How much should I spend on Facebook ads? No one likes the answer to this question when they hear it. The answer is: It depends.
Isn’t that the worst answer?
We have clients who are spending thousands per day on their ads and clients who are spending $60/day. And if you’re running your own ads, you could be spending as little as $5/day and potentially be making your money back.
The answer to this question goes back to one of the most fundamental things to understand about Facebook ads. When you are paying Facebook to run an ad, in the beginning, the main thing that you are paying for is data to learn how to run better Facebook ads. So: how much you spend depends on how quickly you want to learn.
Here are some questions to ask yourself when you are thinking about setting a budget for your Facebook ads:
- How much can you afford to spend? Do you have a marketing budget? How much of that do you want to devote to ads?
- How much can you afford to lose? In the beginning, when the only thing your Facebook ad dollars are buying is data about how to run better ads, it can feel like you are throwing your money away. So while you can for sure see a profit on your ad spend, even in your early days, when you are setting your budget, many ads managers recommend that you only spend as much as you are willing to “lose” while you and Facebook are learning what works. You have to think of your budget as an investment that grows over time. It’s not a purchase that you get to enjoy as soon as you hand over your cash.
- Have you run ads before? It can be more expensive to acquire leads and customers with a brand new ad account.
- What kind of ads are you going to run? A traffic ad designed to get people to read a blog post is a less expensive type of ad than an ad to invite people to sign up for your email list. Ads to invite people to buy a product can be even more expensive (but also more profitable!)
- How expensive is your niche? If you are a curriculum creator or a life coach, you might find yourself getting leads for under $5. Maybe even under $1. (Some of our curriculum creator clients really are that lucky!) If you are an attorney, you could end up paying $15-$50/lead. But if your legal services are $1000 – $5000, $50/lead could very well be worth it!
- Are you running your ads yourself or planning to pay someone? If you are planning to pay someone, you need to make sure you’re spending enough to get your money back (either in the form of leads on your email list or purchases.) If you are running the ads yourself, you can spend less and “dabble” a little bit to learn what kind of content people respond to. (We can help you out here with courses & coaching sessions.)
All that said, here are some budgets to consider starting with if you are a beginner to Facebook ads:
- Traffic Campaign: $5/day to see which content is getting the most clicks. This is the type of campaign you use when you want to get people to click to your website and read an article.
- Lead generation campaign: $50/day. (Unless you know leads in your niche are inexpensive. Then you might find $25/day is sufficient. If you know your niche is expensive, starting with $100 could make sense.)
- Product campaign: $50-$100/day depending on the cost of your product.
Are these hard and fast rules? Nope! There are several exceptions for every recommendation in the list above. And there are complicated reasons why an ads manager will adjust an ad campaign budget up or down. But this is one of THE most common questions beginners ask about Facebook ads so we wanted to answer it for you.
Want help with your ads but not ready to hire an ads manager? Check out our Facebook Ads in One Day workshop. It’s a Facebook Ads coaching program that helps you get your first ad campaign up and running or helps you optimize your existing campaigns.