Instagram CPE means cost per engagement, which compares the cost to the total amount of engagements on a Instagram post that include:
Most advertisers don’t look at CPE as a primary metric to measure performance, but more as an indicator of how well the audience is responding to an ad.
An ad with high engagement could also prove useful as a display of social proof. In fact, some advertisers will run ads with the engagement campaign objective to amass likes and comments as a way to hack social proof with Facebook ads.
Cost per engagement is calculated for Instagram ads by dividing your spend by the number of engagements. For example, if your spend was $100 and you got 125 engagements, your cost per engagement was $0.80 ($100/125=$0.80).
A good cost per engagement on Instagram is always going to be different from one advertiser to another and from one campaign to another. Different types of campaigns and audiences will have very different levels of engagement, for example content ads to a top-of-funnel audience will most likely have more engagement than a bottom-of-funnel sales offer campaign.
To know if your cost per engagement on Instagram is good or not with your new ad, ad set, or campaign, you should compare it to the best CPE you’ve gotten for similar audiences and similar campaign objectives. You will always have lower CPEs when running ads in engagement campaigns because Instagram prioritizes delivering your ads to users who are most likely to engage.
You can also use the chart above to see what the average Instagram cost per engagement is and compare it to yours, or you can join our Facebook community where you can ask folks in your same industry what their CPE is to get a baseline and tips on how to reduce your cost per engagement.
A high cost per engagement on Facebook can be a result of several things, including:
The only time you should really be worried about your cost per engagement is if you’re running campaigns specifically for getting engagement as a way to improve brand awareness or wanting engagement on an ad to reuse in a more conversion-focused campaign.
Most advertisers are better off measuring performance of their campaigns by:
If for example you’re running campaigns with the conversions objective and optimizing for the purchases event, your cost per purchase is the best indicator of whether or not your campaign is performing well, even if it has low engagement.
However, ads with low engagement could potentially decrease your relevance score, hurt your deliverability, and increase your CPMs.
If you’re running campaigns for the purpose of getting engagements and your Instagram cost per engagement is too high, you can do the following four things to lower it:
Remember, if you’re not running campaigns for the sole purpose of engagement, you probably shouldn’t worry too much about your CPE because it is not a primary metric to judge the performance of your Instagram ad campaigns.
