How Much Do Facebook Ads Cost in 2026?

Your budget is how much a campaign or ad set can spend delivering your ads.

For Facebook ads, advertisers can select one of the following overall budget types:

• Meta Advantage campaign budget, which creates a campaign-level budget that Meta distributes across ad sets. Meta allocates this budget to the ad sets with the best opportunities.
• Ad set budgets, which assign a unique budget to different ad sets. This budget type gives advertisers more control, which is beneficial when managing ad sets with different audience sizes, optimization goals, and bid strategies.

Advertisers can then customize whether the above budget types are daily or lifetime budgets:

• Daily budgets: The average amount you want to spend each day for a week.
• Lifetime budgets: The total amount you’ll spend over a campaign or ad set’s lifetime.

No matter your budget, whether it’s $500 or $2000 per month, it will impact how much Facebook advertising costs your business. If you set a budget of $500, that affects your ad bids, ad performance, and the overall results of your social media advertising campaign.

While a large ad spend provides your business additional flexibility, you can still make a small budget work for your company. Your company decision-makers need to realize, however, that a low ad budget provides fewer conversions because of its performance limitations.

One of the biggest factors in the cost of Facebook ads is your bid strategy:

• Spend-based bidding, which focuses on spending your budget to maximize results through highest volume or highest value bids. Highest volume focuses on the number of conversions, while highest value focuses on the monetary value of those conversations.
• Goal-based bidding, which focuses on making bids that deliver a better return on investment for advertisers. Advertisers can use cost per result goal or return on ad spend (ROAS) goal for this bid strategy.
• Manual bidding, which provides maximum control through a bid cap. Your bid cap is how much you’re willing to bid across actions (in comparison, the other bid strategies allow Facebook to bid dynamically).

Depending on your bid strategy, as well as bid amount, you may have higher or lower Facebook advertising costs. Manual bidding usually comes with higher advertising costs, while spend- and goal-based bidding tend to make the most of your budget.

Before you decide on a bidding strategy, it’s vital you understand how the ad auction works on Facebook. When you understand the algorithm behind the company’s advertising services, you can build a better ad strategy and advertising budget.

In an ad auction, Facebook rates each bidder (and their ad) with these three factors:

• Bid: A bid is how much you’re willing to pay for a user to interact with your ad. For example, you may bid $1.50 for every click. According to Facebook, your bid is one of the most powerful tools for improving your ad’s performance.
• Estimated action rates: Your estimated action rates demonstrate the likelihood of users to interact with your ads, like by clicking on your ad or downloading your app. For a competitive ad, you need a high estimated action rate, which means creating a relevant ad for your audience.
• Ad quality: How users interact with your ad (both positive and negative) will determine your ad quality. These interactions can range from people hiding your ad to clicking your ad. A high ad quality can improve the success of your ad in auctions.

If your ad comes away with the highest total value (based on the above three factors), you win the auction. In response, Facebook shows your ad, rather than a competitor’s, to the person in your target audience.

While an aggressive bid can increase your total value, it also raises your Facebook advertising costs. That’s why your business wants to focus on creating a relevant, high-quality ad first. Then, you can assess your bidding strategy and bid investment.

Ad objectives serve an important role in Facebook’s ad auction. With objectives, Facebook can optimize its auction to deliver ads to the users most likely to take your desired actions, from visiting your website to engaging with your profile.

Available objectives include:

• Traffic
• Leads
• Sales
• Awareness
• Engagement
• App promotion

When choosing an objective, it’s critical to understand that Facebook is exceptional at achieving these goals — it will find users willing to visit a site, send a message, or download an app, meaning it will spend your budget.

That’s why using the platform’s bidding and targeting options is critical to focus costs on the most qualified users. You want to pay for qualified leads, for example, because that will make your Facebook advertising costs worth the price.

An in-depth study by AdEspresso on Facebook advertising costs revealed that your target audience significantly impacts the prices of your Facebook ads. Whether you’re focusing on a specific age, gender, or location, you can expect a shift in your ad expenses.

Audience targeting options on Facebook include:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Languages

You can also build custom audiences, like from an existing email subscriber or customer list. Advertisers can use custom audiences for remarketing or targeting new and relevant users via a lookalike audience.

When it comes to targeting, focus your campaign on the people that matter and offer the most value to your business. You don’t want to pay for clicks or views that provide zero value when it comes to your long-term goals, like driving a sale or generating a lead.

The time of year can also impact how much Facebook ads cost.

In peak shopping seasons, businesses tend to spend more on advertising. The increased demand for ad space creates a competitive marketplace, leading to aggressive bids and bigger campaign budgets that inflate the cost of advertising on Facebook.

A few of the most expensive days to advertise on Facebook include:

• Thanksgiving
• Black Friday
• Cyber Monday
• Christmas
• Boxing Day
• New Year’s Eve
• New Year’s Day

While seasonal factors can increase your Facebook ad costs, your business probably wants to take advantage of increased consumer demand. In response, you may increase your budget for those high-demand months or audit your ad strategy to improve the quality of your ads.

Your ad creative extends across several types of Facebook ads:

• Image
• Video
• Carousel
• Collection ads

Advertisers can place these ads across platforms, from Facebook to Instagram to WhatsApp. Your objective will influence where your ads can go, and it’s important to consider how an ad’s placement could affect user interactions — and your Facebook advertising costs.

Besides placement, advertisers also need to consider the quality of their ad creatives. Blurry images, sloppy videos, and poor audio can result in a low ad quality score, resulting in less visibility and higher ad costs.

For the best results, Facebook recommends running ads for at least seven days — and providing those ads with a sufficient budget for that duration. According to Facebook, those seven days (and a realistic budget) provide the time to learn how to maximize your budget’s performance.

While Facebook provides a recommended seven-day budget for its different objectives, it’s critical to consider how industry-specific factors affect Facebook costs. Below, for example, is a comparison of what different industries paid (per click) to advertise on Facebook in a previous year:

Different industries pay different prices when it comes to Facebook advertising costs. There are a few reasons for this, including the following:

• Acquisition costs: Certain sectors, like legal or insurance, will pay more to acquire clients because their service costs are higher than an ecommerce store selling $25 shirts.
• Advertising saturation: More advertisers means more competition for ad space. Markets that are more likely to advertise on Facebook, like clothing stores, will see higher costs compared to other markets.
• Objective: While some businesses prefer a traffic objective, like a restaurant, others will use a lead objective more often, like a college. Naturally, objectives with a bigger ‘ask’ from users will have higher costs.

Use the following table to understand how much Facebook ads cost for different industries:

The quality and relevance of your ads (as rated by Facebook) also affect how much Facebook advertising costs your business. If you create ads with a high quality ranking and engagement rate ranking, you will see lower ad costs.

Hootsuite demonstrated the power of an ad’s quality or relevance score in one study. The company created two versions of the same ad: One with a relevance and engagement score of 2.9 and another with a relevance and engagement score of 8.

The low-scoring ad had an average CPC of $0.14, while the high-scoring ad’s CPC was $0.03.

With its ad relevance diagnostics, businesses can see whether their ranking is “Average or above” or “Below average.” Alongside these scores, Facebook will list the causes of these issues and make recommendations for improvement.

Keep in mind that Facebook requires around 500 ad impressions or views before assigning a score.

If you want to make the most of your ad spend on Facebook, your team must create ads with high quality and engagement rankings. For the best results, monitor your relevance and engagement score on a routine basis.

As long as your ad is live, Facebook will continue to monitor user interactions, determining if it’s relevant. That’s why you need to check in and adjust your ad to feedback regularly. With this proactive approach, you can improve your Facebook advertising campaign’s performance, results, and costs.