The short answer: you decide how much you spend. Most local businesses we work with spend $20 to $50 a day (roughly $600 to $1,500 a month) paid directly to Meta. What that buys depends on your industry and offer. In our campaigns, cost per enquiry has ranged from $8 to $12 for a hair salon to about $77 for a training college, where each enrolment was worth over $18,000.
How Meta charges for ads
Facebook and Instagram ads are sold through an auction. Every time there's a spot for an ad in someone's feed, Meta decides which ad to show based on three things:
- Your bid, which for most local businesses is set automatically by Meta to get the most results for your budget.
- How likely that person is to take the action you asked for, like submitting a lead form or visiting your page.
- How relevant and good your ad is. Ads people scroll past or hide get more expensive to show.
You set a daily or lifetime budget and Meta spends up to it. You're usually charged based on impressions (how many times your ad is shown), even when your campaign is optimising for leads. That's why the numbers that matter to you are the ones further down the line: cost per enquiry and cost per job.
The upside of the auction: a better ad and a better offer literally make your ads cheaper. Two businesses spending the same budget in the same town can get wildly different results.
Real numbers from local campaigns
Most cost guides quote national averages that include ecommerce brands and big-city agencies. These numbers come from our own clients' ad accounts in Queensland.
| Business | Cost per enquiry | What happened next |
|---|---|---|
| Hair salon | $8 to $12 per booking enquiry | 8x increase in bookings |
| Excavation business, Gympie region | About $32 per lead | About one in three leads became a paying job, roughly $96 per job won |
| Training college | About $77 per enquiry ($2,078 for 27) | 11 campus tours, 3 enrolments worth $55,500, about $693 per enrolment |
| Concreting business | Not the point | Booked out for three months after 40 days, ads paused |
Look at the training college. $77 per enquiry sounds expensive next to $8 for a salon, but each enrolment brought in over $18,000. The cost per lead on its own tells you almost nothing. Cost per job compared with what a job is worth tells you everything.
What pushes your cost up or down
1. Your offer
This is the biggest lever and the one most people ignore. "Call us for a quote" competes with every other business in your feed. A clear, specific reason to act, like a fixed-price package, a free design consult or a limited new-client spot, gets more people to respond, which makes Meta show your ad more cheaply.
2. Your creative
Real photos and short videos of your actual work, your team and your local area usually beat stock imagery. Ads that stop the scroll get cheaper over time. Ads people ignore get more expensive.
3. Where the ad sends people
Facebook's instant forms usually produce cheaper leads because people never leave the app. A landing page usually produces fewer, better leads. For high-value jobs we often pay more per lead on purpose, because the cost per job is lower.
4. Audience size and competition
Regional towns have smaller audiences, which can mean cheaper reach but faster "ad fatigue", when the same people see your ad too many times. Metro areas and busy markets like the Sunshine Coast have more advertisers competing for the same people. In regional Queensland, many trades have gaps in our September advertiser search, which warrants further research rather than assuming low competition.
5. Time of year
Ad costs tend to climb in the lead-up to Christmas and around big retail events, when large brands flood the auction. Plan your biggest pushes around your busy season and your competitors' quiet ones.
6. How fast you follow up
This doesn't change your cost per lead, but it has a huge effect on your cost per job. A lead that waits until tomorrow for a call-back is often already talking to someone else.
How to set your budget: work backwards from the job
Don't start with "what can I afford to spend on Facebook". Start with how many jobs you want and what each one is worth.
- How many extra jobs do you want each month? Be realistic about capacity.
- What's your close rate? Out of 10 genuine enquiries, how many become paying jobs?
- How many enquiries does that mean? Jobs wanted divided by close rate.
- What's a realistic cost per enquiry? Use the numbers above as a guide, or your own history.
- Multiply. Enquiries needed times cost per enquiry is your monthly ad budget.
Example: a roofer. Wants 4 more re-roof jobs a month, each worth about $12,000. Closes 1 in 4 genuine enquiries. Needs 16 enquiries. At $40 per enquiry, that's $640 a month in ads, or about $21 a day, to win $48,000 of work. Even if the cost per enquiry doubled, the maths still works.
Our Facebook ad budget calculator does this for you and shows your return on ad spend.
Don't spread a small budget too thin
Meta's system learns from results. Its own guidance is that an ad set needs around 50 optimisation events in a week to exit the "learning phase". Most local businesses won't reach that, and that's fine, but it's why we keep small budgets focused on one or two audiences instead of splitting $20 a day across ten ads.
The costs people forget
- GST. Meta adds GST to ad spend for Australian advertisers. If you're registered for GST you can generally claim it back. Check with your accountant.
- Creative. Photos and videos. Often free if you use your phone on real jobs, which usually performs better anyway.
- The landing page. Sending ads to a slow or confusing website wastes budget. A focused page often pays for itself quickly.
- Management. Doing it yourself costs time. Agencies charge monthly retainers. We charge a fixed price for the setup and first 30 days, then it's your choice.
- Your time following up. Budget for it, or automate the first reply.
If you'd rather have someone look at your numbers, get a free audit and we'll tell you what's realistic for your business and area.
FAQ
What's the minimum I can spend on Facebook ads?
Meta lets you run ads on a very small daily budget, but for a local business trying to generate enquiries, around $15 to $20 a day is a practical starting point. Below that it takes a long time to learn what works.
Is it cheaper to boost a post?
Boosting can look cheap because you get lots of reach and likes, but it usually costs more per real enquiry. See our guide on boosting vs proper ads.
How long before I know if my ads are working?
Give a campaign two to four weeks before judging it, unless something is clearly broken. Early results are noisy while Meta finds the right people.
Are Instagram ads more expensive than Facebook ads?
They're bought through the same system and priced by the same auction. Costs vary by audience, and we let results decide where budget goes.