7 Secrets to Optimizing Facebook Ads CPA
Boris Mustapic
|Marketing | June 25, 2020
If you’re using cost cap bidding for your Facebook ad campaigns, you are probably looking for ways to lower your cost-per-action (CPA) and get a better return on your ad spend.
If that’s the case, you’re in the right place.
We have gathered seven strategies you can use to optimize the CPA of your Facebook ads.
Keep on reading to learn all about them.
1. Adjust Targeting
The first step to optimizing your CPA on Facebook involves adjusting your targeting in order to narrow down your target audience.
By doing this, you will be able to create hyper-specific ads that speak to your target audience and address their pain points. This will help to boost your ads’ relevance score, which, in turn, will result in reducing your overall CPA.
Targeting a more specific audience will also reduce the number of advertisers you compete with for Facebook’s ad space, allowing you to reduce advertising costs even further.
2. Increase ad CTR
Another way to reduce the CPA on your Facebook ads is to increase your ads’ click-through rate (CTR). While adjusting your targeting will certainly boost CTR, there are other ways you can improve it as well.
Start by making sure you are using an appropriate call-to-action (CTA) that corresponds with what you want users to do after seeing your ad (e.g., make a purchase or sign up to your email list).
You will also want to try improving your ad copy and experimenting with different ad placements to see if you can get a better CTR on your ads
3. Optimize your ad schedule
If you’ve been running Facebook ads for a while, you’ve probably noticed that your ads performed better during certain times of the day or on particular days of the week.
You can take advantage of this information by creating a custom ad schedule that’s designed to display your ads during hours or days when it’s the most profitable to advertise to your audience.
This will lower your CPA by preventing you from spending your ad budget during times when it’s less profitable to do so.
You can find out the best times for displaying your ads by reviewing your past ad performance. Simply go to your Facebook Ads Manager, select a campaign or ad and then go to Breakdown > By Time and select either Day, Week, 2 Weeks, or Month.
4. Use videos
Facebook users love videos. In fact, they love them so much that they watch almost 3 billion hours of video on the platform every single day.
Video content generates superior engagement rates on Facebook compared to static content such as image and link posts. Additionally, consumers who have watched a brand’s videos are more likely to make a purchase compared to those who haven’t.
As an advertiser, you can take advantage of this by using videos in your ads and lowering your CPA through increased engagement and CTR.
Since a lot of people watch Facebook videos with the sound off, focus on creating videos that can be understood without sound or add captions to all the videos you create.
Additionally, try to keep your videos short in order to improve engagement. In most cases, it’s best to keep your video under 30 seconds in length.
5. Improve your landing page
It might not be the first thing that comes to mind, but your landing page might be responsible for the high CPA you’ve been experiencing with your Facebook ads.
You might have the perfect targeting and ads, but visitors might still not be converting once they end up on your landing page.
If you’re not getting a satisfactory conversion rate on your landing page, you’ll need to look into different ways of improving it.
Start by reworking the page copy. Use a headline that addresses your target audience’s pain points and make sure to outline your value proposition and your product or service’s benefits within the main page copy.
Your landing page copy should also be easy to read. Opt for short paragraphs and use plenty of white space.
You should also consider using directional cues (such as arrows) on your landing page to point visitors towards your CTA.
Finally, remember to optimize your landing page for mobile devices to ensure a great browsing experience for all visitors.
6. Split-test your ads
While you are probably doing this already, it’s worth reiterating: if you want to lower your CPA, you need to be split-testing your ads.
Split testing (also known as A/B testing) involves testing out different versions of your ad to learn which one performs the best.
When performing a split test, you’ll want to test a single element of your ad (e.g., the creative) while keeping all the other elements the same. This will allow you to understand which particular change resulted in your ad performing better (or worse).
Facebook gives you an easy way to start split-testing your ads. All you need to do is toggle on the Split Test feature when creating an ad campaign and then choose the variable you’d like to test.
Currently, Facebook gives you the option of split-testing creatives, audiences, types of delivery optimization, placements, and product sets.
7. Prevent ad fraud
Ad fraud is one of the biggest problems in the advertising industry.
The University of Baltimore has estimated that advertisers lose around $23.7 billion due to invalid clicks on paid search and paid social campaigns.
You can prevent fraudulent ad clicks and lower your CPA by using CHEQ. It is the only click fraud prevention solution that can be used on Facebook campaigns (also deployed by marketers on every other paid search and paid social platform, including Google Ads, Instagram Ads, Yahoo, Bing, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter). This protects your campaign against bots clicking on your ads – Facebook itself says that 5% of its accounts are bots. CHEQ also prevents you from doing double damage – further retargeting to bots when you use Facebook’s look-alike audiences, bringing further wastage of ad spend.
CHEQ is a multiple award-winning click fraud protection software solution that uses advanced cybersecurity machine learning to block fraudulent clicks and protect your ad campaigns from fraud.
Optimize your Facebook ads CPA and get a better return on your ad spend
If you got this far, you probably know more than enough to start optimizing the CPA of your Facebook ads.
Start by adjusting your targeting and making sure you’re trying to reach a highly-specific audience. Look for ways to improve your ads’ click-through rates, such as by using videos in your ads.
Identify the best times of the day or week to run your ads, and then create a custom schedule to ensure your ads are displayed when it’s most profitable to do so. Take advantage of retargeting to reach people who are most likely to buy from you.
Make sure to improve your landing page and split-test your ads continuously. Finally, make sure you are reaching only humans, not invalid users.
That’s it. Now, go out there and optimize your CPA so that you can get a better return on your ad spend.
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