Facebook charged me $50 to reach less than 250 people.
That’s not to get 250 likes or even 250 views— that’s 250 people who scrolled past me in the newsfeed.
The CPM (cost per thousand impressions) on this post is a whopping $200!
But so what, you say. I’m bidding for conversions or some other metric.
Well, if the base cost of your traffic is awful, then Facebook is telling you that they don’t like your ad, so they will let you run it but at a super high cost. It’s like driving with the e-brake on.
Look at why you’re getting penalized— too sales-ish, cold audience, targeting way too small, saying something offensive, negative feedback, many ads of the same thing, frequency too high.
Watch for this signal of high CPM to spot trouble before you end up wasting a lot of money on something you thought was pretty good.