How much do Facebook ads really cost for a small business?
2026-08-04What you actually pay to advertise on Facebook and Instagram: daily budgets, CPM, the cost of an agency on top, and what a realistic first month looks like.
The honest answer is that Facebook does not have a price. You set a daily budget and Meta spends it buying attention on your behalf. What varies is how much attention that budget buys, and that depends on who you are trying to reach and how many other advertisers want the same people.
What you are actually buying
Meta sells impressions, and the standard unit is CPM: the cost of a thousand impressions. In most European markets a small business advertising to a broad local audience sees a CPM somewhere between four and fifteen euros. Narrow, competitive audiences cost more. December costs more than February, because every retailer on earth is bidding against you.
That means a ten euro daily budget buys roughly one to two thousand impressions a day. Not a huge number, but enough to learn something within a couple of weeks.
A realistic first month
For a local business testing whether ads work at all, ten to twenty euros a day is a sensible starting point. Over thirty days that is three hundred to six hundred euros. Below about five euros a day Meta struggles to leave the learning phase, and you end up paying for data too thin to act on.
Spend it on one campaign, not five. A single ad set with a decent budget will teach you more than five ad sets each starving on two euros.
The cost nobody mentions
The budget is rarely the whole bill. A freelancer or agency typically charges a retainer of five hundred to fifteen hundred euros a month, and many take a further ten to twenty percent of your ad spend on top. On a thousand euro budget that is potentially another two hundred euros for pressing the same buttons.
So the real question is not what Facebook ads cost. It is what fraction of your money reaches Meta at all. A thousand euro budget with a nine hundred euro retainer and a fifteen percent cut means well under half your money is actually buying attention.
What to watch instead of cost
Cost per result matters more than cost per click, which matters more than CPM. If you sell a product worth fifty euros and you are acquiring customers for twenty, a rising CPM is irrelevant. If your cost per purchase is climbing while your CPM is flat, the problem is your offer or your landing page, not the auction.
Track cost per result from day one, and do not judge it before Meta has had a few days and a meaningful volume of impressions.