What Budget For Facebook Ads ? The Cost of Your Facebook Ad

A test Facebook Ads campaign : the solution 

From the objective and target audience to the duration and simultaneous campaigns, there are many factors to consider when defining your Facebook advertising budget. And it’s hard to factor all of these factors into your calculation.

Of course, you can make estimates and look at what has worked for your ads in the past. But the one thing we have always found useful is to run a test facebook ads campaign !

There’s no better way to see how different aspects of each campaign impact your results. We’ll prove it to you.

 

Where to set your ad budget in the Facebook Ads Manager

Facebook requires advertisers to set a budget for each campaign (or ad set). During the campaign creation process, you can set your budget in the Campaigns or Ad Set section of your Facebook Ads Manager account.

We recommend the budget assigned to a campaign. This allows you to use the power of Facebook’s algorithm. Indeed, by choosing this option, you let Facebook distribute the budget across all ad sets and spend the budget to achieve as many campaign goals as possible (campaign goals = conversions, awareness…)

 

Define your Facebook ads budget

Daily budgets

Daily budgets are ideal for ongoing Facebook ads campaigns, such as brand awareness, that do not warrant a specific start or end date.

Lifetime (campaign) budgets

Lifetime budgets require you to specify the duration of your campaign, which makes them more suitable for shorter, more targeted campaigns, such as retargeting or sales promotion.

Setting your budget is the easy part, but determining how to make it sustainable for each campaign is a bit more complex.

Our opinion on setting the facebook advertising budget

We recommend using the daily budget to run campaigns continuously and generate performance over the long term (both when it is profitable for your business or when you are generating growth for your startup). 

Let’s look at some strategies you can use to determine the most reasonable Facebook advertising budget for your campaigns !

How to create a realistic Facebook advertising budget 

There are a number of different factors to consider when setting your Facebook advertising budget.

For example, you need to have a good understanding of your objectives and you need to run trial campaigns to assess different budget amounts.

Define your campaign type (depending on your objectives)

The type of campaign you run has a direct impact on how you spend your budget. There are a number of factors, including audience and objective, that you need to consolidate before you start.

We’ll look at the different considerations you need to make for two of the most popular types of campaigns : retargeting ads and cold campaigns.

Budget for a cold Facebook campaign

For an unsuspecting audience, many advertisers run ads with a short-term goal, such as generating new sales and getting more leads. But did you know that it takes Facebook at least 72 hours to optimise campaigns. So plan a test run of at least 1 week.

On the first day of the campaign, Facebook’s algorithm refines the audience for the ad based on the first 500 to 1,000 people. From there, Facebook will expand its targeting to include similar users. Finally, on the third day, you will be able to track the performance of your ad with the optimal audience. However, we recommend 15 days to analyse the performance, while you adjust the settings of the test campaign.

There is a lot to do to determine your Facebook advertising budget, so once you have determined the type of campaign, the next step is to think about the results you want to achieve. (see below)

Budget for a retargeting campaign

For retargeting (or remarketing) Facebook ads, such as those aimed at increasing brand awareness, many advertisers consider running long-term, low-budget campaigns.

Creating a realistic budget for this type of campaign depends on the size of your audience and how aggressive you want your ad placements to be.

The key is to track frequency and performance, so you know when to increase your daily budget or take a break to avoid periods of low engagement.

Consider the first few days of such a campaign as your test run, after which you can adjust your budget and spend based on actual performance metrics.

The number to watch : repetition ! Repetition is the average number of times each person has seen your ad. We recommend a repetition of 2 to 3 over a period of a week and 4 to 6 over a period of a month (depending on your advertising “aggressiveness”). It’s important to keep an eye on these figures, as too much repetition can lead to target audience fatigue, or even worse, frustration with your online advertising being hidden or flagged.

 

It is up to you to adjust your budget for repetition.

 

Set a target for your results, to define your budget 

To set a facebook budget that works for your business, you need to focus on what you want to achieve with your campaign.

Instead of saying, “I want to spend € X on my ad campaign,” you should ask yourself, “What budget do I need to make an impact on my [desired outcome]? Should I generate 100 B2B leads with a CPA of 20€? Do I need to generate sales with a ROAS of at least 7?

Examples of objectives (clients of our facebook ads agency)

– Client 1 : generate sales of stainless steel electric planchas with a CPA of up to 40€.

– Client 2 : generate B2C leads for less than 2€/lead.

– Client 3 : generate sales of hypnosis sessions in MP3 with a minimum ROAS of 5.

– Client 4 : reach 100,000 parents with a promotional video of an application.

 

Have you defined your objective? Let’s take an example here :

A company specialising in wine courses has a goal of generating sales for a cost of less than 20€ per sale (CPA = €20).

 

Launch a test campaign

The best way to determine a Facebook advertising budget is to run a test campaign, even if it only costs £100, although more is better. Test campaigns help you establish a baseline, based on actual results, for important metrics.

What to do: Validate your commercial offer, prepare your best landing page, define its audience close to your core target and create an ad. For testing, we recommend the minimum budget to get results, i.e. 10€ per day and therefore 70€ over 7 days (one week). Longer test campaigns provide more information to work with and better analyse the results.

You may find that engagement increases after four days or decreases a little between the second and third day. This is valuable data when budgeting and calculating the real impact of your ads on your goals.

 

Analyse the results of your Facebook campaigns

But which figures should I analyse? Where do I start? Here are some guidelines :

– How many people did you reach with the advertising?

– How many sales (and turnover) did you generate and what is the ROI?

– How many visits did you generate?

– How many sales leads did you receive and at what CPA?

– What is your conversion rate?

 

Once you have analysed the figures, you can define your Facebook Ads budget according to your objectives and the first results obtained. Of course, you can take into account the improvement of the performance of the campaigns with the optimization of the ads, the targeting criteria and your website.

 

Unlimited budget

What if you don’t have a target budget? You may not have a budget limit. We explain: some of the agency’s clients have no limit as long as the online advertising campaigns are profitable. One of our clients can go up to 3K€/day on the profitability of the maintained campaigns. Of course, you have to watch the repetition so as not to overexpose your ads, depending on your advertising targeting (centres of interest, for example).