15 Ways Dropshipping Store Owners can Lower Facebook CPM

In Facebook advertising, CPM stands for ‘cost per mile’ or ‘cost per 1,000 impressions.’ To put it simply, the ‘impressions’ refer to the users that have stumbled upon your ad on the internet, while the cost refers to how much you’ve spent in order for your ad to be seen by a certain number of people. 

In the case of CPM, this measurement calculates the amount of money you’ve paid per 1,000 users that see your ad. In other words, in comparison to CPC (cost per click), for example, where you’re charged when someone clicks on your advertisement, with CPM you’re billed only when your ad is successfully displayed to someone while they’re browsing or using the social media platforms. 

In order to calculate your Facebook CPM, you’ll only need the amount of money you’ve spent on your ad campaign and your number of impressions/visitors. Here’s what the general formula looks like:

the amount of ad money spent / number of impressions x 1000 = cost per mile

To illustrate, let’s assume you’re running an online boutique and have just started your Facebook marketing campaign. You’ve invested 50$ and received 2,000 impressions on your ad. By putting the formula into effect, it turns out that your CPM is 25$, meaning you pay this amount of money for every 1,000 users that see your ad. Nevertheless, by applying certain strategies in place, this CPM can be lowered significantly, saving you from sustaining big ad expenses and considerably improving your ROI (return of investment) at the same time. So, let’s take a look at what you can do to improve your CPM.

Now that you’re familiar with what CPM means and how you can calculate it, let’s dive into the strategies you can use to lower it as much as possible.

A well-built ad can help you attract many customers and expose your business to a large audience, allowing you to tap into other markets as well. Therefore, one thing that can really help in significantly lowering your CPM is working on your ad design. With a little inspiration and creativity, you can easily create eye-catching advertisements for your products. Keeping track of marketing ideas and trends, as well as currently popular ad outlines, can additionally assist you in creating a killer ad.

A CTA button can do wonders for your ad campaign as it makes your ad more persuasive. Make people eager to learn more about the products and/or services you’re offering in your dropshipping store by providing them with a convenient one-click step that’ll redirect them to your website. With a call-to-action button, you remind visitors to check out your store which will not only lower your CPM but also increase customer engagement.

The images are your ad’s centerpiece. They’re one of the main components that make your ad compelling and captivating. These visual elements introduce your brand and store, allowing customers to get to know your dropshipping business and encourage them in learning more about it. Therefore, presenting consumers with high-quality photos of your products is a key factor in establishing a smaller CPM, generating bigger profits, and producing impressive dropshipping store traffic.

Even though images are the ones that usually do all the work when it comes to capturing the attention of as many visitors as possible, don’t ignore your primary texts as they present a crucial part of your ad. Despite being worth a thousand words, many times images need to be accompanied by a short description in order to be able to convey the right message to customers and avoid confusion or misinterpretation. By writing engaging text to go along with your ad photo, you’ll have higher chances of successfully reaching more customers, which ultimately will lead to acquiring a lower CPM and obtaining a larger amount of impressions.

Although at first many might feel skeptical of doing this, narrowing down your audience at least for a certain period of time can in fact bring you much greater results than when you’re targeting a broader audience. This is because focusing only on customers that show interest in your store’s niche gives you the opportunity to truly dedicate time and effort in getting to know their needs and preferences. For example, as an owner of a dropshipping clothing business, you should start out by aiming at shoppers who happen to be fashion lovers. Once your business takes off and continues growing, you can slowly begin reaching out to other types of customers as well.

In order to prevent wasting money down the drain, hold on to a low CPM, and keep your ads scoring high, it’s important to concentrate on your ad’s relevance as well which is closely related to targeting a narrow audience. As mentioned in the previous tip, by focusing on a more specific audience, you’re likely to experience greater success with your ads. This is because the ads you’ve created for that certain audience will become quite relevant to these customers, leading to an increase in engagement. Consequently, this will cause Facebook to prioritize your ads by displaying them to more viewers and at the same time decrease your CPM. 

The goal of Facebook ads is simple – they help you establish contact with visitors with the idea of eventually turning them into a regular clientele. The more of your ads customers are exposed to, the bigger the chances of alluring them into your store. However, repetitive ads can have quite the opposite effect. This will cause both to misspend money that you could have invested in something else and distance prospective customers from your store. Bombarding people with the same ads multiple times during a single day can turn out to be catastrophic as consumers might even start reporting them. Therefore, monitoring your ad frequency through the Ads Manager can not only efficiently downscale your CPM but also prevent you from unintentionally spamming your customers.

Image ads are one of the most common formats used to create Facebook ad campaigns. However, sometimes it’s good to switch things up and try something new like video ads. As it turns out, a study conducted by Databox states that almost 60% of interrogated marketers agreed that video ads drive more engagement. Additionally, another investigation carried out by Statista claims that the number of video viewers on the internet has escalated from 3 billion users in 2020 to almost 3.5 billion in 2023. Keeping these researches in mind, since these ads are more effective compared to image ads, they’ll generate more impressions and thus tremendously reduce your CPM.

The only secure way to make sure your ads are functioning well is by running ad tests as these can clearly show you if your customers have taken the bait or not. By implementing, for example, the A/B split testing which can be found in the Ads Manager by navigating to your ad’s campaign, you can examine your marketing strategies and if you’re covering the marketing 5cs and evaluate their effectiveness. For instance, by putting into action two similarly designed ads that promote your online store’s latest fashion collection, you can see which one is performing better in targeting the audience you have in mind.

Letting Facebook automatically set your ad placements is an additional solution that can lead to reduced CPM. When working with Facebook ads, you’re given the chance to choose from a few placements including Facebook itself, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. Here you can select from a variety of content forms where you’d like your ad to show such as Facebook and Instagram stories for dropshipping, feeds, in-stream videos, and many more. However, all of these can vary significantly in price, some being more popular and thus more expensive than others. That being the case, when opting for automatic ad placements, Facebook runs your fashion ads, for instance, on all placements that are available to you and keeps you within your budget.

Another way to bring your CPM down is by making sure you have enough social proof to offer to viewers. With people depending on reviews, it’s highly likely that before making a purchase in your clothing dropshipping store, for example, they’ll turn to the social networks to try to evaluate your business’s reputation. A piece of evidence supporting this fact is presented by the Digital Marketing Institute, stating that up to 82% of customers rely on social media to guide them in their purchasing. That being the case, in order for customers to feel convinced that the products you’re advertising are the real deal, they’ll most probably go through comments, testimonials, and influencer recommendations to assess your brand’s reliability. Therefore, make certain you supply visitors that stumble upon your ad with enough facts that prove your store is genuine and improve their trust in your products.

Optimizing your lookalike audiences can also play a crucial role in getting your CPM as low as possible. These are based on the custom audiences you’ve created to target specific customers and consist of people who share similar interests and traits as your current customers. On that account, if you happen to own an apparel store, is highly probable that your lookalike audience will also react to your clothing ad, bringing you more potential consumers without having to pay a huge sum of money.

Using Facebook Pixel is one more helpful way to keep your CPM low. It represents a piece of code that enables you to track ad conversions. Once you’ve installed it on your website, it allows you to keep an eye on your customers’ actions. By having this type of data within arm’s reach, you can easily analyze your consumers’ interests and use that information to adjust or improve your ad.

Retargeting customers is one of the most effective strategies when it comes to generating more impressions and saving you from incurring additional costs. According to Sproutsocial, 77% of B2B and B2C marketers have taken advantage of retargeting the same viewers as part of their Facebook and Instagram ads. Therefore, whenever you observe visitors that left your online fashion store, let’s say, without purchasing something try to expose them to your ads once more, but keep in mind to not overwhelm them, something that we’ve discussed in the ad frequency section.

Our last tip that’ll help you in controlling your CPM and keeping your advertising process low-cost consists of establishing your Facebook return on investment or otherwise known as ROI. In this way, you’ll be able to keep an eye on your ad budget, know exactly how much you’ve invested into social media marketing and how much you’ve received in return, and run the ads that have been bringing you higher capital.

Monitoring your Facebook CPM is a key factor when it comes to running ads on this platform. By keeping it low, you’ll benefit from a higher ROI and generate more impressions for less money. So, don’t hesitate to take a look at our tips and implement them in your own ad campaigns. The hacks we’ve offered you above will lend you a hand in reducing your CPM and provide you with positive outcomes for your dropshipping store.