When it comes to paid advertising, it can feel like you have countless decisions you need to make, with two of the biggest being which ad platform to use and how much to spend on your advertising budget.
And then, of course, if you are advertising on multiple platforms, you also need to figure out how much to spend on each platform. This can sound like a very overwhelming task. Luckily, I’m here to help. I run a paid ads agency called Snowball Creations, so I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know about ad budgets for different platforms.
The bad news: there’s not a perfect answer
I’d like to preface this by saying that there’s not a perfect answer that will apply to everyone. It will depend on your business, which marketing channels you use, what your overall budget is, and more. Everyone’s marketing strategy will look different.
Therefore, your business’s budget per platform will vary greatly from another business’s. The only way to really figure out how much to invest in each paid ads platform is to have a professional agency audit your ads. Shameless self-promotion here: I do free audits, so if you want to skip to that part, scroll to the bottom of this page and fill in the form!
The bottom line: you need at least £2,000
Everyone in the paid ads world will have different opinions on the minimum you need to spend to see results from paid ads, but at my agency, we recommend having at least £2,000 per month to invest in your overall ad strategy.
This is a high enough number to allow you to use different platforms, while still spending enough per platform to see results. Unfortunately, paid advertising relies heavily on data, and if you have a very small ad budget to spend on your ads, you won’t get enough data to fully optimise your ads. Of course, if you do have some more to spend, I’d recommend doing so, especially if you are advertising on multiple platforms, but £2,000 is a good place to start.
Research individual platforms
The three biggest ad platforms, and the three that most of our clients use, are:
Of course, there are many other ad platforms as well, but if you’re wondering which platforms to start with, these ones are good options. However, you need to research different platforms before running ads on them, as some ad platforms may have their own limits.
For example, Facebook requires a minimum of £5 ad spend per day at the ad set level in order to run ads, whereas LinkedIn has different budget requirements for different areas.
More money = more data
As mentioned, paid advertising relies on data, and the bigger your budget, the more data you get. Massive paid ad platforms like Google and Facebook use very smart algorithms to decide which target audience to show your ads to. However, these algorithms are only as smart as the data (and thus the money) that you give them.
To put it simply: the bigger your ad budget, the better your ads will be optimised.
The more platforms you use, the bigger your ad budget
The £2,000 minimum ad spend mentioned earlier is a good baseline, however, if you are going to be splitting that budget between four different ad platforms, you’re not going to have that much budget per platform.
If you want to stick to one advertising platform, you’re fine – but if you want to run Google Ads as well as social media ads on Facebook, that small of a budget will hinder your marketing efforts.
Therefore, you will need to either select fewer platforms, or increase your budget. It’s all a balancing game, so try not to only focus on your overall ad budget, but also your budget per platform.
Some other helpful info . . .
There’s a lot more I can say about paid advertising and ad budgets, so if you’re looking for more in-depth information on anything paid ads-related, I’d recommend going over to my YouTube channel. However, there are a few more things I want to share with you today:
- You’ve got to spend money to make money . . . this is a cliche saying, but it’s true. Paid advertising is an investment, so the more you invest, the higher your returns will be – provided your ads are set up properly, of course.
- . . . but you also shouldn’t spend all your money: not to contradict myself too much, but you also shouldn’t spend your entire marketing budget on paid ads right off the bat. Rather start with a moderate amount, and once you have enough data to know which ads perform well, you can scale those. This helps to ensure that you allocate marketing budgets to successful ads.
- Remarketing campaigns are your friend: if you really don’t have a big enough advertising budget to run successful ads, you can start with a remarketing ad campaign. These campaigns target people who have already interacted with your business in some way, rather than new users, so it’s a much smaller group of people and thus won’t cost as much.
In conclusion
If this feels overwhelming, don’t stress. There’s a lot of information in here, and once you’ve decided which platforms to use, there will be even more information available. Take it one step at a time, and see it as a journey – you will likely have some ads that fail, but you can use those to help you learn and improve your future ads.
And as mentioned above, you can also fill in the form below if you’d rather have a professional paid ads agency take the reins and handle your ad campaigns across all your platforms for you.