If you’ve ever asked an agency what Facebook ads cost and been told “it depends”, I get why that’s annoying. It does depend, but it depends on things you can actually look at, and most people selling Facebook ads would rather you didn’t.
So let’s look at them. By the end of this you should be able to work out a sensible budget for your own business, and you’ll know what’s reasonable to pay someone to run it for you.
The quick version, if you’re in a hurry: there’s no set price. You choose the budget, Meta charges you in an auction, and the number that matters is what a lead costs you compared with what a customer is worth. One of our clients pays about $8.50 a lead. A family law firm would pay a lot more than that. Agency management sits on top of your ad spend, and ours starts at $2,000 a month.
What you’re actually paying Meta for
Facebook and Instagram ads are bought in an auction, which is a slightly strange way to buy anything. Every time someone opens the app, Meta works out which ads to show them. That depends on what you’re willing to pay, how likely that person is to do what you want them to do, and whether your ad is any good.
Most campaigns are charged per thousand people who see the ad. Ads Manager calls this CPM. It’s worth understanding, because it means you don’t pay per lead, even when leads are what you asked Meta for. You pay to be seen, and Meta does its best to show you to people who’ll act.
Here’s an account of ours so you’ve got something real to go on. It’s a blinds, shutters and security doors business, and the numbers are lifetime to date:
| Blinds, shutters and security doors (Meta lead ads) | |
|---|---|
| Ad spend | $4,219 |
| Cost per 1,000 impressions | About $29 |
| Cost per click | About $1.12 |
| Leads, October 2025 to July 2026 | 496 at $8.51 each |
Those are good numbers, and I’d be careful about treating them as normal. Home improvement products do well on Facebook because people like looking at them. If you’re a dentist or a lawyer, each customer is worth more, more advertisers are chasing the same people, and your cost per lead will be higher. That doesn’t make it worse value. It’s just a different sum.
Four things that push the price around
Who you’re trying to reach. A tight audience in one suburb costs more per person than a broad one across the state, because there are fewer of them and you’re competing harder for each one. Meta’s own targeting has got quite good at finding people on its own, so broad is often fine.
What you ask Meta to get you. Ask for clicks and you’ll get cheap clicks. Ask for leads and you’ll pay more per click but less per lead, which is the number you care about. The cheapest-looking figure in the report is hardly ever the one that pays your bills.
The ad itself. Meta rewards ads that people stop for, and it charges less to show them. A phone photo of your team on a job will often beat a glossy stock image, which still surprises people. On Facebook the picture and the first line of text do a lot of the targeting for you, because they tell the algorithm who the ad is for. We wrote about this in Meta ad formats that work in 2026.
The time of year. Costs climb in November and December when every retailer in the country piles into the auction for Black Friday and Christmas. If you run a service business and you’re setting a December budget, expect to pay more for the same result, or hold the budget until January.
The number to watch is cost per lead, and then what happens to the leads
Reach, likes, engagement rate. None of that matters much. The two numbers worth watching are what a lead costs and how many of those leads turn into paying customers.
I’ll tell you how we learnt the second half of that. We ran Facebook lead forms for our own agency. The leads were cheap, which looked like a win. Then I called the first five. Not one of them picked up.
Lead forms live inside the app, so people can fill one in with two taps while half watching TV. Some of them don’t really remember doing it. For our own ads we moved to a landing page, where people have to read something before they enquire. Fewer leads, much better conversations.
Having said that, the blinds business above ran instant forms and did well with them. Same tool, different outcome. From what we’ve seen, what decides it is how fast someone rings the lead back, and whether the form asked enough questions to filter out people who aren’t serious. If you want the longer version of this argument, it’s in cost per lead vs cost per booked job.
What an agency charges on top
Your ad spend goes to Meta, billed to your card. An agency’s fee is separate, and it usually comes in one of these shapes:
| How agencies charge | What I’d check |
|---|---|
| Flat monthly fee | What’s included. Creative, landing pages and reporting, or just pressing buttons in Ads Manager |
| Percentage of ad spend | The agency earns more when you spend more, whether or not it’s working |
| Setup fee plus monthly | Fair enough if the setup is real work, like tracking, pages and a proper build |
| Lock-in contract | If they’re confident in the results, ask them why they need one |
We charge a flat fee, from $2,000 a month plus ad spend, month to month. The ad account gets set up in your name, so if you ever leave, everything stays with you. If you want to compare it with the other channels, we’ve done the same exercise for Google Ads cost in Australia and SEO cost in Australia.
Whatever you end up paying, this is roughly what the fee should buy you each month: new ads being tested (not the same three images running until they die), the Meta pixel and Conversions API kept honest so leads are counted properly, the stuff that isn’t working switched off each week, and a report that talks about leads and sales rather than reach.
Working out a budget you can live with
The mistake I see is people starting from what an agency wants to charge. Start from your own numbers instead.
Say a new customer is worth $1,500 to you, and you win roughly one in every four leads. Each lead is then worth up to $375 before you start losing money on the first job. If you want ten new customers a month, you need about 40 leads. At $40 a lead that’s $1,600 a month in ad spend. At $100 a lead it’s $4,000.
Those are made-up numbers to show the sum. Put your own in and you’ll know pretty quickly whether Facebook is worth a go, or whether you’d be better off on Google first. We’ve compared the two in Google Ads vs Facebook ads for local businesses.
And one thing agencies tend to leave out: if your total budget is under about $3,000 a month, you’re often better off learning to run it yourself, because a management fee eats most of what you’d gain. Over about $5,000 a month, a specialist usually pays for themselves. In between, it comes down to how much of your week you want to spend inside Ads Manager.
Things people ask me about Facebook ad costs
What’s the minimum budget for Facebook ads?
Meta will let you start at a couple of dollars a day, but that’s not the useful answer. A campaign needs enough budget to get around 50 results a week before Meta’s bidding settles down and gets clever. Work out what 50 leads would cost you and start somewhere near that.
Do Facebook ads include Instagram?
Yes. They’re bought in the same place, Meta Ads Manager, and one campaign can run across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger at once. You can switch any of them off if you want to.
Are Facebook ads cheaper than Google Ads?
Per click, usually by a long way. Per customer, not always. Someone on Google is looking for you right now. Someone on Facebook is scrolling past you. Both can work, but they’re doing different jobs.
How long until I know if it’s working?
Give it at least two to four weeks of steady spend before you judge it, and judge it on booked work rather than clicks or form fills. Switching things off in week one is the most common way to waste a Facebook budget.
Want a number for your own business?
Get in touch and we’ll go through it together. Bring a rough idea of what a customer is worth to you and how many leads you win, and you’ll leave with a budget that makes sense, and a view on whether we’d run Facebook and Instagram ads for you or tell you to start somewhere else. Here’s how we run Facebook and Instagram ads.
