What Is Better: CPM or CPC for Facebook?
Facebook, like many sellers of online advertising, offers the choice between paying a set cost per click (CPC) or paying for 1,000 ad impressions (abbreviated as CPM). In the CPC model, you only pay when people click on your ads, while in the CPM model, you pay any time Facebook displays your ads. Determining which is better depends on the goals of your advertising campaign and requires experimentation and monitoring.
Other People Are Reading
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Conversions
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A primary goal of many advertisements is to convince people to take a desired course of action. For example, product advertisers want you to purchase their product while nonprofit organizations want you to donate or volunteer. "Conversions" occur when people click the advertisement and take the desired action. When advertisers want to track how much they paid per conversion, they often choose CPC advertising methods so they can control how much they pay for each potential conversion.
Visibility
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Getting people to take a specific action might not be an ad's primary goal. Awareness ads make people aware of a brand or issue similar to how a commercial on television promotes a product or cause. Paying for advertisements based on impressions allows you to focus on showing the ad as many times to your intended audience as possible. Additionally, by using Facebook's targeting options for ads, you can show your add only to people likely to find it interesting, potentially resulting in a lower amount paid per click than you would have paid using the CPC model.
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Experimenting and Monitoring
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The only way to determine whether a CPM or CPC ad is best for your needs is to experiment with advertising strategies and monitor the results. For example, you could create similar campaigns using the CPM and CPC models and run both for a short period of time. After determining which which has the best performance, eliminate the poorer-performing campaign and expand the successful one as needed to meet your advertising goals.
Additional Considerations
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When managing your Facebook ad, keep in mind that Facebook's goal is to maximize the amount it gets paid. Facebook has limited advertising space available, so it won't continue displaying your CPC ad if your ad receives very few clicks. Facebook will sell the advertising space to someone else. For this reason, consider paying per impression if you anticipate that your ad will have a very low click-through-rate and you want to advertise even if few people click on the link.
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