Why Social Spend Is About to

Or worse still, your campaign performance will tank.

What’s Driving the Spike in Ad Costs

This is a chart we recently received from a Facebook Agent mapping out the CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions), CVR (Conversion Rate), and CPA (Cost Per Action) over the four quarters.

It’s showing that as we move into the holiday season, businesses ramp up their advertising spending to take advantage of the increased consumer spending. This means that competition for ad space will be fierce, and prices will increase.

The bigger players are increasing their spending and will quickly outbid smaller businesses. So get ready, as you will likely see decreases in your account performance.

If you’re planning on doing any social media marketing over the next few months, it’s essential to be aware of this and budget accordingly. Otherwise, you may find your impression counts taking a hit as your CPM goes up.

And what happens as your impressions drop? Your conversions and sales will likely drop as well.

How to Protect Your Performance

So what can you do to combat this? The most obvious solution is to increase your budget, but you will take a hit on your cost per conversion. Alternatively, you could take the high road, stop advertising over the peak periods and wait till the dust settles.

If neither of those options are possible or practical, don’t worry, there are other options.

1. Focus on Quality Content

Take time to create high-quality content that will resonate with your audience. Quality content will help you cut through the noise and get noticed. 

Also, content that generates likes and comments will get pushed further by Facebook & Instagram algorithms. This means your content will get increased reach at a lower cost. 

Think about ways to get people to engage with your content and be ready to respond. Users love a responsive business, and bigger companies are generally worse at it than you.

2. Hyper-Target Specific Audiences

Spend your time identifying and drilling down on specific user/customer types. 

By targeting a small and relevant group, your messages will hit home. So, although your CPM will be higher targeting a specific audience, your ROI will be higher with high relevancy and specific messaging. 

At the end of the day, it is conversions/sales that matter, not impressions.

3. Step Back and Let the Chaos Ensue

If the big buyers are in town and pushing up prices, sometimes the best thing you can do is sit on the sidelines for a bit. By pausing your campaigns, you avoid overspending and can come back when the dust has settled.

4. Diversify Your Marketing

If you aren’t running a Google Ads account, now is the time to set one up. Take some of your spend that is going to Zuckerberg and divert it across to Google. This will also help diversify your risk to shifts in the platforms.

If you are already running a Google Ads account, try importing your account into Microsoft’s Advertising Platform.

This will get your ads in front of a whole collection of new users. 

As the default search platform (Bing) for Microsoft devices, you will also be getting access to a collection of users that are more likely to be business users (company laptops) or less “tech savvy” users (people retaining default computer and browser settings) 

When importing to Microsoft, ensure you shut off all Audience Ads and Multimedia Ads with 100% bid decreases. They recently started auto-creating them when you import AdWords accounts, and they’re a great way to waste money.

The Bottom Line

So if you want to keep your social media marketing efforts effective over the next few months, make sure to budget for the increased competition and prices.

And look at the bright side… at least it’s not another Federal Election dumping millions on Social media advertising and wiping everyone else out.