The answer to “How much do Facebook ads cost?” is… “It depends.”
It depends on what industry you’re in, how competitive it is, who you’re targeting, where they’re located, what your budget is, and many more ultra-specific factors.
Keep reading for average Facebook ads costs in 2024. Learn how you measure up, and find out how to lower your Facebook advertising costs with data-driven decisions.
Bonus: Use our free Facebook Ads budget calculator to figure out exactly how much you need to spend to get the results you want. Let us do the math for you!
How does the pricing of Facebook ads work?
There are two ways to classify the cost of advertising on Facebook:
- Overall cost: The total you spend on a Facebook ad campaign and/or over a specific time period.
- Individual ad cost: The cost of each result (e.g. impression, click, lead, etc).
There are three ways to buy Facebook ads:
- Auction. The most popular option. You specify a maximum spend and Facebook attempts to get you the most results for the lowest cost. Your ad is displayed when you win the “bidding war” against other advertisers for a placement.
- Reservation. Currently only available for awareness and engagement goal campaigns, reservation ad buying allows you to reliably reach large audiences (e.g. over 200,000 people) for a consistent spend. It is not the most economical option per action, and requires a high overall ads budget.
- Target rating points. Uses Nielsen target rating points to buy video ad placements, similar to TV campaigns. Currently this option is only available to select advertisers.
For those new to Facebook ads, we recommend setting an overall maximum campaign budget and using automated bidding strategies (a.k.a. the auction method).
Only experienced ad buyers who understand the expected ROI and conversion rates of their strategies should manually control bid caps or use reservation and/or target point bidding.
Whether you’re a beginner or expert, get in-depth insights into both organic and paid social media ROI with Hootsuite Advanced Analytics. See your Facebook ad performance alongside other platforms’ ad performance, and understand the true impact of how your organic and paid content works together.
What determines the cost of Facebook ads?
So, so many things can affect your Facebook ad cost. Let’s run through them.
Campaign objectives
This is the most critical factor for controlling Facebook ads costs. That doesn’t mean one objective is cheaper than the other. It means Facebook uses the objective to optimize showing your ads to people most likely to take your desired action.
Choosing the right objective means reaching the right people and getting the results you want, whether you’re spending a little or a lot on ads.
You can choose from six objectives:
- Awareness
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Leads
- App promotion
- Sales
As previously mentioned, only Awareness or Engagement objectives work for reservation bidding. For all others, you’ll only see the Auction buying type option.
Target audience
Not every audience you’re trying to reach costs the same. On average, it will cost more to put your ads in front of a narrower audience than a broad one. That’s not a bad thing.
Think about it. You can spend $0.20 per click targeting everyone from 18-65 living in your area and get maybe 1% of those converting into sales.
Or, you can micro-target your ads to reach only your absolutely ideal customers—20-40 year old digital nomads in your city who spend way too long researching backpacks—and pay $1 per click, but get a 10% conversion rate. This Facebook ads strategy will cost you more, but it’s obviously the better deal when it comes to ROI.
You can set up targeting options when creating an ad in Facebook Ads Manager, including demographic information, location, interests, and more. However, Facebook now offers what they call Advantage+ audiences, which uses AI to automatically find your ideal audience and, on average, costs 28% less per result.
Advantage+ targeting makes it fast and easy to start advertising on Facebook. Set a few basic parameters, such as a broad country to show ads within, and Facebook does the rest.
Optionally, you can add suggestions for the AI to take into account when it’s looking for your audience.
For example, if I’m trying to sell backpacks to world travelers, I can suggest Facebook target people interested in travel. Unlike the original method of ad targeting, things you enter here aren’t absolute. It means Facebook will try to show your ads to people interested in travel, but if the campaign isn’t performing well, Facebook will go beyond these suggestions to find people who it thinks will be interested in your ads, too.
Advantage+ targeting gives you the best of both worlds: the ability to target specific groups of people, while also using AI to find interested people outside of these parameters. (And avoiding a total campaign flop!)
If you want totally manual targeting, you can still do that by clicking Switch to original audience options at the bottom, but we recommend using Advantage+ targeting.
Ad placement
Ad placement refers to all the areas across Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp) where your ads appear. Wondering what all your options are? Check out our Facebook ads sizes guide for 2024.
Again, Facebook’s Advantage+ campaigns make this easy: leave it in Advantage+ mode and Facebook will automatically choose the best placements. “Best” means both for your ad creative, and to get in front of the right audience.
You can set a few options to ensure placements stay consistent with your brand, or switch to fully manual placement choices (which we don’t recommend).
Seasonality
The same Facebook ad doesn’t cost the same all year.
Halloween costume ads on June 10th? $0.75 per click.
Halloween costume ads from Sept 1 – Oct 30th? $1.50 per click.
Not real data but you get the idea. When your ad’s topic is more in demand, and there are more competitors also vying for ad reach, you’ll pay more. Other examples include advertising travel services during summer, and of course, Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
On the two biggest shopping days of the year, ads leading up to and including those dates will cost a lot more than usual due to there being much more competition. On Amazon.com alone, ads running during Black Friday/Cyber Monday cost 145% more than other times of year.
For budget-conscious advertisers, this can mean pausing campaigns during high-cost periods if you’re not trying to compete with big brands. For example, if you’re a small business not offering Black Friday discounts, consider pausing your regular ads campaign during Black Friday week to avoid unnecessarily high costs.
Time of day
Since Facebook ads cost is highly affected by competition, times of day with less competition can mean more cost-effective advertising. That often translates to between midnight and 6am.
By default, your Facebook ads will run 24/7, but you can create a custom schedule for a specific ad or campaign in Meta Ads Manager.
If you’re using an Advantage+ campaign, Facebook will automatically adjust when to show your ads, based on the results you’re getting.
Wondering when your audience is online to customize your schedule? You can see this in Facebook analytics, or in Hootsuite Analytics for all your social platforms. Plus, auto-schedule content for your personalized best time to publish.
Ad quality
Facebook judges the overall quality of your ad in three ways:
- Quality ranking: Facebook’s determination of overall quality based on how relevant it thinks your ad is to your selected target audience, including how it performs vs. competitor ads.
- Engagement ranking: How many people saw your ad vs. took some type of action on it, and how that compares to other advertisers.
- Conversion rate ranking: How your ad is expected to convert compared to others competing for the same audience and objective.
These quality scores are somewhat subjective based on the Facebook algorithm, but it’s an indicator of how competitive each of your ads is against the competition. You can see these scores in the Ads tab in Meta Ads Manager. If an ad doesn’t have a score, Facebook doesn’t have enough data yet.
Facebook stresses that these rankings are about “perceived quality” rather than actual quality, but there are a few things you can do to help boost your quality score:
- Avoid over-sensationalized ad copy
- Avoid clickbait tactics designed to trick users into clicking or engaging
- Use proper punctuation, spelling, and a professional tone (which can still be fun… just avoid all caps or 700 exclamation points, okay?)
Ad quality scores are grouped into five cohorts:
- Above average: your ad is better than 55% of competitors
- Average: 35th-55th percentile
- Below average: bottom 35%
- Below average: bottom 20%
- “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.” (It will actually still say “Below average,” and this is the bottom 10%.)
Check your quality scores regularly as part of your ad analytics routine. It’s better to focus on tweaking the below average scores to bring up their scores, instead of only creating new ads.
Budget
As you’ll see from the benchmarks in the next section, some industries tend to have higher average costs than others. It’s important to keep that in mind when setting your budget and evaluating performance.
You can choose either a daily budget and/or optional total campaign budget (known as lifetime budget). However, daily doesn’t mean your ad spend will stay the same; Facebook may spend up to 75% more than your daily budget on certain days when it feels it can get you better results. But your total weekly spending won’t go over your daily budget multiplied by seven.
You can define a budget by:
- Campaign
- Ad set
Campaign budgets have an extra option: Advantage+ campaign budgets. We recommend turning this on to automatically distribute your budget among ad sets to get the best results and, ultimately, best balance of cost and ROI. You’ll need two or more ad sets to use this feature.
Bidding strategy
As mentioned previously, there are three campaign bidding strategies to choose from:
- Auction
- Reservation
- Target rating points
Most advertisers will only see Auction or Reservation options in their Meta Ads Account, and you can only choose Reservation for awareness or engagement objective campaigns.
Based on your budget, bidding strategy, targeting options, and your previous ad performance, Facebook will show you an estimate of how many people your ad will reach and how many actions may be taken. In this case, clicks, since this campaign objective is web traffic.
Competition
Yes, even the smallest businesses can succeed with Facebook ads. Also, yes, it will be more difficult when you’re up against ad giants.
Small local insurance brokerage wanting to get into ads? Cool. State Farm is the second biggest ad buyer in the U.S., spending $668.6 million on digital advertising in 2023.
How’s your $ 50-a-day Facebook ads budget lookin’ now?
This isn’t to dissuade you. The key to keeping costs down and ROI high is to differentiate yourself from your competition. Be aware of what your competitors are doing, but don’t let that dictate how you run your ads. Get smart, know what you’re up against, and make a plan to conquer by reaching your ideal audience… not State Farm’s ideal audience.
How much do Facebook ads cost in 2024?
So, like, literally… how much do Facebook ads cost? Let’s cover a few common Facebook ads cost benchmarks.
It’s important to remember your Facebook ads cost may be higher or lower than these averages. Having a higher cost doesn’t automatically mean your campaign is “bad.” Your audience could be harder to reach and require a bit more budget to get there.
But these benchmarks are a good tool to start evaluating your Facebook ads budget, along with other metrics and, most importantly, your campaign ROI. (Or just let Hootsuite Analytics get all this info for you automatically in beautiful, customizable, automatic reports…)
Average Facebook CPC
Forty cents. That’s how much a Facebook ad will cost you.
Okay, not really, that’s just the average cost-per-click (CPC) for Facebook ads, according to a study by Databox.
But not all industries are created equal: a software Facebook ad will cost you an average of $0.85, whereas one about food will cost only $0.18.
Source: Facebook advertising cost-per-click (CPC) worldwide in March 2023, Statista
A study by Revealbot arrived at a similar number. Here, the average CPC for Facebook ads was $0.52 in June 2024, based on the last 12 months of campaigns targeting people in the United States.
Interestingly, there were two large spikes of significantly higher CPC costs: an average $0.90 the last week of July 2023, and $0.88 during Black Friday/Cyber Monday in November 2023.
Source: Revealbot
Average Facebook CPM
Cost-per-mille (CPM) means your cost for each 1,000 views or impressions.
In 2024, Databox calculates the average Facebook ads CPM is $5.61. Facebook ads have a slightly lower average CPM cost than social media ads in general, which was $6.06 in Q4 2023.
As you can see in Statista’s study from 2023,, there’s a lot of variability in CPM based on industry, with tech ads having the highest average CPM of $9.98.
Source: Facebook advertising cost-per-mille (CPM) worldwide in March 2023, by industry, Statista
Revealbot’s data doesn’t break down average CPM by industry, but found the average Facebook ads CPM cost to be $8.96 as of June 2024. Quite a significant difference from Databox’s, although several industries weren’t represented in Databox’s study.
When looking at CPM by campaign objective, lead generation campaigns have the highest average CPM, ranging from $9.78 to $31.58, depending on seasonality. Brand awareness campaigns have the lowest average CPM, ranging from $0.74 (amazing!) to $2.58.
Source: Revealbot
Average Facebook CTR
Based on the most recent data available, the average Facebook ads click-through rate (CTR) across all industries is 1.49%. The average CTR for all social media advertising was 0.98% in Q4 2023, meaning Facebook ads get 52% more clicks (on average).
As you can see, the industry with the highest average CTR is apparel with 2.06% and the industry with the lowest average CTR is healthcare with 0.73% (besides a few industries which weren’t measured in this study).
Source: Facebook advertising click-through rate (CTR) worldwide in March 2023, by industry, Statista
Average Monthly Facebook Ads Spend
How does your spending stack up against the competition? You don’t need to spend as much or more than your competition on Facebook ads to be successful. But again, this will give you an idea of where you fall on the spending spectrum.
Overall, the average monthly Facebook ads spend is $1,691.08.
Source: Databox
How to lower your Facebook ad spend
Boost a Facebook post
“Boosting” a Facebook post means turning an existing high-performing piece of organic content into an ad. You can do this from your Facebook Page by clicking Boost post on any post.
Or, keep your budget consistent and automate this with Facebook auto-boosting in Hootsuite. Set a budget and your criteria—for example, only boost posts that receive at least 100 organic likes—and Hootsuite will handle the rest.
It’s as close to magic as advertising ever gets.
A/B test ads
Also known as split testing, A/B testing your ads is essential for improving your ad results and Facebook ads cost. A/B testing can answer questions like:
- Was this ad successful because of the graphics, or the copy, or both? (Or neither?)
- Does my audience respond better to this visual style, or that visual style?
- Which of these two offers is more attractive to my audience?
Besides A/B testing different ad creative, also test different targeting strategies, ad schedules, and types of campaigns.
Use Advantage+ options
New to Facebook ads? Don’t worry, it’s easy: use Advantage+ campaigns for (almost) set-it-and-forget-it simplicity. Advantage+ options allow Facebook’s ad algorithm to automatically optimize targeting, budget usage, placements, and more to get you the best results for the lowest overall Facebook ads cost.
For most people, Facebook Advantage+ campaigns will be your best performing option, even for experienced users. If you want to target a highly specific audience or just prefer more control, manual options are still available.
Use lookalike audiences
If you’ve run Facebook ads before or have a custom audience to import, Facebook can use previous audience data to find a lookalike audience. That means people who are similar to those you’ve targeted in the past, based on similar demographics, interests, or other factors.
You can create a lookalike audience from your Facebook Page followers, previous ad campaigns, Meta Pixel data, or upload your own in Meta Business Manager. The only requirement is having at least 100 people located in the same country, although an audience of 1,000-5,000 people is an ideal size to base a lookalike audience on.
You can also create a lookalike audience right from your Hootsuite dashboard. Click on Tools, then Asset Manager. Then New Asset at the top right and choose Custom Audience. Boom.
Easily manage your Facebook ads, plus organic and paid content for all your other social media platforms, in one place with Hootsuite. Schedule content, engage with followers, and optimize performance with insightful analytics designed to help you grow. Try it free today.
