Paid ads
How do you lower your cost per acquisition on Meta ads?
The short answer
Start with what you're actually buying. Meta sells you impressions, and your cost per acquisition is just how many impressions you had to buy to get one customer. Better content lowers what you pay for those impressions, a better hook gets more people to click, and a simpler account lets your winning ads get the budget.
What are you actually paying Meta for?
Impressions. What you are buying from Meta is impressions. You’re not buying clicks, and you’re not buying reach. You’re paying for the number of times your ad gets shown.
That changes how you read the whole account. Everything else in Ads Manager is an outcome of those impressions. Some of the people who see your ad click. Some of those people buy. Your CPA is what you spent on impressions, divided by the customers who came out the other end.
Which numbers should you look at first?
If nobody has ever walked you through the data, maybe because your last agency kept it to themselves, start with five numbers:
- Impressions: how many times your ads were shown.
- Reach: how many different people saw them.
- Frequency: how many times, on average, each of those people saw them.
- CPM: what you pay for every thousand impressions.
- CTR, or click-through rate: the share of impressions that turned into a click.
Put them side by side in a simple spreadsheet and the story of your account gets much easier to follow.
How do CPM and click-through rate set your CPA?
They sit at the top of the funnel, and they multiply.
If your CPM halves and nothing else changes, every customer costs you half as much. If twice as many people click, you need half the impressions to get the same number of visitors to your site. Improve both and the savings stack.
So what moves them? Content quality decreases your price per thousand impressions. More engaging ads cost less to show. A better hook lifts your click-through rate, because more of the people who see the ad stop and tap. Put the two together and you get cheaper customers. It’s just way better content in, way cheaper traffic out.
How many campaigns should you be running?
Probably fewer than you are now. Everything I’m seeing says the fewer campaigns you have, the better. Meta increasingly rewards less structure.
The usual mess builds up like this. One campaign per country. Then one per persona. Then a testing campaign, a scaling campaign and a whitelisting campaign, often for each country. Before long you’ve got dozens of campaigns and the budget is spread thin. You can have winning ads at a low CPA that you can’t scale, because the spend is locked up somewhere else.
I’ve seen accounts doing serious volume on just two campaigns. Consolidate, and let the algorithm find the winners.
What should change at campaign, ad set and ad level?
Give each level one job.
- Campaign: change the optimisation or bid strategy. Bid cap versus cost cap, or optimising for conversions versus catalogue sales, are campaign-level decisions.
- Ad set: change the targeting and placements.
- Ad: change the creative.
At the ad set level you want to be optimising your targeting and placements, and at the ad level you want to be optimising creative. If two campaigns share the same optimisation goal and bid strategy, ask why they’re separate. Most of the time the difference between them belongs in an ad set, or in the ads themselves, inside one campaign.