Facebook Advertising Costs: Maximum and Minimum Spends

The Maximum Spend For Facebook Advertising

Facebook provides great of control over advertising spending.  A small business can set the maximum dollar budget per day or maximum dollar budget for the lifetime of an advertising campaign. However, you cannot have a maximum daily spend and lifetime campaign budget.  To use the lifetime campaign budget option, you will need to know the run dates of your advertising campaign. Facebook will try to evenly allocate the budget through the life of the campaign.

• Hint 1: A single Facebook account can have more than 1 advertising campaign associated with it.  You can set-up an account spend cap for your entire facebook account.
• Hint 2: A campaign with a daily budget limit will run forever and Facebook will keep charging your credit card until the campaign is turned off. A better idea is to figure out how much you want to spend over a month and create a lifetime campaign limit. As the month comes to an end, you can extend the campaign dates and add to the budget. When you reset the budget, the new budget starts from that moment with none of the past spending counting against the budget.

The Minimum Spend For Facebook Advertising
The minimum daily advertising spend on Facebook is a $1.00 per day. The minimum cost per click is 1 cent, however, you are unlikely to see any clicks if you bid that low.

How much is my Facebook advertising going to cost and what results should I expect?

With Facebook, you get to choose what you want to pay for advertising. You will never pay more than the maximum amount that you bid to have your ad appear or be clicked on. However, the bidding process is competitive. If you bid too low, your ad will never be seen. When you start an advertising campaign, Facebook will give you a range of what you should be bidding and default your campaign to the highest amount in the range.
US advertisers on average will have to pay $24.00 to get 100 people to click on their advertisement or will have to pay $24.00 to get their ad shown 36,364 times.
-  Data From Facebook Ads Benchmark Report From Salesforce Marketing Cloud
There are two ways in which Facebook allows you to bid for ads: cost per click (CPC) or  cost per 1,000 ad views (CPM). When setting up your ad campaign, you can choose which option you want. In the United States, the average click costs advertisers $0.24 and the average CPM cost $0.66.  However, these numbers varied greatly from advertiser to advertiser based on a number of factors.
One Factor Is Type Of Business
Retail stores (like Target) typically have to pay a very high CPM or CPC compared to the average food and beverage company . The average CPC cost was $0.31 cents and the CPM was $1.39 for retail stores.  On the other, Food & Beverage companies (like Coca-Cola) paid an average CPC of $0.21 and CPM of $0.65.

Why Facebook advertising might cost you a lot more if you’re advertising a local business

If you’re a local business, lets say a restaurant, the audience that you want to reach is much smaller than the entire country. It may be limited to a city or even a neighborhood within a city. The great news is that Facebook enables you to target right down to the city or even zip codes. Your advertising will not be wasted on people that live 100 miles away from your business, like it might be with television, radio or a regional paper. The bad news is that a small local audience may have many other local firms bidding for it, in addition to national advertisers that want everyone. In other words, you shouldn’t be surprised if your costs are closer to $1.00 CPC or  near  $2.00 per CPM.
Also, there is another reason why a local business may have a higher CPC than a national advertiser. Big advertisers spend a tremendous amount of time testing and optimizing their ads. If an ad’s not working well, they try another one. This increases their performance and brings their cost per click down over time.

What is my Facebook advertising cost for buying likes for my page?

Facebook provides the illusion that you can buy likes. When you click on the “Get More Page Likes” option, you are actually being charged for the number of impressions being shown (a CPM rate). However, Facebook is testing and trying to find the best audience to show the ads that will produce the most number of likes for the lowest cost.  (Want to learn how to get likes for free?  Go here.)
Many people say buying likes or clicks to one’s Facebook page is cheaper than buying clicks to a website that is off the Facebook site. The difference in price by some estimates  is as much as 30%. There could be two reasons for this price difference. Facebook prefers that its audience to stay on its site and provides a financial incentive to advertiser to make that choice. The second reason is audience doesn’t want to leave Facebook and may be more likely to click on ads which will keep them there.
How much will a like end up costing? The same report mentioned above indicated that the cost of advertising per like worked out to be in the 50 to 80 cent range per like.
For more on how to get customers for your business on Facebook, see our full series on the topic here.
This post is written by Marc Prosser  and is also available Here