Minimum Facebook ad budget? Here's what I think

 

In this blog, I’m going to go over what your minimum Facebook ad budget should be. This is something I get asked about a lot.

This can be confusing for seasoned advertisers, but is even more confusing if you’re a new advertiser.

In this post, I’m going to cover some of the things that I would recommend and I’m also going to go over how you should think about your starting budget and how that should change over time.

So, I’m in an example Facebook ad account right now.

If you follow my stuff, then you know that I’m a big fan of CBO (campaign budget optimization), which means I usually set budgets at the campaign level. Which is what you can see right here.

The first question I normally get is “is it OK to start with a very small budget?”

You’ll see here that I put in a $10 budget.

 

Can you start with a small budget?

The short answer to this question, is YES!

The most important step to get good at Facebook ads or anything else is to just get started. You want to get your feet wet and give it a go. You’ll most likely make a few mistakes but you’ll learn a bit about how to run Facebook ads.

So you absolutely can start with a small budget.

 

Now, don’t think that starting with $10 a day is going to do incredible things for your business. You should use this budget size for testing and experimentation. 

It’s very unlikely to dramatically move the needle for your business.

A 10x return on ad spend is VERY good for most businesses. There are a few businesses with very highly priced services that might get better than that, but 10x ROAS is a good result for most businesses.

Spending $10 a day and making $100 in sales is not super exciting for most businesses. After all that’s only $3,000 a month in gross revenue and you have expenses and overhead coming out of that.

But with Facebook ads you can easily scale…

 

Why testing Facebook ads at a small budget can still have a big impact on your business.

If you’re running a campaign with $10/day budget and it's performing well, that is a reason to be excited. Not because your campaign is generating a ton of revenue, but because you can very quickly and easily scale that budget.

And when you scale, larger budgets CAN generate a substantial amount of revenue for your business. You could potentially go from spending $10 a day to $50 to $500 or more. And provided your ROAS doesn’t fall off a cliff as you scale, those numbers become quite a bit more impactful.

What amount should you start your Facebook ads with?

 

It depends somewhat on your circumstances, but if you are a small business and you don’t have much money to play with – which is where I started – then $10 a day isn’t a bad place to start.

You just have to go into it with the right mindset – this budget is for testing and you can figure out what is working and what Is not working at that budget before you scale up.

Important Tip: Always use money you can afford to lose when testing. Don’t over-extend yourself. There’s no need to do so.

What if you have a larger business?

For those larger businesses a $10 a day budget is not a great place to start. The smaller the budget, the longer it takes for you to generate useful data.

What your starting budget should be in this scenario depends on your business size and your marketing budget. It’s important to start with a number that you’re actually going to care about and check.

 

Look for the sweet spot.

Ultimately when it comes to setting your starting budget for ads you’re looking for the sweet spot. You want a minimum budget where you can lose what you’ve budgeted and not have it hurt you, but enough that you care about the results.

For a small business that might be $300 a month or $1,800 over six months. For a larger business it’s probably going to be a larger amount.

The big thing here is to balance risk and reward. It’s not fun to lose money while testing a new ad platform or campaign, but if the ad platform ends up being a consistent generator of sales then it’s very much worth it.

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