How much should you spend on ads on Facebook and Instagram?

Start with what a customer brings you

The question is not how much you want to spend, but how much a new customer may cost. That depends on what you earn from that customer. An online shop looks at the margin on an order. A service provider looks at what a job brings in. A hairdresser or restaurant also looks at how often a customer comes back.

1. 1Work out what you earn from one customer, after your costs and excluding VAT.
2. 2Choose how much of that you want to spend on ads. That is your maximum per customer.
3. 3Multiply by the number of customers you want per week. That is your weekly budget.

Give Meta enough to learn from

Meta looks for the people who are most likely to buy or enquire. For that it needs results. According to Meta’s Business Help Center, an ad set leaves the learning phase when it gets about 50 results in 7 days. With a small budget you don’t always get there, and that is fine. It does mean your numbers fluctuate in the first days and that you had better not change something every day.

Better small and sustained than big and short

€10 per day for a month teaches you more than €300 on a single weekend. You see which ad works, on which days people buy and what a customer really costs. Only then do you increase, in small steps.

• Local business: start around €10 to €15 per day, in a radius around your business. €10 is also the minimum in AdSweet.
• Service provider: work with what an enquiry may cost, not with a fixed amount.
• Online shop: start with a budget you can keep up for at least a month. In AdSweet an online shop starts from €30 per day.