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Facebook Advertising Costs by CPM

Always up-to-date Facebook ad cost data from hundreds of millions of spend per month.
Data is calculated only from campaigns targeting audiences in the United States.

How much do Facebook ads cost?

Facebook ads are sold in an auction environment, which means the cost of Facebook advertising is largely determined by supply and demand.

When you set up a Facebook ad campaign, you have access to many tools and settings to help control your Facebook ad costs. You can look at the cost of Facebook ads in two ways: how much you want to spend on a campaign or by how much you want to spend per result.

You can directly control the amount you want to spend on a Facebook ad campaign, for example $5 per week or $5,000 per week, but you can’t directly control the cost of each result you get (for example a purchase, a download, or a click). Facebook has tools to help you control the cost per result to a degree, but there is no telling if you will consistently get results for your desired cost.

There are three factors that make up the cost to advertise on Facebook: the auction (supply & demand), the value Facebook users get from your ad, and estimated action rates.
cost of ads

Facebook’s goal is to increase the time their users spend on Facebook and too many bad ads in users’ news feeds will contribute to users leaving. So if you have an ad that doesn’t perform well because people don’t like it, you will have to pay more to Facebook for them to deliver it to their users. On the other hand, if you create an ad people like, you won’t have to pay as much for the ad because you’re helping make Facebook a better experience for their users. Facebook uses a number of different methods to measure user value, two of them being the ratio of negative to positive reactions to your ad and the number of users who hide or report your ad.

The other factor is the estimated action rate which is a measurement of expected advertiser value. Facebook mostly measures this based on how well your ad is achieving the objective you set for it. Typically, if an ad is performing well, it means the user likes the ad.

You can think of the parts that make up the cost of Facebook ads as a formula:
how auction works

All this processing happens under the hood. As an advertiser, all you need to do is set the budget for your campaigns and keep your focus on finding the right audiences for your product and making the best ads you can. Doing these two things well will drive the cost of your Facebook ads down.

Granted that there are unique factors that determine your Facebook ad costs, we analyzed several hundreds of millions of dollars in Facebook ad spend to see how much Facebook ad costs on average.

Use our Facebook ad cost charts above to find the average cost of Facebook ads by your campaign objective.

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Use our Facebook ad cost charts above to find the average cost of Facebook ads by your campaign objective

What does CPM mean on Facebook?

CPM stands for cost per thousand impressions. The ‘M’ in ‘CPM’ is the roman numeral for 1,000 and since no other metric is measured per thousand, it is implied CPM is for impressions only.

CPM is calculated on Facebook by dividing your spend by impressions (not reach) and then multiplying that number by 1,000.

For example, if your spend was $5 and you got 2,000 impressions for that $5, your CPM was $2.50, which means it cost $2.50 to get 1,000 impressions (($5/2000)*1000)=$2.50).

What is a good CPM for Facebook ads?

A good CPM on Facebook really is dependent on who you’re targeting and how you’re targeting them, making it impossible for us to give you a number that holds any relevance for how you run your Facebook ads.

How most advertisers determine whether their CPM is good or not is comparing an ad or ad set’s CPM to their other ads or ad sets or even to their campaign or ad account average.

However, if you want a baseline Facebook CPM target, use our Facebook ad costs charts above with the same campaign objective you typically run to get an average. You can also ask your fellow advertisers what their typical CPMs are in your niche in our Facebook community for Facebook advertisers.

Why is my Facebook CPM so high?

If you’ve noticed an increase in your Facebook ad CPMs, it could be for a wide variety of reasons including:

  • ad fatigue (10 ways to beat Facebook ad fatigue)
  • low relevance score (target a better audience with ‘scroll-stopping’ creatives)
  • restrictive placements (try automatic placements)
  • restrictive campaign objectives (if your campaign objective is website purchases, try pulling your objective a step back in the funnel, such as link clicks)
  • Facebook is having a weird day

Yes, sometimes a higher Facebook CPM is due to just a bad day on Facebook. You’re probably already familiar with the wild swings in day-to-day performance of your Facebook ad campaigns and bad days do happen. You can use automated rules or Facebook automation software to automatically pause ads, ad sets, and campaigns that see a high CPM early in the day and automatically restart again the next day.

How do I lower my Facebook CPM?

If you’ve been experiencing higher CPMs on Facebook for several days now, all you have to do is look at the reasons why your CPM might be higher and solve for them.

Here are five ways to lower your CPM.

  1. Refresh creatives more often to combat ad fatigue. Read our guide on 10 ways to beat Facebook ad fatigue for more on this.
  2. Target more relevant and broader audiences. If your targeting is too narrow, not only will your frequency rise too fast, but it’s also almost always more expensive to target a niche audience than a broad one. Plus, a broad audience may perform better for certain campaigns as Facebook’s algorithm works its magic.
  3. Choose automatic placements or select more placements. There could be lots of other advertisers bidding for the news feed placement and if you’re willing to accept other placements, you can usually get them at a lower CPM.
  4. Change your campaign objective to one higher up in your funnel. If your campaign objective is purchases, try link clicks. The Facebook algorithm might be having hard time finding the right people to show your ad to if the optimization event, such as purchases, doesn’t occur enough times in one week. Read our guide on Facebook campaign objectives for more on this.
  5. If you frequently experience days of high CPMs and low CPMs, you can use a Facebook ad automation tool like Revealbot (try 14-days free) to spend budget on days with low CPM and reduce budget on days with high CPM. This helps you automatically take advantage of good days and avoid bad days. Overtime, this strategy will reduce your CPM.
“Revealbot is my go to. Literally will save you thousands a month in wasted ad spend.”
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Tim Burd
Consultant & Co-Founder
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