You’re finally taking the plunge and are ready to invest in Facebook ads, but how much should you spend?

I’m sorry to burst your bubble but there is no right or wrong answer.

There is no magic bullet, or magic budget in this case.

Whilst there isn’t a magic budget, let me explain the type of expenses and ways to determine your budget you could consider.

Each of Facebook’s objectives will come with its own costs and results which will be your indication of spend after testing some ads.

For example if you want to drive traffic to a blog post you’ll be setting up a ‘link clicks’ ad.

Ads that drive traffic are measured in CPM. Cost per thousand (CPM) is a marketing term used for the price of 1,000 advertisement impressions on one webpage. I often see a CPM anywhere between $20 and $30 to non-fans with my ads, but it’s a very targeted group with specific interests. Your CPM here is going to depend on the size of your audience and my results are no guarantee for yours but my ultimate goal is to keep Cost Per Link Click under $3.

To find out what this number would be for you, you’d need to test a few ads to see what your benchmark would be.

For those of you who have been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of using Facebook ads to build your email list.

This requires a different approach to setting your budget and the only way to find out what you should be spending is by testing a number of ads to grow your list. For some of my clients I can get leads for $1.40 but for others it can be $15. The number doesn’t necessarily matter as long as the leads are highly targeted and likely to convert to sales. This number does matter however, in calculating how much to spend on ads.

Often I recommend working backwards by saying how many people you want to add to your list and then test a few ads to see what it costs to add a new subscriber to your list. For example, you might want 1000 new subscribers and on average it costs $3.80 to add a new subscriber, this means that to add 1000 subscribers you’ll need a budget of at least $3,800.

So, to recap. There is no magic budget. You’ll need to test what the benchmark is for your ads and then work backwards to determine your budget.