Reason 1: Audience Exhaustion
When you have been running the same campaign to the same audience for months, you start running out of new parents to reach. Facebook then recycles impressions back to people who have already seen — and ignored — your ad. The algorithm works harder to get each conversion, driving costs up. Fix: Expand your radius, add new interest layers, or create a Lookalike Audience to access a fresh pool of relevant parents.
Reason 2: Increased Competition in Your Area
If more schools or education programmes in your city started running Facebook ads, you are now competing against them in the same auction. More advertisers bidding for the same parents equals higher costs for everyone. Fix: Improve your ad relevance and quality score so Facebook shows your ad over competitors at the same or lower cost.
Reason 3: Ad Fatigue Raising Costs
When your frequency is high, your click-through rate drops. A lower CTR signals to Facebook that your ad is low-quality — so it charges you more per delivery. Fix: Refresh creatives. A new creative with high early CTR immediately brings costs back down as the algorithm rewards the better-performing ad.
Reason 4: Wrong Campaign Objective or Bidding Strategy
If your campaign settings were changed — even accidentally — to 'Traffic' or 'Engagement' objective instead of 'Leads,' your cost per actual inquiry will skyrocket. Fix: Always verify your campaign objective is set to 'Leads' and your bidding strategy is 'Lowest Cost.'
The Retargeting Reset: Bring Costs Down Immediately
One immediate way to lower your blended cost per lead is to launch a retargeting campaign running parallel to your main campaign. Retargeted audiences convert at much higher rates and much lower cost, which pulls your overall cost per lead down significantly.