As effective as Facebook Ads can be, they are not free – and few businesses have unlimited budgets to work with. One of the concerns that you might have when it comes to using Facebook Ads is that even though it’s much more affordable (and effective) than traditional forms of advertising, such as print or TV advertising, unlike traditional forms of advertising, there’s no set price. This can make controlling the costs of using Facebook Ads seem like a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, it shouldn’t be.

5 Effective Ways to Control Your Facebook Ad Costs

The way Facebook Ads works is that instead of paying a set amount of money to run your ad campaign, you pay for the results that your ads achieve. It does this by letting you choose your bid based on the result you’re looking to achieve. So basically, you can set your bid for clicks, impressions, likes and more. The higher your bid is, the more competitive your ad will be.

But what happens if you receive much higher results than you expected, and you go way over your budget because of it? While you might be happy about your ad’s performance, the cost of that performance may not be affordable for your budget. Fortunately, Facebook allows you to set limits through the use of a daily or lifetime budget.

When you set up a daily budget, your ad will stop running once you hit your budget limit for that day. It will then continue the next day. With the lifetime budget limit, your campaign will halt completely once you’ve reached the limit you set.

Here are 5 tips that you can implement today:

Pick the Right Objective For Your Facebook Ads

The last thing you want to do is use the wrong objective in a way that kills your campaign. If your objective is to get signups consider using the website conversion objective. This allows you pay when a user converts, not just when they click on the link to your website or landing page.

Use a Compelling Image

You will need a number of different versions of each image you use, depending on the location and objective of the ad. Different objectives display ads slightly differently, and this can affect the size of the image.

Use an Appropriate Facebook Ad Frequency

Frequency is the number of times, on average, that a person sees your ad. you can set limits to your frequency. Pay attention to your frequency and adjust your budget and targeting accordingly.

Implement Split Testing

You can change your targeting options in a million ways in the back end of the ads system.  Take one ad and create an exact copy of it.  Change one thing – and only one thing – about that ad. You can change your image by a little or completely. You can alter your copy, your landing page link URL, or your title.

Track All Data

Track statistics, monitor them, and make sure you’re improving the metrics that count. Figure out how much you’re spending, what your reach is, what your frequency is, what your targeting is and what goals you’d like to reach.

As effective as Facebook Ads can be, you’ll want to remain within your budget when possible. Each change you make should be geared towards either improving the performance of your ads or reducing the cost of those ads.

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© 2017 by Turiya Hodge.  All Rights Reserved.  Turiya Hodge, Social Media Strategist and Business Trainer, is the owner of Myabah Consulting Services and founder of Social Media Saturdays, an online platform dedicated to helping professionals, organizations and companies grow their business by social media strategic planning in the area of lead generation.