You’re checking your Facebook ads stats and you’re panicking.

Your cost per acquisition is getting higher week on week and month on month.

You’re now thinking that your strategy is no longer working and scrambling to find a better strategy on YouTube.

Spoiler alert — there’s not one strategy out there that can keep your cost per acquisition constant regardless of any variables.

So what can you do in this situation?

Here are a few things that you can do to optimize:

1) Check your frequency

This is one of the times that I’d actually put a lot of attention to frequency (yes, most times I wouldn’t put much attention to frequency).

Here’s a quick rule of thumb that I keep in mind if you’ve only been using the same set of creatives.

For cold audiences — I’ll change creatives once they get 4x to 5x frequency.

For warm audience — it’s a bit higher because of the small pool of audience so about 7x to 8x frequency.

Check this on the ad level and change out the creatives that have hit the frequency ceiling.

Try to have a totally new set of creatives and copy while maintaining some of the elements that you know work, i.e. your hook.

2) Clear out comments on your ads.

All right, you gotta be honest with me.
When was the last time you checked your comments on your ads?

If they are not answered, this might make your potential clients scroll away.

You can try putting yourself in the user’s shoes — will you be convinced of a company’s customer support if you can see a bunch of questions and comments left unanswered?

The best way to do this is to just make sure you’re keeping tabs on your posts and answer any comments no matter if they’re good or bad.

Just remember that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter are all social platforms and they want you to be engaging with the users.

Speaking of engagement — are all comments equal? Let’s go to the next point.

3) Negative comments and reactions on your ads.

No matter how good your products and services are, there’s always gonna be someone who wishes you could’ve done better.

And they could leave a negative reaction to your ads.

And we don’t want this.

So remember to also change out your creatives when you’ve gotten negative reactions and comments.

We don’t want our ads to get a lot of negative reactions that some people might hide ads from our account altogether. That’s the worst-case scenario that we want to avoid.

4) Make sure your targeting is not constricted.

You do need fairly broad targeting so that the platform isn’t serving your ads multiple times to the same people. Hence, looking at your frequency.

Now there are a few things you also need to keep in mind.

Your CPA will always gonna be increasing as your budget increases and as you keep the campaign running for a long period.

It doesn’t always mean that your strategy is not working.

How Facebook works is that they are going to find your lowest-hanging fruits first. Once you’ve gotten those clients, Facebook needs to widen its reach and find new people that are not as targeted as your low-hanging.

This ends up taking more budget and your CPA tends to increase in this situation.

What you can do is to first figure out the maximum CPA you could have to breakeven. This should be on your business stats not on Facebook or any other ad platform.

Once you know the max CPA you could do, make sure you’re optimizing your campaign to get results lower than your max CPA amount.

Typically, if you do your calculation right, your business could get away with getting $40/lead because many of them take the upsell and purchase your high-ticket program later on within 60 days.

$2/lead is not impossible (I’ve gotten this for my clients before). So you could start getting $2/lead when you’re starting but the CPL can start getting more expensive as you scale.

If your CPL or CPA starts getting more expensive than your max CPA, you can scale your budget back down, optimize, then only try scaling up again.

Your turn:
What do you usually do after seeing your CPA keeps increasing?

Did I miss out on anything? Leave a comment below!

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