In today’s world, where nearly everything is online and digital, advertising on social media has become a key part of most businesses’ marketing strategies. While nearly all social media platforms have some type of advertising option, there’s no denying that Facebook (or rather, Meta, which includes Facebook and Instagram) is a powerhouse.
If you want to reach a vast audience with targeted ads, this is a great place to start. I run my own paid ads agency, and one question that I commonly get is “How much money should I allocate to Facebook Ads?”
The ideal Facebook ad budget will vary widely depending on various factors – this certainly isn’t a one-shoe-fits-all scenario. However, understanding the factors that influence your Facebook advertising cost may help you settle on the perfect Facebook marketing budget for you.
Some other posts that you may find helpful include:
What is the minimum budget for paid ads?
When does Facebook charge me for my ads?
How does Facebook charge me for my ads?
Now, let’s get to actually determining your Facebook Ads budget.
1. Define your goals clearly
When you first set up your ads, you need to figure out why you want to run ads. Sure, the point of advertising is to bring in more business and increase your revenue, but there are a lot of different goals that could help you achieve this.
Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive website traffic? Generate leads? Different goals require different approaches, and this will therefore affect your Facebook advertising budget.
2. Understand your audience
Understanding your audience is another key element in paid ads, and it will help you determine your Facebook ad budget as well. With Facebook, you can target users based on demographics, interests, behaviours, and more.
You can figure out who exactly your ideal candidate is, and target people who fit that description within your Facebook ad campaign. The more you understand your target audience, the more you can create ads that speak to them. And the more your ads resonate with your audience, the lower your ad costs will be, as you will be spending less money on irrelevant audiences.
3. Research industry benchmarks
Paid ads are nothing new. This has its pros and cons. The con is that you will likely have a lot of competition, but the pro is that there is already a lot of information about paid advertising on Facebook, so you don’t need to start from scratch.
This means that you can do research on industry benchmarks to get an idea of the average advertising costs when it comes to your niche on Facebook. While this may not be 100% accurate, it helps you find a good place to start with your marketing budget when setting up your first Facebook ad campaign.
4. Start small, test, and analyse
I always advocate for having a decent Facebook ad budget when you start running ads. If your budget is too small, you won’t be getting enough data to optimise your ads.
That being said, don’t empty out your savings and spend all your money on ads right off the bat, either. Start with a modest Facebook ad budget so that you can test different creatives, copies, and audiences within different Facebook ad campaigns.
This will give you a better idea of what works and what doesn’t, and you can experiment with your winners to improve them even more. Facebook offers you a lot of different analytics, so be sure to use them! And if you’re not sure how, consider getting a Facebook paid ads agency to help you with it.
5. Be careful with scaling
If your ads are making you money, it makes sense to want to scale your ads so that you can make even more money.
However, scaling blindly and without logic isn’t a smart move. Instead, you need to think about which ads have already proven themselves to have a high ROAS, and scale them. If you haven’t noticed by now, you should always make data-backed decisions when it comes to paid ads. So, only scale a Facebook ad campaign once you’re sure that it’s worth the increased Facebook Ads cost.
In conclusion
There you have it! As mentioned, I can’t spit out a random number and tell you that’s the best Facebook ad budget. To do that, I’d need to properly audit your account (which I do for free – simply fill in the form below!)
There are so many factors that play a role in your Facebook ad budget, so no two businesses will have the same budget. And of course, your Facebook Ads budget is dynamic! You can always make adjustments after a while, once you have more information. Facebook offers both a daily ad spend and an overall budget option, so that you can stay on track with managing your marketing budget. I hope this helped, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions by filling in the form below.