Facebook Ads offer business owners a lot of flexibility as there are no fixed costs.
You can run ads from $2/day as a minimum amount.
You can set a campaign budget or an ongoing budget.
Campaign budgets have a set start and end date and an allocated budget to spend during this time which could be $100 between 1st - 31st March as an example.
Alternatively you can set an ongoing budget with a daily ad spend such as $5/day (Facebook will often push to spend more like $15/day, you don't have to spend this much to get started) with these ads running until you turn them off.
For easy maths I like to recommend getting started with a minimum monthly budget of $100.
Obviously the more you spend the more people you reach across Facebook (and Instagram).
There are many different 'goals' such as Reach, Traffic, Engagement, Sales and Leads which all dictate how many people you will reach for every dollar spent and what results you can expect.
If you're setting up Sales or Leads campaigns (things I don't do), you generally need to spend a lot more in order to get 'results'.
If you want to get your ads in front of as many people as possible, using the reach objective you can expect your ads to appear about 200-500 times for every $1 spent.
Or 20,000-50,000 ad impressions with a $100 spend.
Actual results vary based on the scope of your target audience and a few other variables. Once you've run an ad campaign, you'll be able to see your actual cost-per-1,000 impressions figure in Ads Manager.
Something that can also increase costs is working with an agency who will often charge a monthly management fee on top of your ad spend.
Other things to note...
GST is not added or applicable to Facebook ad spend.
If you're boosting posts from the Facebook app on an iPhone you will be charged an extra fee from Apple as this is considered an 'in-app purchase' - advertising from a desktop device is always recommend to avoid this.
My Ads Management Costs
I charge from $200/month or $400/quarter for ads management with these figures excluding ad spend.
If you wanted to work with me and spend $100 on ads per month then total costs would be my ads management ($200+GST) + ad spend ($100) = $300/month (+ applicable GST).
My monthly ads report includes data on your organic (non-paid, non-ad) social media activity as well as data from other channels such as your website to help you measure your overall online presence.
Want support or have further questions?
If you're new to advertising and Facebook and confused by all your options I'm happy to have a chat to help set you in the right direction and provide a second opinion on what ad content you're working with.
