How much do Facebook ads cost?

I get asked a lot from prospective clients and people I meet networking the question, “How much do Facebook ads cost before you see results?”

It’s a common question. And a very important one.

Now obviously we can't predict results until we get going with ads – we need to see where the audience is, what the level of interest is in the product and what kind of ad attracts the most attention.

For most people, I would recommend that you start with just one campaign at £10 a day. Anything less than that and you're not going to get much of a reach. You need to reach as many of your potential customers as you can to get any return for your investment.

Once you start seeing some results, you can then scale your campaign up by adding a budget to it. This prevents you from wasting money. £10 a day for 31 days is £310 – although not a massive amount, this is a big enough investment that you obviously need to keep an eye on how it's working.

For example, if your campaign is to sell a product, ideally you want to do retargeting as well. This is when you have another ad which follows up on the people who are visiting your website, looking at your products, or adding them to their basket. If you've got a small audience, under 1,000 people, I would say a Facebook ads budget of £5 a day is enough to be delivering the ad to them without them seeing it 20 times a day.

The more budget you put in, the more your ad will go out, but if you've only got a small audience, the more it will go out (higher the frequency) to that small audience.

So, at £5 a day, that’s a Facebook ads cost of £155 pounds for a 31 day month. With a retargeting ad running alongside, that doubles the investment to £465 pounds a month minimum that you need to spend on ads.

As well as adding a budget when you see results, you can add more campaigns, or perhaps test new audiences.

I hope that brings some clarity as to how much Facebook ads cost to really make a difference.

If you're interested in running Facebook Ads for your business, I offer a deep dive Kick Start Your Ads Strategy Session where I will take you through your audience targeting, customer journey ads funnel, website and a whole host of other strategy factors to help make your ads perform as best they can.

Take a look at all my Facebook ads packages here and book your discovery call.