What Facebook Ads Cost in November 2024

As the world’s largest social media platform, Facebook provides unparalleled access to new prospects. It also attracts competition as similar businesses target the same users.

The more demand for a Facebook audience, the more ad costs increase—and the harder it becomes to make money on Facebook. So, how much should you spend to beat the competition and reach your target customers?

Below, find figures on how much the average business budgets for Facebook ads, as of November 2024, plus tips to reduce the cost of ad campaigns—without sacrificing results.

How much do Facebook ads cost?

Facebook bills advertisers based on two metrics: cost per click (CPC) and cost per mille (CPM), otherwise known as cost per 1,000 impressions.

• Facebook ads cost approximately 70¢ per click.
• Facebook ads cost approximately $13.75 per 1,000 impressions.

Average Facebook ad cost: CPC

The average CPC for Facebook ads in November 2024 was 72¢. That makes it cheaper, on average, to run an ad on Facebook than on Instagram or Google Ads.

Seasonality and competition play major roles in the cost of winning a Facebook ad auction. While the site’s average CPC is a helpful guide, consider factors such as your campaign’s timing, type, and objectives for a more accurate estimate.

Average Facebook ad cost: CPM

The average CPM for Facebook ads in November 2024 was $13.75.

Many online stores use Facebook to build brand awareness amongst its three billion monthly active users. If reach and awareness are your goals, focus on the cost of impressions, known as cost per mille, or the cost of being seen by 1,000 Facebook users.

Average Facebook ads cost: CPL

While advertisers pay for ads based on CPC and CPM, other metrics such as cost per lead (CPL) can help you understand the wider value of your Facebook ad campaigns. The average CPL for Facebook ads in November 2024 was $6.49.

Many brands use Facebook to generate email leads or potential customers who agree to receive newsletters, promotions, and other communications via email.

Unlike fleeting ad impressions, email subscribers are a more stable and potentially profitable audience. Building an email list through Facebook ads offers the benefit of ongoing contact with your audience without needing to pay ad costs.

Meta has a variety of tools to help you refine your Facebook audience targeting. You can use demographic data to narrow down your audience or expand to lookalike audiences based on your existing customers.

By focusing on the people most likely to subscribe, you might increase your ads’ conversion rate and lower your CPL. With a lower cost per lead, you can build an ongoing relationship with your customer base for less ongoing investment.

8 factors affecting Facebook advertising cost

The price of a Facebook ad isn’t random. A combination of factors affects the ultimate cost per click or impression of every ad you run:

1. Bidding strategy

Your chosen ad strategy influences your Facebook ad pricing. You can opt to pay based on an ad’s budget or goal:

• Spend-based biddingstrategy. This tells Facebook to maximize results within a set budget, either by finding the lowest average cost per conversion or by targeting a smaller number of high-value conversions.
• Goal-based bidding strategy. This tells Facebook to pursue a target conversion rate and allocate ad spend accordingly. Overall spending can still be capped or set within a predefined range.

You can also forgo Facebook’s dynamic ad bidding algorithms and make specific manual ad bids.

If you’re concerned about overspending on Facebook ads, you can set a bid cap for your campaigns. If you can calculate a customer’s value, a bid cap stops you from spending more than your customers are worth.

2. Ad quality and relevance

The relevance of your ads to your audience will impact how much you pay. Meta prioritizes ads that are relevant to its users, leading to a better browsing experience. Relevant ads tend to perform better, making them more cost-effective.

Meta’s ad relevance diagnostics tool can show you whether your ads are relevant to the audience you’re trying to reach. The tool assesses your ad’s historic ranking in ad auctions over three categories:

• Quality. Meta judges ad quality through a combination of user behavior data (whether they choose to hide the ad, for example) and elements of the ad’s content (such as sensationalist language or clickbait).
• Engagement. This refers to how often your ad is clicked, commented on, shared, or expanded compared to competing ads.
• Conversion. The likelihood that a user who viewed your ad will complete your goal.

Use diagnostics to understand more about your underperforming ads. Is it your creative assets, the post-click experience, or audience targeting that needs work?

3. Audience

The audience you target can significantly influence your Facebook ad costs. Factors like age, location, and interests can drive costs up or down. For instance, targeting a densely populated city or a highly sought-after demographic might cost more.

There are two general approaches to creating audiences:

• Specific or custom audiences. These use inputted data to target people who already know about your business, or who are likely to be interested.
• Broad audiences. These refer to users identified by Facebook and may include a wider variety of prospects.

Remember, targeting a narrower audience might cost more per click, but if it leads to a higher conversion rate, it could offer better value. Whoever your initial audience is, Meta will learn who is engaging most with your ad over time and refine your audience to reach more of the right people.

4. Ad format and placement

Ad placement refers to where your ads are displayed on Facebook and within Meta’s ecosystem—including ads on Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. You’ll pay different amounts depending on whether your ad appears in the news feed or the right column.

Available ad placements depend on your Facebook ad campaign objectives. For instance, awareness or website traffic campaigns can be formatted in various sizes, such as a single image or video, a carousel, or a collection ads on Facebook, Marketplace, and Instagram.

Facebook recommends running ads on Instagram and Facebook to reduce the average cost per result of your ad. You can let Facebook optimize your ad placements or manually choose where you want your ads to run.

5. Ad frequency

Facebook wants to keep the user experience fresh and exciting. People who see the same ad repeatedly—particularly those who see but don’t engage with the ad—don’t get that kind of experience. 

“When your ad has been running for some time, it will be seen by the same people repeatedly,” says Tim Clarke, the senior reputation manager at the marketing agency Thrive. “Therefore, you will notice that your advertising costs will be lowered if your frequency is as close to one as possible.”

Implement a frequency cap inside Ads Manager to prevent ad fatigue. This upper limit means your ad stops displaying to the same audience once they’ve already seen it a specified number of times, reducing ad costs.

6. Ad duration

It takes a while for Facebook’s algorithm to contextualize your campaigns, especially if you’re running your first ad. This learning phase gives Meta time to test and identify best-performing placements, audiences, and bidding strategies.

It takes around 50 optimization events in the week after your campaign’s last significant edit for a campaign to come out of the learning phase. Avoid edits where possible, and instead create a new ad set if you need to make major changes.

Indefinite campaigns can also put you at risk of ad fatigue and seasonal cost variations. For example, running an ad during a high-competition period (like the Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend) may increase overall campaign costs as you face more competition for impressions during the peak sales period. 

7. Time of year

Facebook advertising costs can increase during certain times of the year. The price of a Facebook ad historically skyrockets in the latter months of the year. Black Friday and holiday shoppers draw more advertisers to the platform, increasing the number of competitors in ad auctions.

8. Performance goal

Your ad costs will vary based on your chosen performance goal, which is the desired outcome that Facebook will bid on for you in the ad auction. Whether you aim to increase brand awareness, get app installs, or drive website traffic, each goal comes with its own cost.

You can select from a long list of performance goals, including maximizing:

• Ad reach
• Impressions
• Landing page views
• Link clicks
• two-second continuous video views
• Leads

The available performance goals depend on your wider advertising campaign objective.

Some optimization events cost more than others. For instance, a conversion may cost more than a landing page view. When setting your ad budget and bid strategy, consider the cost of your chosen optimization event and make sure your budget can accommodate it.

How to reduce Facebook ad costs

1. Pick the right campaign objectives and goals
2. Use narrow audience targeting
3. Consider excluding audiences
4. Run retargeting campaigns
5. Make your campaigns relevant
6. Monitor ad frequency
7. A/B test ad creatives and placements
8. Focus on post-click experiences

Once Facebook ads generate revenue, it’s natural to be cautious about changing your marketing budget. You don’t want to lose your ad spots to competitors. Thankfully, Meta provides tools and data to optimize your ad spend. Here’s how to take advantage: 

1. Pick the right campaign objectives and goals

One of the first things Facebook asks you to do when creating an ad is to pick a campaign objective. There are six objectives to choose from in Meta Ads Manager:

• Awareness
• Traffic
• Engagement
• Leads
• App promotion
• Sales

The objective you choose should describe the result you want to achieve from buying ads on the platform. Experimenting with these objectives—and the related performance goals mentioned above—impacts the cost of advertising on Facebook. 

The algorithm pairs your objective with users who fit its criteria. If you’re bidding for sales, for example, your ad is more likely to be shown to Facebook users who’ve made purchases through the platform before.

Selecting the wrong campaign objective can lead to higher costs. If you pick lead generation when your real goal is brand awareness, for example, your campaign may become less efficient. To avoid unnecessary costs, make sure you develop a clear marketing goal for your ad campaign.

2. Use narrow audience targeting

Facebook’s algorithm considers ad relevance when calculating bids. The smaller and more relevant your target audience, the more chance you have of winning the ad auction.

That makes it more cost-effective to use narrow audience targeting. But to find the right audience, it helps to begin with an established wider pool, so you can discover which audience types are most responsive to your content.

“Start your targeting a bit broader than you would initially think,” says Josh Jurrens of Caliper Marketing. “This gives Facebook a bit more room to find users most likely to take your intended action before narrowing your targeting. Starting too narrow will result in high costs and fewer conversions.”

For example, let’s say you’re an online business that sells home coffee machines. You’re experiencing high Facebook ad costs with this custom audience:

• Female
• Based in the US
• Aged 18+

Your sales data reveals that most of your customers are based in Los Angeles, and customer surveys indicate they buy from you because they don’t have time to pick up a Starbucks coffee during their morning commute.

With this information in mind, you refine your target audience to sell on Facebook and reach people who:

• Live within 10 miles of Los Angeles
• Show interest in “Starbucks”
• Have an annual income of more than $75,000

By starting with an established audience and then using data to reduce its size, you’ve increased ad relevance and likely reduced your spend.

3. Consider excluding audiences

Not everyone in your target audience will be ideal customers. You could wind up paying to reach people who won’t contribute to your advertising goals. 

If your goal is to build brand awareness and you’re paying the average CPM of $13.75 to reach 1,000 new people, for example, exclude people who:

• Already like your Facebook Page
• Have visited your website within the past 28 days
• Have already made a purchase 

“Some brands worry they might be excluding potential customers, but if there are certain demographics or interests that might indicate a poor fit for your product, exclude them,” says marketer Brooks Manley.

4. Run retargeting campaigns

The Meta pixel collects data about your website visitors and pairs it to a Facebook profile—including the pages they visited, which items they added to their cart, and their visit duration. All of that data can be fed back into your campaign to run personalized retargeting ads.

“In my experience, I have found that remarketing ads were the cheapest to run,” says Usama Ejaz, co-founder of social media management tool SocialBu. “Let’s say you want to run a campaign for sign-ups to your website blog. Combine that with a remarketing ad that targets the visitors to your blog post from the first ad and you will save a lot of money.” 

Potential Facebook retargeting ads could include:

• Abandoned cart ads. Show shoppers products they added to their shopping cart but didn’t purchase.
• Landing page ads. Serve ads according to the area of your website a person visited.
• Recent visitor ads. Show Facebook ads to recent visitors to your site to keep your brand top of mind.

5. Make your campaigns relevant

Once you’re serving ads to a specific audience, it becomes easier to make your ad creatives relevant to potential customers.

Retargeting campaigns can be based on a previous experience that a person had with your brand, such as browsing a product page. Ads for custom audiences can leverage data used to define the audience—things like their interests and location.

Other data sources you can apply include post-purchase surveys and historical ad performance data. Do your customers prefer video ads or image carousels? Use these insights to craft copy that aligns with your audience’s tone of voice, vocabulary, and needs.

The health-conscious cereal company Magic Spoon, for example, promises customers that they can get a snack that’s “both delicious and better for you” by purchasing its products. 

6. Monitor ad frequency

A potential mistake when niching down your Facebook advertising audience is that campaigns can become repetitive. Once a user sees your ad several times in their news feed, it is likely to lose conversion power, no matter how relevant and well-targeted. 

Facebook keeps track of ad frequency with a simple calculation: impressions divided by reach. As your frequency score creeps beyond two or three, consider refreshing the campaign with new ad copy, images, or videos. You may find that you don’t need to overhaul your creative entirely to keep the content interesting.

7. A/B test ad creatives and placements

Facebook advertising is a mixture of science and art. 

Many variables affect an ad’s performance (including seasonal factors beyond your control) so it can be hard to land on the perfect creative or audience selection. However, you can improve your results and cost-efficiency through A/B testing. 

Facebook’s A/B testing feature helps advertisers find winning combinations. So, for each campaign, experiment with the following elements and monitor the impact on your Facebook ad costs:

• Ad creatives. Do images, videos, or carousels do a better job of engaging your audience? How about long-form versus short-form content? Influencer content or user-generated visuals?
• Ad formats and placements. The news feed may be the first port of call for advertisers, but test whether your ads get more attention elsewhere—like the Audience Network. Instagram Stories are also worth exploring if your priority is clicks at the lowest cost.

8. Focus on post-click experiences

A successful Facebook ad is a valuable asset for any business, but your post-click experience will have the final say on whether an ad click turns into a conversion.

Present potential customers with a slow-loading website or a confusing user experience and an eye-catching campaign won’t help you.

Here are some simple ways to improve the post-click experience of people visiting your website through a Facebook ad:

• Direct shoppers to personalized landing pages. Make product discovery easily accessible by pointing your ad to a relevant page (not your homepage).
• Have fast loading times. A one-second improvement in site speed can increase conversions by 27%. Compress images, remove unneeded Javascript, and minimize third-party apps to speed things up.
• Make it mobile-friendly. The vast majority of Facebook users access the platform via mobile devices. Make sure your online store is responsive and adjusts to a smaller screen size.
• Offer one-click checkout. Less friction at the checkout means less chance of customers leaving. Use Shop Pay to increase conversions by 10% versus other accelerated checkouts.

Is it worth paying for Facebook ads?

Facebook marketing is a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes. You’ll find customers of various interests, income levels, and locations using the platform—many of whom discover new products through ads in their news feeds. This makes Facebook ads worth paying for. 

Effective Facebook advertising is all about trial and error. Test different campaigns and creatives, comparing them to past performance. Soon, you’ll start to see winning, cost-effective advertising strategies that resonate with your audience.