Facebook CPM Predictions 2023

For Facebook marketers and advertising agencies, Q1 is for allocating budgets for offline, digital, and paid marketing. This marks a crucial time of year, as during this stage it’s vital to plan for fluctuating costs on Facebook. These costs change year on year – 2021 to 2022 saw the average CPM (cost per thousand impressions) on Facebook rise from £9.34 to £11.65¹.

The cost of the CPM in 2022 could have been influenced by various factors. This includes industry type, campaign objective, seasonality, target audience size, and type of budget used. With these factors in mind, we share our predictions for Facebook CPM in 2023.

A brief review of 2022

In 2022, an 18-year-old Facebook continued its winning streak as the most popular social media platform: it boasted 2.96 monthly billion active users by the end of the final quarter². While questions hover around the relevancy of Facebook for Gen-Z – with 25% vouching to use it less in 2023³ – the network remained the firm favourite of the 35-44 age group demographic⁴.

For marketers, Facebook’s platform – now operating under the corporate name Meta – provided unmissable opportunities. In October 2022, Facebook reported that it could reach 2.08 billion people through ads. This reach grew by 12 million quarter-on-quarter⁵. As in 2021, more than 200 million businesses used their apps and tools.

The average Facebook CPM cost £11.65¹in 2022. This fluctuated throughout the year, falling to its lowest cost of £6.90 in October 2022 and peaking the following month at £13.35 – around Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the US and UK⁶. However, ad spend in the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday fell by 37% from last year⁷. This could be a reflection of the latest economic downturn, and how this impacted marketer spending.

The type of campaign you ran also affected Facebook CPM. By the end of the year, the highest average CPM cost for a lead generation campaign was £17.63. This is compared to just £1.98 for a brand awareness campaign⁸.

Now we’ve looked at the Facebook and CPM landscape in 2022, what are industry experts predicting for the advertising metric in 2023?

Digital Playmakers’ predictions

Tom Stride, founder of Digital Playmakers, shares his industry predictions for 2023.

“This year’s CPM predictions are particularly difficult because their cost will largely reflect the global economic state. We can already see different markets are recovering at different rates, with some very much still in recession.”

That being said, Stride believes that:

CPMs will continue to drop across mature platforms such as Meta and Google. Budgets are likely to shift across to increasingly popular apps like TikTok. This is due to a reduction in marketing budgets caused by inflation and reduced consumer spending.
However, CPMs may only decrease to a certain point. More and more high street brands will go solely online to escape high physical costs, such as rent. In turn, this will increase competition for digital ad space.
Key retail period CPM may hit record highs and non-key periods may be the lowest we’ve seen for years. This is will be due to companies looking to capitalise on periods where consumers are still happy or able to spend their currently diminishing expendable income.

9 ways to keep your Facebook CPM costs low in 2023

You don’t need to simply accept a high CPM cost – there are strategies that can help you keep these costs low. Here are Digital Playmakers’ top tips for ensuring your Facebook CPM costs stay low all year round:

Evaluate the actual value of each impression to your business – taking time over this before your ad campaign can help you avoid generating negative ROI (return on investment) for your Facebook ad spend.
Limit your bids – what one impression is worth to you might not be replicated by Facebook.
Consider lowering your maximum CPM or CPC (cost per click) – Facebook can discover cheaper impressions, and your ad campaign will still reach sections of your target audience.
Use a lifetime budget instead of a daily budget – this also allows Facebook to find cheaper impressions or clicks while continuing to deliver your ad to your target audience.
Use A/B testing – this Facebook tool can help you find out the ads that generate maximum engagement, which Facebook will measure and reward with lower CPM costs.
Watch your ad frequency – constantly targeting the same audience increases your costs as Facebook will deem your ad less relevant. Instead, limit how often your selected audience sees your ads, or ensure copy and graphics are frequently refreshed.
Narrow your target audience – Facebook will also deem your ad irrelevant for lots of people if your audience is too broad, in turn increasing CPM costs.
Prioritise retargeting to interested audiences – similar to custom audiences, retargeting enables you to show your ads to people who have already demonstrated some interest in what you’re advertising, reducing your CPM in the process.
Find the best ad time for your audience – by making sure your audience aren’t seeing you ad more than once a day you can lower your CPM while maximising your ROI.

A potential insight into Facebook CPM in 2023

Here at Digital Playmakers, we want to help you reduce your ad spend and generate a more significant ROI. Our expert predictions aren’t set in stone, but they should highlight some of the major factors likely to influence Facebook CPM.

We also hope that our 9 tips for keeping costs low provide useful insight into how CPM can fluctuate. Most importantly, we hope you can adopt these strategies to make ad spend more manageable.

If you’d like more help making your Facebook marketing campaigns successful, with optimum ROI and impressions, Digital Playmakers are experienced digital specialists offering expertise in performance marketing. Our previous clients include Threshold Trial Series and London Revolution.