How Much Does It Cost to Advertise on Social Media?

There is no fixed price list for social media advertising. You are bidding in an auction, so the cost depends on who you want to reach, how many other advertisers want the same people, and how good your ads are. That said, a realistic starting point for a UK small business is £10 to £30 a day in ad spend (roughly £300 to £900 a month) on Meta platforms, and more on LinkedIn where clicks are far more expensive. On top of that you either pay someone to run it or you run it yourself.

Your total cost has two separate parts: the media spend that goes to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn, and the management fee that goes to whoever builds, monitors and optimises the campaigns. At DPOM, social media advertising management starts from £145 a month as a fixed fee, and every penny of your ad budget goes to the platform. Mixing those two numbers up is the single most common reason small business owners think paid social is more expensive than it is.

The two costs, side by side

Before you look at any benchmark figures, get clear on what you are actually paying for.

Cost	Who gets it	Typical small business range	What it buys
Media spend (ad budget)	Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc	£300 to £1,500+ a month	Impressions, clicks and conversions in the auction
Management fee	Your agency or freelancer	Fixed monthly fee (DPOM from £145)	Strategy, build, tracking, testing, reporting
Creative production	In house, freelancer or agency	Anything from nothing to a few hundred	Video, photography, copy, design
Landing page or offer	Your website provider	Varies (RentAWeb sites from £49/month)	Somewhere for the click to land and convert

Some agencies charge a percentage of ad spend. That model quietly punishes you for growing, because the fee rises every time the budget does, whether or not the work increases. We use fixed transparent monthly pricing instead so you always know your total cost before the month starts.

How the platforms actually charge you

Every major social platform sells ads through an auction. You do not bid for a fixed position like an old media booking. You tell the platform your objective, your audience and your budget, and it works out which ads to show to which people.

The numbers you will see in the reporting are:

• CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions). The base cost of reaching people. This is what the auction really prices.
• CTR (click through rate). What percentage of people who see the ad click it. This is mostly down to your creative and offer.
• CPC (cost per click). CPM divided by clicks. A result of the two numbers above, not something you set.
• CPA (cost per action) or cost per lead. What each enquiry, booking or sale actually cost you.

Here is the important bit. You do not directly control CPC. You influence it by improving the click through rate. If your CPM is fixed by the auction and you double your CTR, you halve your cost per click. That is why creative quality matters more to your budget than any bidding trick.

Realistic monthly budgets by goal

What you should spend depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve and how much a customer is worth to you. These are the sorts of budgets we see working for UK small businesses.

Below about £150 a month on any platform, you are spreading a thin budget across an audience that is too large to reach meaningfully. The ads get shown a handful of times to a scattered group and nothing compounds. If that is genuinely all you have, put it all behind one audience, one offer and one strong piece of creative rather than splitting it four ways.

Working out your cost per result (the maths that matters)

Benchmarks from other people's accounts are interesting but not decisive. Your costs depend on your industry, your margins, your audience and your creative. What you can do is model the funnel before you spend, then compare reality against it.

Here is a purely illustrative worked example for a local service business running Facebook and Instagram ads.

1. Monthly budget: £600
2. Assume a CPM of £8. That buys 75,000 impressions.
3. Assume a click through rate of 1%. That is 750 clicks, so an effective cost per click of 80p.
4. Assume the landing page converts 5% of clicks into enquiries. That is around 37 leads, so roughly £16 per lead.
5. Assume you close 1 in 4 of those leads. That is nine customers, so about £67 to acquire a customer.

Now the only question that matters: is a customer worth more than £67 to you over their lifetime? If your average job is £400, this is a straightforward yes and you should be looking to scale. If your average sale is £25 with thin margins, the maths does not work and you need a different offer, a higher order value or a different channel.

The same model on LinkedIn looks very different. A CPM of £30 on a £1,500 budget buys 50,000 impressions. A 0.5% click through rate gives 250 clicks at £6 each. An 8% landing page conversion rate gives 20 leads at £75 each. That sounds expensive until you remember a single B2B contract might be worth thousands.

Platform by platform: where the money goes furthest

Costs move constantly, so treat this as a relative guide rather than a price list. The ranking rarely changes even when the numbers do.

Platform	Relative cost to reach people	Best suited to	Practical minimum
Facebook	Low to moderate	Local services, ecommerce, lead generation, older demographics	£10 a day
Instagram	Moderate	Visual products, hospitality, beauty, fashion, younger buyers	£10 a day
TikTok	Low CPM, variable conversion	Impulse purchases, entertainment led brands, broad reach	£15 a day
Pinterest	Low to moderate	Home, interiors, weddings, crafts, long consideration purchases	£10 a day
LinkedIn	High	B2B, recruitment, high value services, specific job titles	£30 a day
X	Moderate	News led, tech, live events	£10 a day
YouTube	Low CPM for views, higher for action	Explaining a product, building demand, retargeting	£15 a day

For most UK small businesses, Meta (Facebook and Instagram together) gives the best combination of cheap reach, strong targeting and mature conversion tracking. That is why the majority of the accounts we run sit there, and why our Facebook ads management services tend to be the starting point before anything else gets added.

What pushes your costs up or down

Audience size and competition

Narrow audiences cost more per thousand impressions because you are competing for a small pool of people. A campaign targeting "chartered accountants in Manchester" will always have a higher CPM than one targeting adults within ten miles of a town centre. Narrow is often still worth it, but expect to pay for the precision.

Your objective

Asking the platform to find people likely to take an expensive action costs more than asking it to find people likely to watch a video. Reach and video view campaigns look cheap in the reporting and frequently produce nothing commercial. Conversion and lead campaigns look expensive and usually pay for themselves. Judge on outcomes, not on the cheapest line in the report.

Creative quality

This is the biggest lever you control. The same budget, same audience and same offer can produce wildly different costs purely because one ad stops the scroll and another does not. Fresh creative also fights ad fatigue, which is when the same people see your ad too often, engagement drops and your costs creep up week after week. Plan on refreshing creative every few weeks rather than running one ad until it dies.

Seasonality

The auction gets more expensive when more advertisers bid. Expect higher costs in the run up to Black Friday, through December, and around any big retail moment. If you are a local service business with no Christmas angle, that is often the quietest, cheapest time to be visible, because the retailers have bid the price up and then vanished in January.

Your landing page and offer

Half the cost per lead equation happens after the click. A page that loads slowly, asks for too much information or does not match the ad will quietly double your cost per enquiry while the ad reporting looks fine. Before you blame the campaign, check what happens after someone taps.

Tracking setup

Ads optimise towards the actions you feed back to them. If your conversion tracking is missing or broken, the platform is guessing, and your costs reflect that. Getting the pixel, conversions API and event setup right is dull work that materially reduces what you pay per result.

The learning phase and why tiny budgets struggle

When you launch a new campaign, the platform needs a run of conversions before its delivery stabilises. Until then, performance is erratic and costs are usually higher than they will be later. This is normal and it is why judging a campaign after four days is pointless.

The practical consequence for budgeting is simple. If your cost per lead is around £20, you need a decent number of leads per week for the system to learn. A £100 a month budget will not get there, so the campaign sits in a permanent state of uncertainty and never settles. A £500 budget behind one clear objective will almost always outperform £500 split across five ad sets that each get a trickle.

The costs people forget to budget for

• Creative production. Video and photography, or the time to make them yourself. Vertical video in particular needs regular new material, which we cover in our guide to vertical video strategy for Reels, Shorts and TikTok.
• VAT. Meta and other platforms charge UK advertisers VAT on ad spend. If you are VAT registered you reclaim it, but factor it into cash flow.
• Landing pages. Sending paid traffic to a cluttered homepage wastes budget. A focused page is usually worth building.
• Organic presence. People who see your ad will often check your profile. If the last post is two years old, you lose the sale. That is where social media management for small businesses earns its keep alongside the paid side.
• Follow up. Leads that nobody rings back cost exactly the same as leads that convert. Build the response process before you switch the ads on.

Boosting posts versus proper campaigns

Boosting is the £20 button on a post that has done well organically. It is not the same as a campaign built in Ads Manager, and it usually costs more per result because you lose most of the objective, placement and optimisation controls.

Boosting is fine for what it is: putting a bit of money behind a post to get it seen. It is not a growth strategy. If you want enquiries or sales, build campaigns properly. If you are new to this and want to see how the mechanics work first hand, our walkthrough on creating an ad on Instagram is a sensible starting point.

How much should you actually spend?

Three ways to land on a number, in order of usefulness.

1. Work backwards from your target

Decide how many new customers you want this month. Multiply by your modelled cost per customer. That is your budget. If you want ten customers and your model says £70 each, you need around £700 plus a margin for testing. This is by far the best method because it ties spend to a commercial outcome.

2. A percentage of revenue

Some owners prefer to set total marketing spend as a small, fixed slice of revenue, with paid social taking part of that. It is crude, and it takes no account of what a customer is actually worth to you, but it does stop you spending money you have not got.

3. What you can lose without pain

For the first two or three months, treat the budget as the cost of buying data. You are finding out which audience, message and offer work. Set an amount you can spend for ninety days without stress, and do not pull the plug in week two.

Common ways small businesses waste social ad budget

• Changing things daily. Every significant edit resets learning. Make changes weekly at most, and only on the back of enough data.
• Running too many ad sets. Five ad sets on £300 a month means each one gets £2 a day. None will learn.
• Optimising for the wrong event. Cheap link clicks or page likes feel good and sell nothing.
• No retargeting. Most people do not buy on first contact. A small retargeting budget aimed at people who visited but did not convert is usually the cheapest result in the account.
• Ignoring frequency. When the same people see your ad again and again, results fall and costs climb. Refresh the creative or widen the audience.
• Judging by clicks. A campaign with a high cost per click but a low cost per sale is the one you want to scale.

Frequently asked questions

Can I advertise on social media for £5 a day?

You can, and for a very tight local radius with one strong ad it can tick along. But at £150 a month there is little room to test, and one poor creative choice burns the whole budget. Treat it as a minimum viable presence, not a growth plan.

Is social advertising cheaper than Google Ads?

Usually the cost per click is lower on social, because you are interrupting people rather than answering an active search. Google captures existing demand, social creates it. Cost per lead is often comparable once you account for intent. Many small businesses run both, with search catching people ready to buy and paid social building the demand that feeds it. If you already run search campaigns and want a second opinion on them, we offer a free Google Ads audit.

How long before I see results?

Expect the first fortnight to be noisy. By week three or four you should have enough data to see which audience and creative are working. Three months is a fair window to judge whether the channel suits your business.

Do I need a big following first?

No. Paid reach does not depend on your follower count. A tidy, current profile helps conversion, but you do not need thousands of followers to run effective ads.

What is a good cost per lead?

Whatever is comfortably below the profit you make from a customer, multiplied by your close rate. There is no universal number. A £100 lead is a bargain for a business with £5,000 contracts and a disaster for one selling £30 products.