As a small to medium-sized business (SMB) owner, you are likely exploring different ways to reach more customers without breaking the bank. Facebook advertising, now under the Meta umbrella of technologies, is expected to remain in 2025 to be one of the most accessible platforms for targeted marketing efforts. With over 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, it can offer your business unparalleled reach, but what is the actual cost to take advantage of these platforms’ advertising opportunities? This guide will help you break down the essentials, so you can budget effectively and get the most out of your campaigns.

Key Insights on the Cost of Facebook Ads

For small to medium-sized businesses looking to run advertising on Facebook platforms in 2025, the first question many people have is what the cost of facebook ads is currently, and how it might affect the ability of their ads to be successful. Budget is one of the most important aspects of a good Facebook Marketing plan, and so figuring out the cost of ads and how far that budget can stretch is just as important as knowing how much you are going to spend. Research suggests that the average CPC (cost per click) can range between $0.26 per click to $1.88 per click, and the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) lies between $1.01 and $14.40 per thousand. Keep in mind that these metrics will vary depending on campaign objectives, industry, target audience, and ad quality. For the best results, you should probably start with modest budgets of $1,000-$5,000 per month in order to test and optimize your ads, as higher spends often yield better results, although they do require careful maintenance in order to reduce inefficiency of spend and allocation. During peak seasons, costs can increase quite a bit, due to increased competition, so planning ahead is key to avoiding surprise costs.

Average Benchmarks By Metric

The average benchmarks that each metric usually should cost do vary by industry, but as a whole, tend to hover around the following:

– CPC: $0.70 on average, but can be as low as $0.42 in travel or up to $8.50 in legal services.

– CPM: Between $1.01-$3.00, but can be much higher, across Meta platforms, varying by audience and placement.

– Cost Per Lead (CPL): $21.98 overall, with real estate at $13.87 and attorneys at $104.58.

– Total Monthly Spend: 63% of businesses allocate $100–$500, though small firms can start at $500 for testing.

These benchmarks are not a one-size-fits-all and should be used as a general guideline when determining what your allocated ad spend budget should be. Make sure to take your time and research what your industry average might be, so that you can be sure to have a good chance of competing with businesses that have been on the Facebook Ad platform for a while already.

Potential Challenges & Considerations

While Facebook ads can offer strong ROI (return on investment) potential, about 3x’s ad spend on average, small businesses might not be able to see these high-performance metrics when advertising in competitive niches such as finance or legal services. Thus, in any industry, and more so depending on your industry, it is important to focus on having as high-quality creative content as possible so that you can try to decrease your expenses as much as possible. Additionally, starting off with broad audience targeting can also help keep your expenses manageable, and remember, results can improve with data-driven adjustments over time (such as changes to targeting, creatives like video and image content, copy lengths, and copy options, etc). 

Tips for Getting Started

When first starting off running ads on Facebook, you should begin with clear objectives, such as traffic optimization, leads optimization, or sales. Also, begin by using automated bidding to control costs, and use setups like Facebook’s “advantage+” can help you optimize on the go, without requiring you to input excessive manual changes very often. Just be wary that using some of these methods can negatively impact your ability to test audiences, and can cause Facebook to allocate ad spend away from other potentially good ads/audiences, so make sure you understand the best setup for your specific campaign goals and needs.

Factors Influencing the Cost of Facebook Ads

Several elements can make your Facebook ads either more expensive, or less expensive, and thus can make your ads more or less effective in both success measurements, and cost measurement. Recognizing these factors can help you avoid some common pitfalls.

1. Audience Targeting: The narrower the audience you are trying to target–for example, specific audience age range, gender, and interest targeting, along with specific location targeting – The more expensive the costs may be, as you are increasing your competition, and thus increasing the number of ads bidding for similar audiences, driving up costs. Use Lookalike Audiences if you can, which is based on your customer data, to try and decrease costs if you want to increase the specificity, but don’t have the budget to pay top dollar for it.
2. Industry & Competition: Highly competitive industries, like the finance industry ($4.75 CPC on average for leads), or the legal industry ($8.50 CPC), will be more expensive to advertise in than, say, retail ($0.51 CPC on average for sales).
3. Ad Quality & Relevance: The higher the quality of your ads (as seen by the Facebook Ads Platform’s quality score ranking) and the stronger your CTR (click rate), the cheaper the cost per click can become. With too low a quality score for your ads, price per click can increase by as much as 50% compared to the competition.
4. Bid Strategy: Automated bidding is the best option for most situations, and is usually the cheapest option. Manual bidding is not as common, and sometimes can cause unnecessary ad spending, with higher costs overall.
5. Seasonality & Timing: costs for advertising on Facebook can spike up as much as 10-15% during holiday seasons or events. Running ads during off-peak hours (such as between 12 Midnight and 6 AM) can help reduce these costs, but might not generate the same results as the more expensive peak hours can
6. Campaign Objectives: Awareness campaigns are always cheaper (between $0.01 and $0.25 cost per interaction), compared to conversions like sales ($0.01-$5.00 per click)
7. Placement & Format: Ads on Facebooks News Feed, will cost more than ads on the Audience Network. Additionally, videos or carousels may perform better, thus lowering effective costs.

By following these guidelines and tailoring them to your own needs, you can help keep costs of advertising in check, while scaling your efforts online.

Average Costs for Small to Medium Businesses in 2025

Based on 2025 data, here is a breakdown of average costs for SMB’s 

These metrics above come from an aggregate of data across various industries. For SMB’s, you could potentially expect a 2:1 or 5:1 ROI, if optimized properly, and during the right market conditions. This is not a one-size-fits-all suggestion, however, and every individual business advertising on Facebook should only use this as a starting point to help determine what their individual needs are, and what budget they should use in order to meet those needs. There is no such thing as too much ad spend, but there is such a thing as too little ad spend. Make sure that in your own marketing efforts, you find the sweet spot to help your own digital marketing efforts be and stay successful and sustainable.

How To Reduce The Cost Of Facebook Ads:

– Broaden Audiences: Avoid over-targeting; use lookalikes for 10-20% cost savings.

– Improve Ad Quality: Aim for high CTR with engaging visuals; test formats like videos.

– Use Automated Tools: Advantage+ placements optimize automatically.

– Monitor and Adjust: Check overlap and refresh creatives weekly to prevent fatigue.

For SMBs, combining organic efforts with paid ads amplifies results. If you want to reduce the cost of Facebook ads, one way to do this is to reduce your total ad spend and use the rest of your efforts on organic social media posts, on Instagram, Facebook, and other social platforms. This might not be as straightforward as the options listed above for reducing costs while still generating results, as reducing the available spend reduces the reach of your ads; however, combining your organic efforts with paid ads can actually help you amplify your results on each platform. One way to do this would be using organic social posts to generate new followers, and then using a lookalike audience to help generate new audiences to target your ads with, and then repeating this cycle to continue to grow your organic audiences while still also growing your paid ads without necessarily increasing your daily budgets. 

Real-World Examples & Best Practices

A small retail business might spend $1,000 per month on traffic ads, achieving around $0.51 CPC and 2x ROAS (return on ad spend). In contrast, a services-based SMB in the health industry could see $3.29 CPC for lead generation campaigns, but overall a higher lifetime customer value. Best practices will vary based on industry, available ad spend, and quality of your assets used in your Facebook Ads, but the overarching strategy will stay roughly the same: top-of-funnel for awareness, and lower cost results, bottom of funnel for conversions and optimization. Are you ready to optimize? 

The cost of Facebook ads in 2025 may not be as inexpensive as they were in years past, but they still offer great value for SMB’s when managed thoughtfully. Start small, track everything, and scale smartly for sustainable growth.

Tanner Doezie

When he’s not busy helping his clients’ increase revenue with online ads, you can find Tanner binge-watching true crime and war documentaries, listening to WW2 podcasts, doing epic 5000 piece puzzles, watching or reading anything Star Wars and Marvel-related, or spending time with his friends and family.