If you’re reading this message, it means your business is still standing in 2024! Congratulations.
Now, we all know it takes money to make money, and most people know that Facebook advertising is still one of the most cost-effective ways to build your brand awareness and get new customers to buy your products or services.
But what should you spend on Facebook advertising? How much does a Facebook advert cost? What is the cost of advertising on Facebook?
Sit back, grab a cuppa, and keep reading. I’ll break down how much Facebook ads cost in 2024 so you have a better idea of how to budget your ad spend across your sales funnel, AND I’ll go over how to decrease your overall costs as well.
How does the Facebook ad auction work?
This one may hurt a little, like when you found out they added letters to math.
Before we begin going through the different Facebook advertising costs, we need to understand how they’re calculated in the first place… There are a few factors, but the Facebook ad auction forms the bulk of this.
When you click the publish button on your campaign, Facebook pits your ads against other advertisers who are bidding on that same audience—just like an auction house. The person who has the highest bid (amongst other factors) wins the auction and has their ad displayed to the target audience.
Your bid relates to the specific action you chose to bid on, which can be either:
- CPM Bidding - Bid per 1,000 impressions
- CPC bidding - Bid per click
- Conversion bidding - Bid per specific conversion
We have an entire article dedicated to understanding how the bidding process works and how you can guarantee your ads will win the auction here for those who want a deep dive into the topic.
How much do Facebook ads cost?
“How much is a Facebook ad?”
Everyone wants to know what their Facebook ad costs will be so that they can budget accordingly. It’s not a simple answer, as these costs depend on many variables. So, this is why we look at benchmarks.
In addition, these costs vary wildly across industries, so it’s important to note where you fall in the picture so you can better anticipate the cost of your conversions.
Similarly, every advertiser has a preferred metric or KPI, and Facebook packages and presents them for you with their costs once the auction has taken place. So, how much do Facebook ads cost?
I’ve scoured the web to round up the main cost metrics for advertising on Facebook:
Facebook ads cost per click (CPC)
Cost per click is calculated every time someone clicks on your ad, like clicking the call-to-action button or visiting the destination URL of your ad. On Facebook, the average CPC across industries is $1.68.
Facebook ads cost per 1000 impressions (CPM)
Your impressions are the number of times your ad was shown to a Facebook user account (note that these aren’t unique accounts, meaning the same account might see your ad multiple times). Facebook charges you by the thousand (cost per mille). The average cost per thousand impressions across all industries is $8.70 from sample data from ad accounts targeting the United States. This is a foundational cost from which all other Facebook costs are calculated.
According to Databox, the average Facebook CPM by industry in 2023 was $5.61.
Facebook ads cost per action (CPA)
First of all, remember that cost per action is a concept, not an actual metric. It’s the collective term for the average cost of all actions you can achieve in your Facebook ads.
Wordstream says the average cost per action across all industries on Facebook Ads is $19.68.
Facebook ads cost per lead (CPL)
According to Databox, the average cost per lead is between $5 and $7, while Revealbot shows an average cost per lead of $8.01 in March 2024. It’s best to zoom in on your industry benchmark for an accurate average that’s relevant to you.
Facebook ads cost per like
The average cost per like is between $0.00-$0.25 (62% of businesses don’t pay more than $1.00 per like.)
Facebook ads cost per download
The average cost per download is between $0.00-$5.00 (for 72% of businesses). Then, 2% of companies spend more than $10.00 per download. Remember, this cost varies greatly depending on industry, budget, ad quality, time of year, and other factors.
The easiest way to keep track of all your costs and analytics data is with a rock-solid reporting system like Madgicx’s One-Click Report.
It’s simply the best tool to monitor your Facebook ad costs and all metrics from all your ad channels in a live dashboard. You can adjust the date range of the real-time analytics you want to view.
And, because One-Click Report connects to Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, Shopify, GA4, and TikTok, you have all your ad data in one place… Madgicx ✨Try it for yourself.
What determines your Facebook ad costs, and how to reduce them
With the cost of ads on Facebook being fluid, you should ensure you know what your breakeven ROAS is to ensure you remain profitable. You should also prioritize reducing your costs wherever you can so you can pull in more revenue.
Target audience
Usually, the more specific your target audience is, the more expensive it is. The broader you make your audience, the cheaper it becomes. It’s all about relevance.
If you have a mix of broad audiences (like main category interests, behaviors, and demographics) in your acquisition stage and narrower audience pools (like existing customers, web visitors, or abandoned carts), you’ll notice the cost varies greatly.
Only by analyzing your audience and its segments' performance will you be able to tell which audiences bring in the most profit. You should test different audience sizes to see which ones work better for you, as all businesses are different.
Targeting Insights is an excellent tool to help you understand your audience data better. You can see how your audience segments and sizes perform.
The most expensive is the smallest audience, which is likely to be the retargeting audience, and the least expensive is the 10k-100k audience size. Surprisingly, the 10K-100K audiences are cheaper than larger acquisition audiences (500K-2M, 10M+), which shows that size isn’t the only factor you should consider.
Note: It’s crucial to target your entire sales funnel (acquisition, retargeting, and retention). Yes, results will usually be better lower down the funnel, but acquisition is crucial for growing your customer base.
That’s why you should test different kinds of audiences, especially for acquisition (lookalikes, interests, broad targeting). You can use the Audience Launcher to create and test new audiences in a few clicks and ensure you cover the entire funnel. Madgicx also has a dedicated tool for interest discovery - the Audience Studio.
Placement
There are a ton of different placements across Meta’s social media platforms and networks (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network), all of which are different sizes. In addition, each of these placements has a different average cost, which fluctuates.
In February 2024, the most expensive placement is a ‘Rewarded video’ at just under $20 per 1000 impressions, with the cheapest being the ‘Right-hand column’ and ‘Messenger inbox’ for just a dollar or two. Note the difference between Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories (Facebook is twice as expensive!).
Even knowing the ballpark of the average cost of Facebook placements can help you plan your ads and budget. Then, you can see which placements bring in better results and easily turn off the ones that don’t perform as well and aren’t worth it.
By watching your average spend on placements, you can make sure that the ad placements that you choose (and the ones you double-check if you’re using Advantage+ to make these decisions for you) are working for you and not against you.
Location
You may be thinking that by advertising on Facebook, you now have access to the world at large, so you should target everyone on the planet. Please don’t do that.
Firstly, you should know that costs vary from country to country too! As you can see, the average Facebook CPM cost in 2024 in the United States is over the $20 mark, whereas in Japan, it’s around $7.
Considering where your most profitable target markets are, as well as their location average costs, is key to lowering the cost of your Facebook advertising.
You should test different locations and analyze the data to find locations that have the sweet spot of great results and a cheaper cost and target those. Make sure to turn off ads targeting poor-performing locations.
It’s important to remember that not all products suit all areas; think of someone living in New York City versus Miami - their wants and needs might be different.
Hint: Use Madgicx if you’re lazy about doing research and prefer your data served freshly squeezed.
Bidding strategy
Your bid strategy tells Facebook how to bid for you in ad auctions. Meta offers three options:
Spend-based
- Highest volume - focuses your spend to show your ad to people on placements that would drive as many conversions as possible, regardless of the purchase value
- Highest value - focus your ad spend on the likelihood of high-value conversions
Goal-based
- Cost per result - aims to charge the same amount per result regardless of the type of result to maintain average profitability
- ROAS goal (return on ad spend) - focuses on maintaining the return on your ad spend as the priority
Manual bidding
- Bid cap - strictly keeps the maximum amount spent across auctions to prevent Facebook’s algorithm from doing it dynamically based on cost or value
Madgicx’s Auction Insights shows you how each bidding strategy performs on your ad account in the ‘Automatic Bid vs Manual Bid’ widget so you can easily see which is best for you.
Every business is different, and the best thing is to test bid strategies until you find one that works well.
Ad format
Whether your ad is a video, an image, or a carousel is one thing, but the different versions of each format are another.
By checking your analytics, you will be able to tell which ad formats perform better than others and which variations of each format have better results.
For example, you may find that short videos outperform long ones, and longer ad copy has a higher ROAS. However, you won’t know this unless you test all formats. Only then will you know what to improve.
In this account, no short videos have been tested, so we can’t say for sure how they would fare against the image or medium-length video. We should test this and analyze the results.
While there is no definitive link to some ad formats costing more, if you monitor this yourself on your account, you can easily tell which ad formats generate more purchases than others. You’ll curb your costs once you pause a dud ad and refocus the budget into a scaleable one.
This makes a difference to your bottom line.
Our Creative Insights tool helps you identify high-performing ad formats and spot missing ones you should test. Try Madgicx free for 7 days to analyze your ad formats.
Campaign objective
Considering the dynamic nature of how Facebook determines its ad costs, it stands to reason that the campaign objective you set on creation is a significant factor. Not all campaign objectives are the same, as they each add a different kind of value to your business. A purchase is worth a lot more than a simple impression or even a click.
As you can see, the costs fluctuate throughout the year.
Lead generation campaigns can be costly, so my advice to you is to diversify the types of campaign objectives you choose for your ads. As long as the objectives are aligned with your goals, you may uncover a more cost-effective objective that brings in better results.
Make use of Madgicx’s analytics tools found in the 360° Meta Audit, where you can see your performance across different campaign objectives under Auction Insights.
Ad relevance diagnostics
Advertising on Meta is all about relevance. How relevant your ad is to the audience you’re targeting is key to its success. The more relevant your ad, the cheaper it is.
Meta’s ad relevance diagnostics used to be called ad relevance score and is a tool used to diagnose underperforming ads. The ultimate goal of this tool is to improve low rankings - to take ads from below-average to average performance, not average to above-average. It should be used when one of your ads has a poor ranking, not when your ad has an average ranking.
The three areas it looks at are:
- Quality ranking - your ad’s perceived quality against ads competing for the same audience
- Engagement ranking - the expected engagement rate compared to ads competing for the same audience
- Conversion rate ranking - your expected conversion rate against ads with the same optimization goal competing for the same audience
When working with this tool, you can understand whether making adjustments to your creative, your audience targeting, or your landing page experience can improve performance.
In addition, working to improve your customer feedback score and overall account status positively impacts your relevance in Meta’s eyes. In fact, your go-to strategy, in the simplest of terms, should be to create compelling ad creatives, improve the customer journey, and follow up with excellent customer service.
Season or time of year
People’s spending habits change throughout the year, so it stands to reason that there will be more demand for certain interests at Christmas when people are in a buying mood than in January when they’re being frugal and sticking to their New Year’s resolutions.
Think about Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Halloween, or Black Friday to see how seasonal events can sway the cost of your Facebook ads as the bids become more competitive (see the CPM charts above).
Time of day
Certain ads perform better - or worse - at different times of the day. Once you know which times are more profitable, you can schedule your ads to run only at those times, thereby saving ad spend that would usually be spent on the less lucrative hours of the day.
You can find this information in Auction Insights in the 360° Meta Audit menu in the Madgicx app.
Industry
While your industry contributes greatly to your Facebook costs, there isn’t much you can do about it. Unfortunately, changing industry isn’t something businesses do, so it’s best to weigh up your options and spot the ad trends of brands in your niche.
Scroll up again, and you can see the average Facebook CPM by industry.
Use Madgicx’s Ad Library to browse ads by category and industry so you can see what’s out there and tap into some creative inspiration.
Already have these in place? Just add Madgicx to blow the lid off your ROAS. Try it free for 7 days.
Conclusion: Is it worth paying for ads on Facebook?
Hell, yeah.
Compared to other advertising platforms, Facebook is still one of the cheapest ways to reach your target audience. It’s easier than ever to find people who are just itching to find you and your unique offering with over 3.05bn monthly active users.
In 2024, the average CPC on social media platforms varies between a high of $5.26 for LinkedIn and a low of X (formerly Twitter) at $0.38. Facebook comes in at the second cheapest average Facebook CPC at $0.97.
When using tools like Madgicx to easily optimize your Facebook ad campaigns and further reduce your ad costs, increase ROI, and save time creating new ads, advertising on Facebook is a no-brainer.
TL;DR
Here are the best Madgicx tools to use to lower your Facebook ad costs in 2024:
1. The Creative Workflow - streamline your ad creation process from start to finish
- Ad Library - browse for inspiration
- Sparkle - have your ad designed in 48 hours
- Creative Insights - identify scaleable creatives
2. The Audience Studio - discover, create, and test high-performing audiences
3. 360° Meta Audit -to analyze account performance
Sign up for a free 7 day trial and see what all the fuss is about.
