It’s an almost impossible question to answer yet it’s one I find myself estimating over and over again to a varying degree of success. How much should you spend on your Facebook ads?
There are lots of answers I could give you. I could tell you that you set the daily or lifetime budget and Facebook works out the rest.
I could tell you that the minimum spend for an ad set is €1 a day but I can’t tell you exactly what results you should expect for that.
I could tell you that the cost per result will depend on audience size or as Facebook say, it will be the ads that provide:
” …positive, relevant experiences for people using Facebook, Instagram or Audience Network”
that see the best cost per result.
How much should you spend on Facebook ads?
Testing
In reality, for each new client, I have to test. The cost per result will depend on:
- The objective of the ad
- The size of the audience we are targeting
- How competitive the audience we’re targeting are
- Where they live
- How much our ads appeal to our audience
With all these variables it’s essential that we keep honing our ads, that we split test them and keep a keen eye on results.
How to estimate ad results
All this seems a bit vague but we can, with a little more investigation make a good guestimate of how much it’s going to cost us to get the results we want.
In Ads manager, when you are setting up the ad you can find out how much Facebook anticipates your results are going to cost.
Set up your ad as usual, when you get to the budget section click ‘Manual’ under ‘Bid Amount’. Here you’ll see what Facebook estimates it will cost to meet your objective.
We’re just using the manual bid option here to get an estimate, you can return to ‘Automatic Bid’ once you have made a note of the costs.
How to keep ad spend at €1 per day
In 2015 I wrote about Facebook ads and how much you could get for a €1 a day. Since then Facebook has increased the minimum spend on website click ads and app instal ads.
The minimum daily spend for a website clicks ad set is now €5 a day. Although it’s not going to break the bank, for a small business wanting to split test and experiment with multiple ad sets for one campaign it’s a little high.
There is a way to get around the €5 minimum spend.
Go back to the budget section in ads manager and click ‘more options’ next to ‘When you will get charged’.
Select ‘Impression’
Once you’ve selected this option Facebook will let you set a minimum budget of €1 per day for your ad.
What to keep an eye on
Facebook grades your ads for relevance. An ad with a high relevance score will reach more people and get better results than an ad with a low relevance score. It will also ensure that you compete favourably against others targeting the same audience.
Relevance is based on how well your audience reacts to your ads. You can view your relevance scores for recent campaigns in ads manger in the ads section.
The real measure
So far I’ve shown you how to measure results within Facebook but the real results are measured on your website or in your business.
It’s great when you get a good cost per click but what are people doing when they arrive on your site? Don’t stop measuring on Facebook.
Use tracking links and Google analytics to follow your Facebook audience as they move through your site. Use the Facebook pixel to measure conversions but set up goals in your Google Analytics to verify them.
So how much should you spend?
As you can see there is no right answer. If you’re new to ads and experimenting start with a low budget. Make a note of your cost per result for each ad type you run so you have something to benchmark against.
Experiment with your audiences, your placements and your creatives and you’ll soon be able to gauge what the real cost is.
Get a headstart on Google Analytics 4 & understand the lingo with the GA4 phrase book
It is already common knowledge that facebook ads do not give the result you’d expect, thanks to click-farms around the world. Facebook has “struggled” with click farms for years now, and come up with no solution to it.
Click farms are people all over the world that gets paid to like Facebook pages, usually in order of 1€ per 1000 likes. In order to seem legit, they also need to like unrelated pages, which is done through clicking on Facebook ads.
As a result, most likes you’ll get from a Facebook ad will be from a click farm, which impacts your visibility negatively, as these accounts never interact with your page again and will soon disappear as the account is deleted (either by the user or by Facebook). You still pay for all those likes and clicks though.
There are plenty of articles and videos on the subject, and I have my own experience with this. Even with local ads, I had about 75% of the budget used up on click farms.
It seems to be a low priority for Facebook to handle this, as they have not done so for over 5 years. And why should they? They get big money for it. Instead, they’ve gone the other way around and now forces pages to pay for advertising their content to people who already like their pages.
Too bad you did not mention this very, very big problem in your promotion of Facebook ads, like a responsible site that claim to help businesses with social media would.
Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment. Although some of your information is valid, this sort of issue cannot occur if you are running ads in an ethical way. The problem arises when unscrupulous advertisers target the countries that contain the click-farms. When I take on advertising for a client we are tight on our targeting and we also measure results by proven actions taken as a part of the advertising.
For example, conversions, how many people buy as the result of an ad, how many targeted responses do we get to our emails. When you have a thorough plan for measurement you will always know if you are getting a solid ROI.
For more on the Facebook ad scam you could read Jon Loomer’s article on it (although I’m sure you already have) https://www.jonloomer.com/2014/02/11/facebook-fraud-response/
I am a responsible site that does help businesses in the social media world, I’m not sure spreading your fake news is quite as responsible.
As I said, it doesn’t matter what region you’re targeting, if you’re global or local.
These click farms are not localized to any specific countries, it’s people all over the world.
And please, do tell me what unethical thing me and countless others who have studied this phenomenon has done, to “deserve” farm-clicks. I can’t speak entirely for people like Vtas, who made their results public, but I know that all I have done is pay FACEBOOK and FACEBOOK alone for advertising, gone through their process on their site without any third party involvement. The strictest test I ran was on a brand new page, set to a small town in England and advertising targeting a small part of this small town. Facebook showed up to 500 people could see the ad.
Before the second day was over, the budget had been exceeded and the campaign put on halt. 40 likes, 5 from the area specified, the rest from all over the world.
The widest experiment was on a 3-year-old page with a steady like stream already, targeting the top 10 countries of content engagement, with a wider budget.
This time the ad ran for the entire week and the page got 500 new likes.
About 400 of the new likers never interacted with any content on the page, just a week later. There was a severe decline in user interaction percentage, while the user interaction number was steady.
Both of these within the last year.
What did I do unethically here?