For many small companies Facebook advertising is an extremely effective way to reach a targeted audience quickly and cheaply. Because of the way Facebook operates building a page without advertising is becoming increasingly difficult and time consuming with companies expecting to take at least 1 year to make any serious gains.
This makes Facebook advertising an important consideration for any strategy that incorporates the Facebook platform.
There are many different types of Facebook ad depending on the goals of your campaign. One of the popular types, (although not always the best) is the ‘like’ ad which is designed to build the number of ‘likes’ on your page. You’ll then be able to push out content to your fans though your business page.
But how do you know if you’re ads are performing well? One key metric is Facebook’s cost-per-action which gives you the average amount you paid for each action related to the objective your campaign. In the case of ‘like’ ads this is the average cost per like.
Monitoring the cost per like across your ad sets gives you an indication of which ads are performing better within your campaigns and is one way of making decisions about which ads to continue running and which ones to stop.
Benchmarks for Facebook ads in Bahrain
When running Facebook ads it’s tempting to look to external benchmarks as a guide for the success of your campaigns.
A December 2012 report, The Online Project (TOP) analysed their own Facebook ad campaigns across the Middle East. The results showed Egypt was the cheapest place to acquire a like at $0.16, whilst Qatar was the most expensive at $0.45.
Facebook ads in Bahrain were amongst the highest at an average of $0.43.
The TOP report further segmented this data by industry showing some significant variation between different sectors with fashion having a high cost per like at $0.62 whilst telecoms had a relatively low cost per like at $0.24.
The Online Project Report on Facebook fans acquisition in Bahrain. Read full report here
Another example is a case study for the Ministry of Culture, where Bahrain digital agency East Innovations registered a cost per like of $0.31 for the annual Spring of Culture event. East Innovations benchmarked the campaign at a cost per like of $1.
For the most recent campaign Masadir Media has been running we’ve seen a cost per like at $0.28 for a customer in the medical industry.
This admittedly tiny sample size suggests that somewhere around $0.30-$0.40 is a reasonable cost per like in Bahrain.
You should only be benchmarking yourself
Ultimately however you should only be benchmarking your own data within your campaigns. With Facebook ads the price you pay is dependant on the level targeting you are using. If you’re targeting a smaller, more defined audience you will pay more. Without knowing the targeting options used in the above examples making any useful comparison is difficult.
As a test we ran some Facebook ads with extremely wide targeting to see the results. In this case we targeted the whole of Bahrain (18-65) and segmented only by gender. Here we achieved a cost per like of $0.14-$0.15. As a result we now have a few poorly targeted fans on our page but this test is a useful datapoint for people looking to avoid hiring an agency that promises to deliver very cheap Facebook fans.
Conclusion
In the end the answer is that there isn’t a good cost per like in Bahrain. It’s possible to get as low as $0.14 per fan for extremely wide targeting but if you’re targeting a highly niche audience you’ll expect to pay more. Only by looking at your own tests inside of individual campaigns will you know whether you’re achieving a ‘good’ cost per like and making progress in optimising your Facebook advertising costs.
[thrive_custom_box title=”How can we help? ” style=”dark” type=”color” color=”#ffffff” border=”#dd3333″]Masadir Media offers basic and advanced results driven advertising for businesses. Visit our Facebook advertising page for more [/thrive_custom_box]
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