Facebook Advertising Cost Benchmarks

John Ross - CEO of Test Prep Insight

Having an advertising cost benchmark allows me to more effectively gauge the efficacy of ad campaigns, and ultimately decide whether to double down on it, or reign in our ad spend. Data is useless in a vacuum. You need benchmarks to compare it to in order to make sense of the data and put things in perspective. In the context of Facebook ads, having benchmark metrics around cost can increase the cost effectiveness of a campaign and aid in the decision making process of whether to continue or cut ad spend. 

Rex Freiberger - CEO of Gadget Review

A data benchmark is incredibly helpful, though it changes depending on the industry and the volatility of the market. If a more stable benchmark can be provided for Facebook advertising, advertisers can make smarter decisions about their campaigns.

For example, let's say one of your campaigns has a CTR of 13%. In my experience, this is roughly average, but it varies greatly from industry to industry. And if you take into account the timing and how much certain keywords are selling for, that creates even more wildcards. Having a benchmark to shoot for allows you to look at your campaigns objectively and decide what is and isn't working.

Josh Jurrens - Caliper Marketing

For clients who are already advertising on Facebook we typically use their historical data as an initial benchmark measurement with the understanding that there are optimizations and adjustments we can make to improve upon these results.

For new clients, we typically look at our own internal data first and supplement this with industry benchmarks. The problem is that no two companies are the same - their target audience, geographic targeting, ad creative, messaging, products, and websites are all different. It's helpful to look at benchmarks but it's by no means a prescription for what to expect.

The most helpful benchmarks for our agency and our clients have come when there is an industry aggregate. Costs for telecom and e-commerce businesses can be extremely volatile. Industry benchmarks help us understand overall trends so that, for example, if our costs are rising we can look to the industry data to understand if this is an overall trend or if our campaigns are impacted by something unique that we need to look into.

The issue we run into is that most benchmarks are old, outdated, and more recent data is always needed. What was happening on Facebook six months ago doesn't help us today.

Ravi Parikh - CEO of RoverPass.

Facebook benchmark advertising is a great way to reach customers that you want, without going over budget. This is incredibly helpful when you are trying to really control spending.

Dan Bailey - President of WikiLawn

Our costs fluctuate so much on a week-to-week basis that it's hard for us to determine which campaigns are successful and why. With dedicated cost benchmarks, we would be able to make more educated decisions instead of taking a shot in the dark that we aren't overpaying for our results.

Benchmarks that related to our industry--or a related one, at the very least--would be very helpful for us.. I feel they'd greatly reduce the amount of money we waste trying to nail down exactly what elements of our ad copy are working.

Jon Dykstra - Owner of Fat Stacks

Knowing average CPC's for your industry is a great way to be able to look at your own Facebook cost data and determine if your targeting, ad quality and costs are on target, better than average, or much too high. Having this benchmark data is something that makes advertising on any platform, including Facebook, much easier, because you have another data point that tells you if your ads are doing well or not.

YY Lee - Founder of Zoewebs Sdn Bhd

when you get the data benchmark, what direct help does it have for your advertising?

Answer: It helps me to better understand the performance and where should I do improvement. My interpretation for each benchmark as below:

CPC: How much I pay for a visitor to visit my site. If I'm paying high (few visitor click), then I have to review my audience, maybe target audience is not accurate

CPM: How much I pay for branding awareness. If I get less view, the target market could be very competitive

CTR: How good is my ad copy to attract visitor. If CTR is low, then I have to review my ad copy, maybe it's not attractive

CPA: Overall return on investment, from here I can justify whether it's a good channel to do marketing. Shall I adjust my campaign or change marketing channel

Avinash Chandra - Founder and CEO of BrandLoom

“Facebook advertising cost benchmark open opportunities for advertisers to improve their ad campaigns. Through these benchmarks, the advertisers will know the ranking of their ad which will indicate how much improvement their ad campaign needs.”

Milosz Krasinski - Managing Director of Chillifruit

The first thing to understand is that Facebook recognises 18 separate industries when it comes to advertising benchmarks and, so, working within your industry is super important. For example legal advertisers may have low click through rates but high CTRs, whereas, the highest CTR tends to be in the retail sector. If you’re going to commit to Facebook advertising, you really need to take the time to find out as much as you possibly can regarding how it works and how you can make it to work for you.

Jack Zmudzinski - Senior Associate of Future-Processing

First things, you need to figure out if Facebook is actually the right platform for your requirements. Often, other platforms such as LinkedIn or Instagram will be more effective, depending on your industry. Once you’ve decided to commit to Facebook, you need to examine CPM - as a rule of thumb, a good CPM for telecommunications may be $1.39 whereas a decent CPM for the entertainment industry would be closer to $1.00. Always always do your research and make sure you know all the facts as, otherwise, you’re just throwing your money away.

Sarah Walters - Marketing Manager of The Whit Group

It provides insights in order to take action to improve upon past efforts.From our experience, it helps us facilitate a strategic decision based on insights from competitors in order to achieve business goals.

For example, if a certain SEO Marketing strategy hasn't given me the results I expected, I need to look into the data to see what's not working and tweak the process to make it more effective.

Ryan Salomon - CEO of Kissmetrics

The Facebook advertising benchmark creates opportunities for small businesses to fully grasp their customers and target audience. This process makes it so that all analytical matters of a company can be compared to each other and other companies numbers as well. This creates a big picture to what the company is achieving rather than looking at small scale numbers that do not generate a major understanding of what is getting done on the marketing side.

Jonathan Snow - COO and Co-Founder of The Snow Agency

The advertising benchmark is the pinnacle of what every business should strive for when working on mastering their marketing tactics. The benchmark itself can be summarized as comparing all businesses metrics together to help improve performance. This means comparing competitor marketing strategies, marketing campaigns and any other form of analytics that drives engagement on all of your platforms. Once you compare and understand all of these components, understanding what interests your target demographic will be far more easy. Companies tend to make the mistake of focussing on only one aspect and neglecting others, this is where problems occur. Compare them all together to get a wider scope of your business.

Reuben Yonatan - CEO of GetVoIP

Data benchmark allows you to identify areas where the difference between your average and the industry's average is too large. For example, if the Facebook CTR benchmark for the tech industry is 1.04% but your average is 0..3%, it means your ads are underperforming and you need to change your advertising strategy.

Deepak Shukla - Founder of SERPWizz

“When you get the data benchmark, what direct help does it have for your advertising?”

Your data benchmark lets you know if your ad is producing a positive return on ad spend. Think about what a positive return means for your business and clarify the goals of your ad. What do you want your ad to do? A benchmark gives you a point of reference from which you can then improve. Think of your data benchmark like training for a 10k run, maybe you can run 5k at the moment - this is your current benchmark. You then start making tweaks to your training programme until you can run 10k, your new benchmark. With your ad, use your data benchmark to make tweaks until you meet your goal.