How Much Should a Small Business Spend on Meta Ads?

The Short Answer

Like with Google Ads, there is no single number that works for every small business on Meta. Your industry, ad quality, and campaign objective impact campaign price the same way it does on Google, but the bigger difference is that Meta runs on a fundamentally different kind of auction than Search does. To see how Google prices their search campaigns, check out our other blog post

On Meta, you're not bidding against people actively searching for what you sell, you're bidding for attention in The Feed against every other advertiser and all the organic content someone would rather be looking at. That changes what actually drives your cost because you could be competing against Fortune 500 companies with multi-million dollar marketing budgets who can pay significantly more than you can to be prioritized in The Feed.

What this means for you is the general advice any cookie-cutter agency will give you "just run a leads campaign" skips over the assessment of whether this is a viable strategy for your company with your marketing budget.

There are ways to estimate what budget would work best for your business, and we'll outline in this article the methods Propel Collective uses when advising our clients.

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What Meta Ads Actually Costs Based on Research

The most recent benchmark report with disclosed methodology comes from WordStream's Facebook ads benchmarks report, which analyzed 1,280 US campaigns running between April 2024 and June 2025. It's worth noting for this article, unlike Google Ads data, Meta doesn't have a 2026-dated version of this report yet as of this writing, so this is the most current credible data available. We will update this post when their 2026 data is published.

Traffic campaigns optimized for clicks:

• Average cost per click across all industries - $0.70
• Average click-through rate - 1.71%

Leads campaigns optimized for form fills:

• Average cost per click across all industries - $1.92
• Average conversion rate - 7.72%
• Average cost per lead - $27.66

This data tells us that both types of campaigns are meaningfully cheaper than Google Search, where average CPC and CPL run closer to $5+ and $65+ respectively.

Similar to WordStream's 2026 Google Ads benchmarks report, the spread between industries is wide in this data set. For leads campaigns, Restaurants and Food pay as little as $3.16 per lead while Dentists and Dental Services pay as much as $76.71. A single blended average CPC figure hides these significant differences, which is why it's so difficult to pinpoint a dollar amount you can expect to pay on Meta across the board.

Be sure if you are doing your own research to use sources that disclose its sample size, date range, and methodology before using it to inform your budget allocation.

What Actually Influences Your Business's Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Lead (CPL) on Meta

There are four distinct factors you need to consider:

1) Campaign objective. This is the biggest driver of cost for any performance marketing campaign (not just on Meta or Google). Campaigns that are focused on driving website traffic will be significantly less expensive than campaigns focused on driving leads or actions (such as form fills).

2) Competition in your industry. Dentists, attorneys, and beauty and personal care businesses pay the highest CPCs on leads campaigns because the lifetime value of a single client justifies aggressively bidding for their target audience. On the cheaper side, Restaurants, career services, and sports and recreation can expect to see lower competition and prices.

3) Ad relevance and creative quality. Meta's delivery system rewards ads with strong engagement (relevant creative, compelling copy, audience fit) with lower costs and deprioritizes ads with generic copy that people scroll past. This is the lever small business's can easily control, and one where business owners get caught short using AI tools that can only produce average content.

4) Audience specificity and Advantage+ usage. Meta's Advantage+ AI targeting can improve efficiency, but it can also inflate lead volume with lower-quality leads if your targeting is too broad. Narrower, better-qualified audiences and tighter geographic targeting typically cost more per click but convert at a higher rate than broad Advantage+ targeting run without guardrails.

How to Estimate an Ads Budget for Your Business

Propel Collective has built a paid ads budget calculator, but if you'd like to calculate it yourself you can use this formula:

Monthly budget = target number of leads × your industry's average cost per lead (from the WordStream data linked above)

Here's an example of what this could look like: if your industry's average CPL is $30 and you need 25 leads a month, you're looking at roughly $750 as a starting monthly ad spend. One thing you need to remember is this is an estimate, not a firm number. Once you have your own campaign cost data, simply replace the industry average with your actual cost per lead for a far more accurate number.

As we've managed Meta campaigns for our clients, we've generally seen higher-consideration services like med spas, dental practices, or financial advisors need $2,000-$3,000 a month to generate a consistent, qualified lead volume, given their CPLs run well above the platform average. Lower-consideration, higher-urgency services like home cleaning, plumbing, car detailing, or electricians can often stay competitive on $800-$1,200 a month, since their CPLs sit at the lower end of the range.

Ad Costs are Only One Part of the Equation

The same is true here as it is on Google: someone has to build the campaign, produce and rotate creative, monitor relevance and lead quality, and adjust targeting and Advantage+ settings on a regular basis. Creative production and rotation in particular is a real challenge for social campaigns because your ads may be shown more frequently as people scroll their feed endlessly and they may become frustrated by how often they're seeing your same ad. A search campaign can run on the same three ads for months, but because of the infinite scroll on Meta, campaigns on that platform must remain fresh.

One place Meta actually differs from Google and is worth knowing before you set a budget: Meta doesn't hard-cap spend the way Google does. If you set a daily budget, Meta can spend up to roughly 25% more than that daily amount on a given day if it sees a stronger opportunity, and it will even the overage out over the course of the week. It's not a runaway spending risk, but if you're budgeting to the exact dollar per day, plan for to have some flexibility rather than assuming a hard daily ceiling.

Similarly to running Google Ads campaigns, agencies typically price paid social ads management as a flat monthly fee or a percentage of spend.

Is Meta Ads the Right Move for Your Business Right Now?

Meta ads perform best for businesses where visual examples such as a scroll-stopping image or video actually can influence a customer's purchase decision (home services with before/after shots, med spas, restaurants, apparel, events). If your product or service is hard to convey without a paragraph of explanation, a leads or traffic campaign on Meta will likely underperform Search, where the person is already looking for services like yours.

Deciding whether Meta makes sense also depends on whether you have (or can produce) enough compelling creative to avoid fatigue, whether your landing page or lead form converts once someone clicks, and whether you have the bandwidth to actually manage the campaigns within your account. Those items need to be considered before you set a budget and get started, not after.