For example, I like to include website visitors and engaged email subscribers from the last 30 days who have not purchased into the same ad set and target them with an offer. I recommend separating your social audiences from your website traffic and email list since these audiences can have different buying intents and be in a different part of the customer journey.
• Retarget your previous purchasers with an upsell or cross-sell. This works especially well if you have a product that has a predictable reorder cycle, such as haircare products, so that you can put an ad in front of your customer at the perfect time. It also can be a great upsell to your subscription program.
• Retarget people who watched your top-of-funnel videos with a follow-up offer. If you run educational and brand awareness videos at top-of-funnel, you can create a video views audience and retarget them with an offer that relates to the video they watched.