What is the cost of Facebook advertising?

Facebook ads are a powerful choice for reaching your audience across the Web, but it's important to understand how much you can expect to pay to run them on a monthly basis.

The primary cost of Facebook Ads can be split into two buckets:

Ad spend costs

This is the money that you pay directly to Facebook's parent company, Meta, in order to run ads on their platform. To determine what this cost will be on a monthly basis, you will need to set your daily spend amount in the Meta Ads platform. For example, if you know you have a monthly ad spend budget of $3000, you can work backwards to set your daily budget at $100. Just because you set this amount doesn't mean Meta will spend the same amount of money every day. Some days it might use slightly less, some days slightly more, but it will average out around the number of your choosing.

Ad management costs

Ad management costs are the fees you pay to the agency or partner managing your Facebook advertising campaigns. The Meta advertising platform is intuitive enough that some users can feel confident running ads without an agency, but if you don't fully know what you are doing, this can be a risky decision.

In working with an agency, there are two different ad management costs to consider:

One-time set up cost

This is the up-front charge you pay to have the agency conduct industry research and build your campaigns. This one-time fee is typically in the $3,500 - $7,500 range, depending on the degree of research, ad design, video production, and number of campaigns needed. If you decide to advertising on additional platforms, your set up cost will likely increase, but it should not compound beyond this range.

Ongoing management

This is the recurring amount you will pay to have agency experts monitor and optimize your campaigns. Unlike many companies which charge 25-40% of your ad spend as their management fee, USDP charges a set monthly amount. This takes away any incentive for us to tell you to increase your ad spend unnecessarily—if we recommend that you increase your ad spend on Meta, it's because we believe that it will benefit you.

Depending on the number and complexity of campaigns across the Google platform, our monthly fee could be in the $1,850 - $7,500 per month range. All performance data is aggregated into an advertising dashboard that is used for monitoring and improving results.

Using Meta for Instagram Ads

One benefit to working with Facebook ads is the ability to seamlessly run Instagram Ads through the same Meta Ads platform. If you choose to run ads on Instagram to broaden your reach even further, you will likely need to increase your ad spend to ensure that your ads on both platforms are being displayed frequently, but the transition to planning and building Instagram ads is very simple. You can learn more about the Instagram ad cost structure here.

Hopefully this answered your questions about the cost of running Facebook ads. If you are trying to determine if we are the best partner for you, it is best to get in touch and tell us your specific needs.