Since social networking began, people have been using it as a vehicle for advertising their businesses. However, as the rules regarding businesses on Facebook continue to change and organic reach continues to drop, business owners are being pushed towards purchasing advertising to promote not only their Facebook pages, but also their external web pages. Small business owners especially are wondering if this is really a worthwhile investment of their advertising budgets. Let’s take a closer look at how much value for money Facebook advertising is going to offer.fb-ads

The great thing about Facebook from a business owner’s point of view is that it offers you the potential to reach millions of consumers via your free business page. However, as more and more businesses have been taking full advantage of this, Facebook has stepped in and made it more difficult to access these millions of consumers unless you are willing to pay for them by way of purchasing Facebook advertising. This advertising can be specifically targeted towards a specific demographic and can be used to get more likes on your business page, or to send more traffic to your website. You could even use it to direct people towards a current promotion. It sounds like a great idea in theory, but we need to decide whether or not the return of investment is worth it when it is actually put into practice.

The Cost of Facebook Advertising

There are two main forms of Facebook adverts to choose from:

  • CPC – Where you pay every time someone clicks on your advert
  • CPM – Where you pay every time someone sees the advert.

With both of these methods, you will need to decide on a maximum daily or lifetime budget for the campaign based on what you think you can afford to spend on Facebook advertising. You can also look out for free advertising credit offers which come up from time to time and are a great way to try Facebook Advertising out as a beginner.

The cost of these adverts varies from one advert to the next. As a general rule of thumb, when it comes to advertising on Facebook, you are going to get what you pay for and the more targeted your advert actually is, the more expensive you can expect your clicks to be. When creating your advert you need to bid a maximum amount, but bidding is super competitive so if you bid too low then your advert will end up not being seen. As a general guide, a recent study shows that the global average per click on CPC campaigns is around $0.21, while the cost of 1000 impressions for a CPM campaign averaged around $0.75.

Knowing the costs involved with Facebook advertising is only half of the battle. You will also need to determine how much a new like from a consumer is actually worth to your business. While each click may be costing an average of $0.21, not every click is going to result in a like and not every like is going to convert into a sale! The true worth of getting more Facebook likes for your brand is something that is difficult to measure as it really does depend on your individual company and what your expectations are.

So in conclusion, is spending money on Facebook advertising worthwhile? The simple answer is that yes it is. The larger scale audience that can be tapped via Facebook is something that simply cannot be found anywhere else online and for that reason alone spending some of your advertising budget on Facebook adverts is a smart move. It has been suggested that every business should go ahead and spend $1 per day (that’s the minimum daily budget) on Facebook advertising because it is a way to get your advert and therefore your brand name out there in front of thousands of people. If you can then convert those to likes and/or paying customers then you will get even more benefit from your advertising campaign.

Tuan Nguyen is the founder of web development and marketing agency Aplusmedia. Tuan’s area of expertise is banner advertising which led him to create 20DollarBanners.com one of the top banner ad design companies.