How Much Do Facebook & Instagram Ads Cost?

We live at a time when online competition is fierce and keeps growing, and the same question always comes up: how much does it cost to advertise on Facebook & Instagram? What makes your e-shop or website stand out online is effective advertising. The main type of advertising you can run online on a fairly small budget is:

In this article we will focus on advertising through facebook (and, by extension, instagram) and how much it costs to advertise there.

Facebook & Instagram advertising strategy and setting goals

Unfortunately, many professionals have not fully taken on board the value of planning and setting goals. They have neglected to set clear, measurable goals and the results they want from their efforts.

These goals can vary: more traffic to a website, more phone calls and messages from potential customers, raising awareness of a new product or service, or even more video views. Of course, the main aim is always more sales or more leads, and that calls for different tactics and different parts of the budget.

We have a whole range of advertising techniques at our disposal, and it is wrong to believe that one single advertising can meet all our goals. Let’s put ourselves in a potential customer’s shoes: would we buy something from a shop we don’t know? Would we trust it if we were seeing it for the first time?

Absolutely not, and that makes perfect sense. Before we start running sponsored ads aimed at selling, we first need to become known as a brand, educate our customers and then present our products to them. That is the purpose of awareness and audience-building ads, which usually make up 20% of the total advertising budget.

You may ask yourself: “If this kind of advertising doesn’t bring me sales straight away, how does it help me?” Its benefit is long term: it builds and constantly refreshes an audience that is interested in your products. It makes sure that your business’s audience doesn’t become saturated and that your cost per action doesn’t shoot up to unmanageable levels.

The next 60% of the total advertising budget should go on directly promoting your products and services, highlighting their quality and why users should choose them over the competition. Here we use objectives such as “Traffic” and “Sales” (including catalogue ads), and formats such as Instant Experience.

Finally, the remaining 20% of the advertising budget should go on supporting remarketing. As we said, nobody buys something from the first ad they see. So we need to remind people who looked at a particular product, or added it to their basket without buying it, that we are here and their choices are waiting for them!

Social media advertising

The first thing to work out when answering how much it costs to advertise on facebook and instagram is who our audience is and which location we want to target.

The location where we want to advertise on Meta’s platform

Ad pricing is directly linked to the geographical areas we want to reach. To illustrate, if we choose to target busy Athens, the cost of showing our ad will be considerably higher than for Thessaloniki. Going further, an ad for Thessaloniki will cost quite a lot more than an ad shown on Facebook that targets Kavala. So geographical focus is a key factor in shaping our advertising budget.

To put it in figures, an ad budget of €6 a day is very good for the city of Kavala but not enough for the city of Thessaloniki.

Audience: the persona we want to target

Once we have chosen the geographical scope of our ad, the next crucial stage is defining the target persona. This means deciding who the ideal customer is and who should be seeing our advertising.

If we focus on an audience that values luxury, listens to classical music and travels often, our group will be smaller than if we targeted people who prefer pop music and clothes. This holds true even if the two audiences are in different cities, such as Athens and Thessaloniki: the audience is usually much more limited in the first case.

So, talking in figures once again, in the first advertising scenario the cost could be €5 a day, while in the second it could be €15 a day.

Facebook advertising costs case by case

What we can see is that every advertising case is very different. The product or service we want to promote plays the main role. Who we want to show it to, and where, will determine the cost of advertising. One thing to watch is the type of product we want to sell, because it will also determine the right channel for our ads, such as Instagram, Facebook or google ads.

The 1st step in working out the cost is to run an A/B test. With a persona for our product or service in mind, we will see which audience brings us more results and spends our budget more effectively. If we look at the image below, we can see straight away which ad set is the most efficient and which spent our budget best.

One rule we can say exists is that the more specific we get about our audience, the better our results (there are always exceptions to a rule, which is why we run tests).

Analysing the cost per purchase

The cost per purchase is one of the important factors to look at. Does the product we are advertising leave a profit after the cost of the advertising?

Compared with traditional forms of advertising such as radio or a magazine, social media advertising can be measured very accurately! Let’s look at an example below, with two images where, as well as the cost per purchase, we can see how much money we made through the ad!

By looking at detailed data, we can make decisions about our advertising. As soon as we see that our ad is performing, we can increase the budget on that campaign until we see that raising it no longer improves the results.

Reducing advertising costs

There are many ways to reduce advertising costs. The most important is for the ad to lead somewhere (a landing page) that gives the user what the ad showed them, immediately and quickly. That way we get better results per click.

Another way to reduce costs is to show our ads to narrower age groups, or at times when we are more likely to get results.

This way we can cut advertising costs by up to 50%!

How many ads should an ad set contain?

Facebook advertising with Web-Mate

Let us handle your Facebook and Instagram advertising or your website promotion at web-mate. Click the link below, fill in the details we need and we will get in touch with you.