How Much Do Facebook Ads Cost?

The beauty of running Facebook ads is that you can set up an ad campaign to run for as little as $1 per day or spend as much as you want, it's totally up to your own budget. Some of our clients only spend $10 per day and get enough return on their investment to have us create and manage the ads for them, and still make a good profit on top of that. 

To give you a rough guide the cost you will be looking at paying on Facebook is $1 for 50-300 impressions depending on the objective and size of audience. (more further down the page on that)

Are there any up front costs to run Facebook Ads?

There is no up front costs to start using Facebook. All you need to do is link a credit card to your Facebook Ad Account and it will charge your card once you hit the billing threshold. This will usually start with a small amount (under $100) and is raised the more you spend as you can prove to Facebook you can pay your account.

Being charged after your ads have been shown is helpful with cashflow for many businesses, as you can make a sale and get paid before you have to pay for the ad spend. A lot of small businesses are switching to Facebook Ad more tradition forms of advertising like TV, radio or print media to avoid the large up front costs and risks.

Am I paying for each click on Facebook?

On Facebook you are charged for impressions of your ads, not clicks like Google. Depending on your campaign objective and size of audience, the cost of impressions will vary. 

Cost per impressions for objectives like conversions, leads and messages are generally higher because more advertisers are using them because they usually require and exchange of personal information like name, email address or phone number or money for a purchase.

The objectives that are cheapest to use are brand awareness, reach, engagement and video views.

IMPORTANT NOTE - Although there are cheaper ways to get more impressions you should never measure the success of your ads though by impressions, rather than return on ad spend. Your ad may be shown more times but that doesn't mean that it will convert better. It is always best to choose the right objective to match your marketing goal as this will give you better return on ad spend in the long run.

Daily and Lifetime Budgets and how they are calculated?

There are two ways to set your budget when creating an ad campaign, either daily budget or lifetime budget. Now you are in complete control of what you want to spend and the figure is up to your own budget although once you determine these budgets, you aren't locked into that spend for the day or lifetime of the ad, you can stop the ads at any time.

When you set either a daily or lifetime budget for your campaign, Facebook will spend your budget evenly over the allocated time. For example for you set your daily budget to $50 it will evenly distribute your ads across the calendar day to spend that amount and you will get charged per impression.

For lifetime budgets it will evenly distribute the spend across the allocated life of the campaign. If you choose to stop running your ad campaign it will only charge you for what has been shown. 

For example if you choose to set your campaign up with a daily budget of $50 per day and you decide it's half way through the day that you want to stop the ad for some reason, all you need to do is turn the campaign off. Once the campaign is turned off, you will only be charged for the impressions that have already been shown during the day.

Same goes for lifetime budget, if you choose a lifetime budget of $250 on a campaign that was set to run for 7 days and you want to stop after 3 days you will only be charged for what Facebook has used to show your ads.

On the flip side to that if your ad campaign is doing really well you can increase the budget. Once you increase the budget Facebook will simply recalculate and adjust to serve the ads over the allocated time period and spend the new amount accordingly.