Facebook doesn’t charge a fixed price. You set a budget, and what it buys depends on how much advertisers are bidding to reach your audience on the days you run.
Plug in a budget and a few guesses and see roughly what you would get. Better to find out the sums don’t work before you spend, not after.
How to use the Facebook Ads Cost Calculator#
- Set your budget. Enter a daily budget and how many days the campaign will run.
- Add your costs. Enter the CPM you expect and your click-through rate. Use figures from your own account if you have them.
- Add a conversion rate. Optional. It turns clicks into sales or sign-ups and gives a cost per conversion.
How the estimate is worked out#
A daily budget of 10 for 7 days is 70. At a CPM of 10, that buys 7,000 impressions. A 1 percent click-through rate gives 70 clicks, so each click costs 1. If 2 percent of those clicks convert, you get 1.4 sales at 50 each.
Where the real numbers come from#
CPM, CTR and conversion rate are the three assumptions that matter. Take them from your own Ads Manager if you have run campaigns before. If you haven’t, start with a small test budget and use the real results to replace the guesses here. Costs vary by country, audience size, time of year and the quality of your ad, so one account’s numbers rarely carry over to another.
Using the result to decide#
Work backwards from what a customer is worth. If you make 20 on each sale and the calculator says a sale costs 50, the campaign loses money at those assumptions. Either the offer needs to be better, the click-through rate needs to rise, or the audience needs to be cheaper to reach. See also the CTR calculator.
A worked campaign#
A shop sets a daily budget of ₦5,000 for 14 days, so the total spend is ₦70,000. With a CPM of ₦1,500, the ads are shown 46,667 times. At a click-through rate of 1.2 percent that is 560 clicks, and the cost per click is ₦125. If 3 percent of the clicks turn into orders, the campaign brings about 16.8 orders, at ₦4,167 each. Whether that is good depends on the profit on each order. If a sale earns ₦6,000 in profit, you make a profit on every order. If it earns ₦2,500, you lose money on each.
Which numbers to test#
The calculator chains four numbers: CPM, click-through rate, conversion rate and budget. Small changes in each multiply. Improving the CTR from 1.2 to 1.8 percent cuts the cost per click by a third. A better landing page that lifts conversion from 3 to 4.5 percent has the same effect on cost per order. Change one thing at a time and give each test enough impressions, a few thousand at least, before you judge it. See the CTR calculator to measure your click rate.
Why estimates and results differ#
CPM changes with the audience, the placement, the season and the competition in the auction. The first days of a campaign are often more expensive while the system learns who responds. Audience size matters: a small audience shown the same ad many times sees costs rise as people tire of it. Treat the calculator’s output as a plan, then compare it with the actual numbers in the ads dashboard after a few days, and adjust your assumptions.
Frequently asked questions#
There’s no fixed price. You choose a budget, and the cost per thousand impressions or per click depends on your audience and competition.
It depends on the country, audience and season. Use your own past results as the benchmark.
No. It’s an estimate based on the numbers you enter. Real results differ.
Facebook allows small daily budgets, but very small ones give too little data to learn from.
Start from what a customer is worth to you. If an order brings ₦3,000 in profit, you can spend up to ₦3,000 to win it, and less if you want a margin. Work backwards: multiply the cost per conversion by the number of orders you want to get the budget, then test with a small amount first.
It varies by industry, format and audience, and many advertisers see anything from under 1 percent to a few percent. Compare with your own earlier campaigns and with other ads in the same account. If the CTR is well below your average, the creative or the audience probably needs to change.