Eighty-five percent of marketers are concerned about the rising costs of Facebook ads, according to a LiveIntent study which polled 200 marketers who spent at least $100,000 on Facebook ads during October.
Research from earlier this year found that Facebook CPM rates have grown 90 percent year-over-year for marketers. Since Q1 2019, CPM cost increased by 11 percent, reaching $7.84. Additionally, 42 percent of marketers are spending more in 2019 than 2018, largely due to the growing cost of Facebook ads. LiveIntent’s data shows that the increased cost is a concern for a majority of marketers, with 13 percent extremely concerned about the trend. If costs continue to grow, nearly half of the marketers polled believe they could be priced out of paid Facebook ads.
A separate study commissioned by LiveIntent found that 35 percent of new LiveIntent customers had moved to LiveIntent due to either higher Facebook costs or slowing performance.
Today, 3 million businesses actively advertise on Facebook. More than 70 percent of those businesses are based outside of the US. But with the rising cost of Facebook CPMs, some may be forced to turn to other platforms and channels. To successfully compete against other brands, the report notes that marketers must diversify their ad spend.
“Marketers who abandon Facebook entirely abandon one of the largest nation-states ever known to humanity. Instead of missing out on this font of audiences, marketers should be aware of when they run into audience fatigue on Facebook (the cost to find new audiences go up) and work to balance their Facebook spend with inventory that has incremental and new audiences,” Kerel Cooper, SVP, global marketing at LiveIntent tells us.
Cooper adds that as a result, marketers will turn towards other measurable media. “Most likely, that will be the email channel, where brands can be sure they are reaching a known person when they are logged-in and engaged. After all, you need to log in and open an email to have the ad served,” notes Cooper.
