When buying ads on Facebook, which model gets you the best return on your advertising spend? In an effort to develop Facebook advertising strategies, many internet marketing experts have postulated the best way to buy advertising on Facebook. Some have argued for CPC ads, some have argued for CPM ads. Either way, these arguments were backed up with very little solid data and as such, have questionable validity. To help explore which method is truly optimal, we conducted a test in order to provide some hard data behind our recommendation.

 

 

Based on our analysis, we found somewhat mixed results. The CPC buy had a higher CTR, lower CPC, and higher percentage of unique impressions while only performing slightly worse than the CPM buy in terms of CPM. Overall, when comparing the CPC and CPM methods of buying on Facebook, for the same budget the CPC campaign ads were shown to 50% more unique people and generated 150% more clicks. The CPM buy did get more impressions overall for the budget, but it seemed to fall short by every other measure. Because of this, we conclude that the data indicates that CPC is the preferred way to buy ads on Facebook for the majority of advertisers.

Download the full report here: Facebook Advertising Best Practices: CPC vs. CPM Buys