How to tackle the rise in Facebook CPAs

With the increased investment in advertising that large companies spend to communicate on Facebook and Instagram, acquisition costs are skyrocketing. If this is your case, I recommend that you do an analysis and adjust your ad strategy to optimize your campaign budgets. 

A good way to start is to determine if your budget is right for you to get the best click-through rates (CTR), by looking at your audience's response to your ads and adapting your strategy accordingly.

Analysis of Facebook CPCs

Sometimes the bigger your target, the better. This is because CPCs on Facebook are determined by audience size, campaign structure, and click-through rates or CTRs. The narrower and smaller your audience, the more competitive your offer should be, so the competition in the bid will mainly affect the CPC result.

If you think your CPCs are too high, one of the first things you could do is check your audience size. If in your review you find that you are being too specific, check if there are other interests, behaviors or demographic factors that you can add. Doing this can help you broaden your target group and thereby give the Facebook algorithm more options to display your ads. 

If in another scenario you have already reached a ceiling or limit, a broad segmentation may be the next step. If you are an experienced advertiser, it is not recommended that you go directly to this step, especially if you have not yet obtained conclusive information from your tests.

Structure and segmentation

The structure of the campaign and how the ad group is targeted can also determine where a piece is displayed. Ads can run in a number of locations, including the Facebook and Instagram news and stories section, among many others. This segmentation by locations also restricts the size of the audience, so you must recognize in which of them it is convenient to communicate to your brand, based on the places where your audience interacts.

This point is very important since the platform offers you to show your ads in as many locations as possible. However, with a good understanding of your audience you can know which are the locations where your users are most likely to convert.  

Segmentation can be invaluable when working based on where an audience is in the conversion funnel. Understanding what message to communicate at each stage is very important, especially when thinking about the creativity of your campaigns, creating “buyer personas” and defining which pages a user will be sent to when clicking on an ad. 

Harness creativity to get conversions

For advertising creativity to be compelling, it should make the user clearly visualize the value proposition of the product or service you offer. With which, a good creativity should not only give you more prospects, but it should also generate better long-term relationships with your audience and therefore lower costs. 

Facebook has tried to motivate its advertisers to use animations and videos in their campaigns, as these formats sometimes perform better than static images. However, the quality of the content is decisive when it comes to achieving good conversion levels. 

This means that not because an ad is in video format, it will have better conversions than an image. The performance of your pieces will largely depend on your ability to capture the attention of your audience and express your message in an original way, through your creativity and the animated resources that you have at your disposal.

Regarding the way to express your message, keep in mind that an effective copy should make your brand be remembered. It should also make your users feel comfortable clicking on an ad, so one way to generate this result is by being clear about the value proposition and the offer that you are presenting. 

I recommend that you be as convincing and clear as possible, so that your users do not have to navigate forums in search of information or have to read your entire site to understand your proposal. 

Conclution

Having a good ad strategy focused on improving metrics can be achieved both from the analysis of your audiences, and from the messages you deliver. I recommend that you start with the analysis of your audience, since with a better knowledge of your target audience you can optimize in which locations to distribute your messages and then improve your creativity if necessary.