Minimum Facebook Ad Budget? Here’s What I Think

In this tutorial, 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 guide, 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 campaign budget optimization, which means I usually set budgets at the campaign level. Which is what you can see right here.

Resource: Here’s a good article on how to use the Campaign Budget Optimization feature if you aren’t familiar with it. It’s a great way to optimize your campaigns!

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 £5 budget.

Can You Start with a Small Facebook Budget?

The short answer to this 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 make a few mistakes most likely and you’ll learn a bit about how to run Facebook ads.

So you absolutely can start with a small budget.

How Much of a Difference Will a Small Ad Budget Make in My Business?

Now, don’t think that $5 a day is going to do incredible things for your business. This budget size is for testing and for experimentation.

It’s very unlikely to be a needle mover 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 $5 a day and making $50 in sales is not super exciting for most businesses. After all that’s only $1,500 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

If you’re running a campaign with $5/day and is 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 meaningful amount of revenue for your business. You could potentially go from spending $5 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 significant.

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 $5 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 will figure out what works and what doesn’t work at that budget level 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 businesses that aren’t just getting, $5 a day 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.

More Free Facebook Ads Training

To help business owners succeed with Facebook ads I’ve created a FREE webinar training that you can register for here.

When you attend this webinar you’ll learn:

• 3 different Facebook ad strategies that we use every day. These strategies have generated millions of dollars in revenue and are tried and proven to work.
• How to customize the Facebook ads strategy to your particular business. There is no such thing as a one size fits all approach to Facebook ads.
• How Facebook and Instagram have changed and how to adjust your ad strategy to what works in 2021.

The Bottom Line on How to Set Your Minimum Facebook Ad Budget

When you are set your minimum Facebook ad budget you want to keep a few things in mind:

• Make sure the budget is money you can afford to lose
• Make sure the budget is enough for you to care about the results
• Remember you can always scale up a winning campaign

Setting a small ad budget of $5 a day is perfectly appropriate when you are starting out.