Facebook Ads Audience WAY Too Expensive?

0:00hi guys it's ben heath from lead guru and in this video i'm going to give you six reasons why your facebook ads audience is too expensive i'm also going to show you how you go about fixing those issues if you're seeing really high cpm so i'm going to get into that more in a minute that's an issue and it's an issue that can often be solved that's what we're going to be covering in this video before we're going to very quickly answer hit that like button that'd be much appreciated and really help me out okay so i'm in one of our ad accounts and i've sorted these campaigns

0:29by cpm by cost per thousand impressions now that's the metric that we're basically always going to use when we're assessing how expensive an audience is to reach how much does it cost you to get a thousand views on your ads when targeting that audience okay and you can see from this column here that the cost per thousand impressions varies massively right at the top here we've got 35 almost 36 pound cpm that's really quite expensive all the way down to five pound fifty six pound thirty eight that sort of thing which is much well far far far less expensive okay and i do need to very quickly state that

1:08your cpm is going to be affected significantly by where you're advertising and what you're advertising certain industries have higher cpms certain locations the us is going to cost a lot more per cpm on a cpm basis than advertising in india for example that's just a fact nothing you could do about that so working out what a high cpm is for you is going to be somewhat relative and you're going to have to look at potentially how your campaigns are performed historically versus the new ones maybe you know other people in the industry you can compare with that sort of thing but we often see facebook advertisers coming up with cpms

1:43often in the us which is probably the most expensive market to advertise it that's 60 70 even 80 cpms and these are monstrously high in my opinion cpm's they're a problem that's a problem there are things you can do about it okay so why might your cpm be much higher than it should be first reason is because your audience is too small if your audience is too small facebook has a lot less flexibility around which who they can advertise to so you're basically forcing it you're having to bid against the advertisers and having to advertise to those people because facebook's going okay well those people are really expensive right now they

2:19can't do this right they can't go those people are really expensive right now but those over there are far less expensive let's go with those over there they can't do that because they don't have as much flexibility um it also means that you rack up multiple impressions per person you get a higher frequency number so once people start to see your ads again and again they become disinterested facebook doesn't like that they charge you more as an advertiser um in order to advertise to people multiple times than just the ones and you end up with higher cpm so the simple answer there is increase your audience size and i'll include a link in

2:51the video description below to a video all about facebook ads audience size what i recommend it's not very long strongly recommend you go through okay so that's reason number one reason number two is that there's tons of competition for whoever you're advertising to i often talk to advertisers that i'm like oh we want only one to reach really high net worth individuals and you look at their product and maybe it's a little bit on the expensive side but you think but there's a lot of people that don't have to be really high net worth individuals to afford this and might be interested or maybe they just decide to spend a

3:21large proportion of their budget on this particular thing because that's what they're really into and you know if you just try and reach the top one percent or even smaller fractions within that that audience is incredibly expensive to reach why because that audience has a lot of money it's in demand a lot of other advertisers there are other examples but that's probably the most common what can you do about it potentially try advertising to other people don't just get fixated on we only have to reach this specific small audience that we know is interested or know is right at the top end of the market there may be other people that would

3:58happily buy your products and services that don't necessarily fit into that criteria and this can often work in conjunction with the two smaller audiences test broadening things out right test advertising to other audiences the worst you'll find out is that it doesn't work which might cost you a bit of money but it's absolutely worth it because the potential upside of going oh actually we thought we only wanted to advertise to the top one percent of net worth individuals but actually if we advertise to the top 15 or 20 those people can afford our product and they're happily buying it and that's amazing because that gives us so much

4:30more audience to advertise to that gives us um a much lower cpm and um much more longevity on your facebook ad campaigns all that sort of stuff so don't get fixated necessarily on a specific audience that may have a ton and i mean a ton of competition because there are audiences that are just bombarded how can you work around that how can you target other audiences worth thinking about reason number three is seasonality okay are your cpms much higher right now because this is not the best time of year to be advertising your products or services people aren't that interested facebook is picking up on those signals

5:06and they're charging you more to reach the same amount of people this happens to a lot more businesses than people think um how do you go about addressing that i wouldn't recommend that there are times of years when well i would rarely recommend not advertising for certain times of the year but what we will often do once we've established that there is a high degree of seasonality within an industry is we might spend significantly less during certain parts of the year like if you know that people aren't as interested in your business through the winter months perhaps you drop your budgets down to 15 20 25 of what they usually are for

5:40those months keep things ticking along keep those warm audiences and being advertised and things like that and then you take that budget that you've saved during the three four winter months let's say and you absolutely smash it out the park in the summer by spending a lot more and loading budget into months where you know your results are likely to be much better you will see this in your cpm data obviously you'll see it in your cost per conversion things like that but if you're thinking why did our audience get expensive all of a sudden you go yeah well we're selling something that there's more demand through the summer

6:11months than there is in the winter months and and maybe that's what yes that can be why it's not just going to affect your cost per conversion it'll also affect your cpm by weighting budget more towards the better times of the year you'll have much better cost per version you will also find that when you average it out over the year your audience is cheaper to advertise to even though this is the exact same people one of the nuances of how facebook advertising works reason number four for overly high cpms an aggressively expensive facebook ads audience is are you restricting where you're putting your ads too much one of

6:45the classic cases here is just advertising on instagram now new data has come out recently that is might be quite shocking to some people for those of us that live and breathe this it's it's it's not but instagram is now more expensive than facebook to advertise on for the cpm number that we've been talking about in this whole video to get a thousand impressions on say instagram feed it's gonna cost you a good chunk more 30 maybe 35 percent more than it is on facebook so are you just advertising on instagram because you think that's where your audience is or just advertising on say instagram stories

7:16because you think that's the best placement try opening it out try opening up other locations particularly adding facebook back into the mix if you've previously written it off that might really help reduce your cpms make your facebook ads audience much less expensive and give you better results reason number five is that much in the same way that you don't want to necessarily get fixated advertising to a small group of people from a targeting standpoint you also don't want to get fixated on just advertising in certain locations i've talked to a lot of advertisers they're like oh we know that our um best customers come from cities like la

7:51or new york yeah okay i understand that but those are the most expensive places to advertise to in the world and facebook is sophisticated enough to work out that someone living in um you know rural wisconsin might be really interested in the product that you offer and advertising to that person is going to cost you a fraction of what it costs for you to advertise to someone in la um and that might be a much better result for your business so if you haven't already tested it and you're seeing really high cpm's really expensive facebook ads audiences definitely try opening in other geographical locations particularly ones

8:28that aren't big cities or less expensive states there are far less expensive states than for example california and new york um in the u.s you can even have it expand to other countries we've worked with this on lots of clients where they're only advertising in say the us canada uk australia and we go well you know we could advertise to other european countries maybe other asian countries are still going to be demand for your products but they're going to sell a lot better now this will only work for certain businesses because i'm not saying you should advertise out of where you can deliver your product or

8:58service that might be a real local area in which case that's fine but something to keep in mind and last but not least reason number six is that your ads are boring facebook really care about the user experience on facebook and instagram if your ads are boring if they're not engaging facebook punishes advertisers with higher cpms they're like yeah you can advertise that but our audience doesn't like it we don't want them to be bored or annoyed by your ads on the platform therefore you can advertise but we're going to charge you more for it conversely if your ads are really engaging the creative is grabbing people

9:34there's lots of people watching it you get rewarded as an advertiser with lower cpms facebook's going okay well look we know you're running an ad but we can see that people love this we really want to put things in front of people that in front of our users that people love that's fantastic this is super i'm super happy about this let's go ahead and reward you with lower cpms so people think that cpms and expensive facebook ads audiences is all about the audience itself and often it is about the audience but it can also be about the ads those engagement signals are really really important so if perhaps you've

10:08been going through the other reasons and you've gone like no i'm advertising to broad audiences i'm doing this i'm doing that i've done all things recommended what's going on well it could well be your ads are they just boring no one cares no one wants to look at them not no one that's probably too harsh but you know what um you know what i mean they're not engaging enough focus on that more dynamic creative slideshows videos get people's attention that could help reduce your cpm reduce your um the cost of advertising to the same people the same facebook ads audience and help you improve your results

10:44okay so before you go something i'll quickly mention and that's our facebook and instagram advertising services so my company lead guru is a specialist facebook and instagram as agency we create manage and optimize facebook instagram campaigns for our clients if you have a budget of 3k per month or more and you're interested in finding out more about our service what you should do is book a free call with one of my team members there's a link in the video description below no obligation call you can find out more about us we can find out more about you see if we'd be a good fit and hopefully we get a

11:10chance to uh to work together and thanks for watching guys please hit that thumbs up button uh comment below to let me know if you've got questions comment below with feedback was this useful et cetera et cetera and i'll talk to you soon