If you're a beginner, you might be wondering this critical question - how much should I spend on Facebook Ads? After all, spending too little might risk missing out on conversions, while spending too much might cause overspending. You want to find the perfect number and make the most out of every dollar! Luckily, this article might be able to nudge you in the right direction as we'll go more in-depth into budgeting.
We'll go over how to determine your ad spend based on your revenue goals and allocate your money accordingly to meet your goals. In addition, we'll provide some tips for running ads on a small budget and avoiding common mistakes.
Without further ado, let's get started!
Budget Overview
Though we briefly went over the budget in our Facebook Ads blog post, it's a good idea to revisit the basics. Firstly, there are two ways to allocate your budget- by campaign or individual ad set.
Campaign Budget and Ad Set Budget
Campaign Budget:
This allows you to set one overarching campaign budget that distributes in real-time to ad sets with the best opportunities with the help of campaign budget optimization (CBO). Utilizing this method will allow you to decrease your workload by reducing the number of budgets you need to manage manually. Click here to learn more about CBO.
Ad Set Budget:
As the name implies, this method allows you to set individual budgets for your ad sets if you want more control. While a campaign budget allocates your budgets accordingly evenly throughout your campaign, an ad set budget allows you to direct your funding as soon as opportunities become available for that ad set.
To learn more about the budget types and how to choose between the two, click here.
Daily Budget and Lifetime Budget
Now that you understand budget allocation between ad sets, we'll select how each set will use the money over a budget duration. There are two options: Daily Budget and Lifetime Budget.
Daily Budget:
The daily budget requires you to set an average dollar amount per day and Facebook will do its best to optimize it over a week. Facebook will search for the best opportunities and deviate from your average of about 25%.
Using Facebook's example, if your daily budget is $10, Facebook may spend up to $12.50 on a given day. Despite this slight deviation, your spending will still average over the week.
This may be a good fit for you if you're running ongoing campaigns, significantly increasing brand awareness.
Lifetime Budget:
Lifetime Budget is the total amount you're willing to spend over the entire run-time of your campaign or ad set and is perfect for predefined campaigns. For example, if you're running a discount sales campaign, you would typically have a defined budget and end date.
Once you've done that, Facebook's algorithm will take over and show the ad where it believes you can get the highest return for your ad dollar. If daily consistency isn't your primary concern, you should consider this option.
The Perfect Facebook Ad Budget
The perfect Facebook ad budget does not overspend to achieve your goals. Although it doesn't sound too hard, it does require some trials and errors. Here are some steps that should help minimize your downside.
Here are the steps:
Define Your Goals Start off by determining what concrete goals you hope to achieve, such as sales goals, Facebook interaction goals, etc. After that, match your goals with the appropriate campaign objective. As you can see below, there are more specific marketing objectives within each campaign objective, one of which you'll have to choose so Facebook can optimize your ads.So, for example, if your goal is lead generation, select Lead Generation, create your lead ad, and watch Facebook collect data on potential clients, which you can follow up on and view later.
Understand the Cost This comes as a no-brainer! Every business must analyze and understand the cost of running Facebook ads, which may vary depending on your marketing objectives, audience size, and other factors. For beginners, it's recommended you understand that Facebook works on an auction system. This is where Facebook will showcase the ad with the highest "value" after an auction with relevant ads. To read more about the "value," click here.To get a sense of the average costs, check out this 2020 Wordstream article. We also recommend browsing and keeping up with Salesforce, Nanigans, and Adpresso for regular social media ad spend updates. Though these won't give you the exact cost of your campaign(s), these should serve as a good benchmark for new advertisers.If you would like to read more, we believe this Buffer article does a beautiful job explaining the advertising costs for Facebook Ads.
Set an Advertising Budget Once you have thoroughly understood the cost, it's time to set your advertising budget. According to a Hubspot blog, as of February 2021, the average marketing budget is 11.7% of the total budget. If you're trying to grow aggressively, you might spend more. If you're looking to grow incrementally or maintain your success as a mature company, you might spend less.However, if you're new, we recommend starting small, testing, and tracking your metrics. This allows you to see which ads are effective.Start off with a small ad spend (ex. $5) over 3-5 days to allow Facebook to gather data on your ad's performance; the longer you let it run, the more data you will have, which will work heavily in your favor. After 5 days, you should have enough data to analyze and evaluate the campaign's performance. Running multiple ads can help you better understand what works since you have more to compare.
Here are a couple of metrics we recommend tracking:
Click-through rate (CTR) - This is the rate at which people are clicking on your Facebook ad. You want this number to be as high as possible, indicating that the ad is working well.
Conversion Rate - Like the CTR, you want this number to be as high as possible. The conversion rate tells you how often your ad leads to a conversion following the click. Therefore, if you see a low number, there could be a disconnect between the ad and the landing page. After collecting and analyzing enough data, you'll have a sense of what works for you and your goals.
Increase your Facebook Ad spend
After some time, you should have a general sense of what is and isn't working; 5 days is enough. To change your budget, open Facebook Ad Manager and follow these simple steps:
Hover over the ad set or campaign you want to edit.
Click Edit.
Change your budget.
Click Publish and Close.
It's that simple! We also recommend you check out our other blog posts for optimization ideas and examples to help make the most of your budget. If you would like to read about how to allocate your budget based on the types of Facebook ads, we recommend checking out this Social Media Examiner blog post.
You might be wondering, "What if I only have a set amount of money for my advertising campaign? Say, $100?"
Well, lucky, that is something we will cover in the next section!
Though this may sound daunting, it's actually not once you learn how to effectively allocate your budget and select winning campaigns; without a doubt, it takes time. Plus, you got to start from somewhere to grow your brand and/or business!
Without further ado, here are 3 tips for successful advertising on a small budget:
Repurpose Your Best Content
You should constantly audit your social media content, but you can take it one step further by throwing money behind the best-performing post(s). Though you can start from the beginning, we recommend sticking to the more recent posts.
While browsing through, check out the total engagement numbers(comments, likes, link clicks, or views) that your post has gained organically. If it does well as a post, it'll also do well as an ad. In other words, you have an example of what works for you! Imagine how far it'll take you if you repurpose the content with a bit of money behind it!
You can utilize the Boost feature offered by Facebook to quickly turn any post from your business page into an ad. Additionally, you can customize your audience, placement, and posting schedule to make every dollar count!
Understand What Success Looks Like for YOU
With a small budget, it's essential to understand what success looks like for you! Everyone's version of success differs from one another. Clearly define your goals and KPIs to ensure that your ad content is working toward supporting these objectives.
Here are some metrics that you can track, other than the usual metrics—such as likes, comments, and shares :
Reach
Audience engagement
Site traffic
Leads generated
We need to repeat this one more time. Align your content with your objectives. You can include a solid and actionable call-to-action anywhere in the ad.
Monitor And Optimize Your Facebook Campaigns
Monitoring your ad performance is the most crucial phase and one that many forget to do. When it comes to advertising, in general, nothing is ever set and done; you'll always need to audit, revise or delete an ad set. If you have a small budget, you definitely would not want a single cent to waste, especially on ads that are not achieving any meaningful results.
Now that we've provided you with several tips for running campaigns on a small budget, we would like to give you some common mistakes that come up repeatedly. That way, you can avoid them yourselves!
3 Common Mistakes
Giving Your Campaigns Too Little Time
Giving your ads enough time to run is crucial for obtaining data that you can later leverage in your favor to grow your business. As a matter of fact, this might be the primary reason why many miss their sales goals.
For example, the amount of data you have may affect how you target your audience. When your ad campaign targets the wrong audience, you lose time and money. Not to mention, you might not even get the results you're looking for!
We believe that $100 is enough to collect the right amount of data, but you must make sure to keep the ad running. As suggested earlier, 5 days should be enough. After viewing the results in Breakdowns in Ads Manager, you can make the needed adjustments.
Over- or Under- Segmenting Your Audience
Yes, both are mistakes that many advertisers make. You don't want your audience to be too broad or too narrow. Don't worry, we'll explain! Let's start with under-segmenting your audience.
Unless you're a household name, it's challenging to gain relevance among a broad audience; everyone has different interests, preferences, etc. You want people with the highest purchasing potential to see your ads and take action before your budget runs out, so segmenting your audience can improve your return on ad spend. Remember, Facebook has over 2.8 billion users worldwide!
On the other hand, if you over-segment your audience, your tight hold may prove damaging. Over-segmenting will keep you in the Facebook learning phase, causing you to potentially miss KPIs and under-serve your audience as a whole. Moreover, the smaller your audience, the more you'll have to pay! According to this WordStream blog, reaching the same audience is more expensive if you've broken up targeting options into 10 different ad sets rather than 3 to 4.
Another question you might have is, "How do I know if my audience is too broad or narrow?" We have great news! Facebook can calculate the potential reach for you, as seen down below.
If you think the potential audience reach is broad, you might want to downsize by targeting people by their interests, demographic, etc.
Not Focusing On The Creatives
Great visuals are a massive reason for successful Facebook Ads campaigns. Consumers tend to view images first before reading any text. Though we did mention repurposing your best-performing content, it's best not to rely on them and let your ad creativity go stale. After all, customers want to see something new every once.
There are many websites where you can find inspiration, such as Adobe's Behance and Facebook's own Facebook Ads Inspiration. In addition, you can leverage design tools! Canva is an excellent website for design creation with hundreds of pre-made templates, copyright-free graphics, and stock photos! Remember, even though this process is the most time-consuming, this phase will make the most impact on your campaign before running them.
Conclusion
Following these steps will help you determine your budget. However, you must understand your own numbers and goals and the types of data you need to make decisions. If your data is accurate and you act accordingly, you should see wonderful results, whether your budget is big or small!
We wish you the best of luck! Did you find this blog helpful? Let us know in the comment!
Looking to learn more about how to generate more leads for your business?
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