7 strategies to reduce Meta Ads costs: choose the right objective, optimize audiences, run A/B tests, refresh creatives, and manage placements effectively.
The honest answer is: it depends.
To make more people aware of your business, you can use objectives such as “Reach,” “Engagement,” “Video Views,” or “Brand Awareness.”
For example, the “Reach” objective lets you reach the greatest number of people possible within your target audience. This is especially useful if you are doing local marketing.
The “Engagement” objective lets you reach people who regularly interact with Facebook posts. This is particularly useful for increasing interactions with your ads and reducing costs.
Therefore, do not use this objective if you want to drive traffic to your website — there is a specific objective for that.
This is where many beginners go wrong and confuse the “Sales” objective with the “Traffic” objective.
We use the Traffic objective to send traffic to a web page. Nothing more.
If you choose this option, Facebook will optimize the distribution of your ads to find users most likely to click on the link in your ad.
In itself, the goal is to minimize your cost per click (CPC). We will come back to this.
The problem is that the people who click will not necessarily be the ones who convert on your web page.
If your goal is to get conversions, there is a solution…
The Sales objective lets you create ads that invite people to take a specific action on your web page, such as making a purchase or subscribing.
So, in which case should you use the Sales objective rather than the Traffic objective, given that in both cases you are sending people to a web page?
When your web page is a landing page requesting contact information — typically a page promoting a free e-book when the user provides their email address in a form.
When your web page is a sales page.
When your web page is a product page (e-commerce).
DigitalMarketer ran a test to find out which objective was best for generating leads.
The results are clear: 5 times more leads at 5 times lower cost per lead using the Sales objective.
Trust the Facebook algorithm — if you want sales, the Sales objective is the one to choose. The real goal is not to have the most traffic on your sales page, but to convert every visitor into a customer!
However, remember that to sell, you must fulfil the basic principles: a good product, trust, brand awareness…
If you work with a funnel-shaped campaign structure, it is very likely that the lower you go in your funnel, the smaller your audiences become.
It is recommended that your custom audiences have at least 25,000 members. When you reach an audience of more than 100,000, you can consider more precise segmentation and create 2 separate audiences.
If your audiences are too small, the Facebook algorithm will tend to increase the cost per click. Before activating a retargeting campaign, make sure your reach/traffic campaigns are creating sufficient volume to get the most out of it.
A/B testing is a technique that lets you test multiple versions of your pages or creatives to determine which is most effective. This allows you to know what works and what does not work in your ads. For a complete breakdown of how to run these tests properly, see our guide to A/B testing as an essential optimization tool.
The principle involves putting 2 versions of the ad in competition — for example, version A and version B. If we find that version B generates more sales or more clicks than version A, we keep B.
We test first and keep what is most efficient. The result? Better return on investment (ROI), better conversion rate, and therefore lower costs.
Do not make the mistake that many advertisers make, which is simply putting an ad online and then letting it run on its own. The best way to find out what works is to test a few different ideas upfront (texts, images, videos, forms, etc.).
How is this done in practice?
When your ads are published and you want to test everything, you can start with the image or the copy.
You need to create a first ad and A/B test the image, for example. Keep the same text in every ad — only change the image.
You will therefore have ads with identical text but different images. By monitoring your campaigns, you will quickly see which ad performs better than the others. All you need to do is keep the best-performing one and eliminate those with a low Quality Ranking, low Engagement Rate Ranking, or low Conversion Rate Ranking. The final strategy will be to focus your budget on the successful ads.
Why ensure you refresh your Facebook ads? For two main reasons:
There is one point to keep in mind constantly: people get bored quickly and love new things. They want to interact with advertisers who can innovate and therefore surprise them.
You should therefore be able to recycle elements of an ad. Once a campaign ends, you can create a new one. For example, add new images to the same offer, change the text, invent a new phrase, while targeting the same audience.
The goal is to interest, capture attention, and create an emotional connection. A good ad should not give the impression that it is solely intended to sell a product; it should, in itself, bring something to whoever sees it: a smile, a thought, in short, anything that creates connection.
Obviously, if you are already running an ad that works very well, do not change it!
But if you see that it is ineffective, or that its impact is declining, then it is time to change it. Once again, A/B testing will be a great asset. By designing multiple versions of images, text, or offers, you can combine characteristics and develop a wide variety of different ads in very little time.
The image you choose for your ad is the first thing that will catch a user’s eye and, ultimately, will determine whether they read your text or ignore it.
The image is one of the most important elements of your advertising, and by choosing the right image you will reduce the cost of your ads by increasing the click-through rate and its relevance score.
Furthermore, as you well know, the human brain is divided into two parts: the left part is rational and logical, while the right part is drawn to dreams, imagination, and intuition. So when a person engages the emotional part of their being, they tend to look to the right. Hence the importance of choosing the right image, because an ad first seeks to “make people want.”
There is still some basic information to know about the impact of certain images in ads:
Ads with photos tend to attract more attention than illustrations, for example.
Choose contrasting colors. The main color of your ad is crucial for attracting a user’s attention. You should know that in marketing, colors have meaning and must be consistent with the message of your ad. For example, if your ad concerns an eco-friendly product, it may be advisable to choose green.
And you should always choose an image that is coherent with your text.
Do not just try to get clicks. The goal is to make the user stay. The goal is for the user to click AND not be disappointed by what they discover.
Once again, to determine which image sparks the most interest, testing will be necessary.
You can optimize the costs of Facebook advertising through segmentation.
To ensure the effectiveness of your ads, at low costs, the first step is to place your audience at the center of your strategy. This goes beyond obvious demographics such as age and gender.
Knowing the people who interact with your brand, what they like and what they want to see, helps maintain a lasting conversation with them. To group your audiences into specific segments, start by asking yourself some simple questions:
Which demographic groups are already interested in your brand?
What types of topics do they engage with most?
What are their other areas of interest?
What other brands do they like?
Which of your competitors’ pages are they following?
The answers to these questions may be varied. Identify the segments that make up your audience and customize content according to each category.
Dividing your Facebook ad campaign into several personalized micro-campaigns remains the best way to achieve a low CPA (cost per action).
The landing page is unfortunately underestimated far too often.
However, this is the page where people who click on your ads land. If you want to systematically identify what is preventing visitors from converting, a CRO audit is the most structured way to approach it.
You need to leave them with a very good impression, which requires at least:
Fast loading time for this page, especially on mobile devices.
Responsive design — that is, perfectly suited to all screen sizes (PC, mobile, tablet…).
A bounce rate that is not too high.
A conversion rate fully optimized for your landing page.
Basically, you are spending money to attract potential customers to your site — think about taking care of your visitors and guiding them toward your goal.
But moreover, a landing page also helps reduce the cost per result and optimize the performance of your advertising.
Do you think Facebook is only interested in what is happening on its platform? That is not the case.
Facebook’s algorithms take into account the entire user experience. Facebook does not want to disappoint its users.
Like all platforms on the internet, Facebook seeks to better satisfy its users. If its users are not happy, Facebook will lose members from its social network… and if it loses people, it cannot make money — and neither can you.
In short, Facebook’s priorities are: happy users, making money, and letting you do the same. Now you know the rules, so you know how to play by them.
All placements have a different cost per click and per impression. This means you can remove costly and inefficient placements to get better results.
The value of your bid will determine not only whether you can receive ad space, but also which ad spaces, which can mean the difference between success and failure.
You can see how your ad set was displayed across different placements. Facebook also shows whether the placement appeared on a desktop, in a mobile app, or on the mobile web.
If you do not know which placement to choose, you can run your campaign across all available placements for a short period. Thanks to the report breaking down results by placement, you will be able to make decisions that will help you reduce your Facebook/Instagram advertising costs.
Once you have identified the best-performing placements, concentrate your budget on them and pause or remove those that consume budget without generating results. This simple optimization can translate into a significant reduction in cost per result without needing to change any other element of your campaign. For a broader view of how to structure efficient Meta campaigns, the Meta Advantage+ algorithm guide covers the automation tools that complement these manual optimizations.
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