Why Nobody Can Quote You A Price.
Meta runs an auction. You are not buying a slot at a published rate, you are bidding against every other advertiser trying to reach the same people at the same moment. What you pay is decided by how many of them there are, how good your creative is, and how relevant Meta thinks your ad is to the person seeing it.
That has three consequences worth understanding before you set a budget. Costs move seasonally: November and December are the most expensive weeks of the year in Australia because every retailer in the country is bidding. Costs vary by audience: reaching a homeowner in Toorak costs more than reaching a renter in a regional town. And costs move with your creative, which is the part inside your control. A hook that stops the scroll earns cheaper delivery, because Meta is rewarded when people stop and watch.
So the useful question is not "what does a Facebook ad cost". It is "what does a booked job cost me, and can I afford that". Everything below works back to that.
The Three Costs You Will See Reported.
Three metrics get quoted constantly and they measure different things. Here is what each one means and the range an Australian local service business usually sits in.
| Metric | What it measures | Typical range | What moves it |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPM | Cost per 1,000 times your ad is shown | $8 – $25 | Audience size, season, competition, creative quality |
| CPC | Cost per click on your ad | $0.60 – $3.00 | How compelling the hook and offer are |
| CPL | Cost per lead submitted | $15 – $90 | Industry, offer, and how many questions the form asks |
| Cost per booked job | What you paid to get one job in the diary | $150 – $3,000+ | Lead quality, follow-up speed, close rate |
The bottom row is the only one that pays your bills, and it is the one almost nobody reports. A $15 lead that never answers the phone is more expensive than a $90 lead that books. We have seen a builder buy roughly a thousand leads at a very respectable cost per lead and turn them into five jobs in a year. Cheap leads, catastrophic economics.
What We Actually See.
Rather than repeat industry averages, here are figures from campaigns we run. Client names are withheld by agreement; the numbers are as reported in the accounts.
| Industry | What we see | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Solar, Melbourne | $20 – $30 per exclusive lead | Client had previously been buying resold leads shared with competitors |
| Renovation and outdoor living, Melbourne | About $2,400 per booked job in month one | Six jobs booked in the first month after taking over from a previous agency |
| Early learning and childcare | 10 enrolment leads in 10 days | After rebuilding a single fatigued ad into five creatives and five messages |
Two of those three are not lead costs at all. That is deliberate. The solar number is a lead cost because solar is a volume game where lead price genuinely drives the model. The builder number is a cost per booked job because in renovations one job is worth tens of thousands and the lead price is close to irrelevant. Pick the metric that matches how your business actually makes money.
What You Need To Spend To Find Out.
Meta needs conversion data to optimise. Below roughly 30 to 50 conversion events a week, the algorithm stays in its learning phase, delivery is erratic and you cannot tell a bad campaign from a small sample. So the question is not what the minimum spend is, it is how many leads a week your budget buys — and that changes completely between a $40 lead and a $90 one. Whatever the number, run it for at least 60 to 90 days before judging it.
- A small budget. Think twice before hiring an agency. The management fee can end up larger than the media, and you are paying someone to watch a campaign that has no data yet. Build it yourself, or do a one-off done-with-you session.
- A few thousand a month. The sweet spot for a single-channel local campaign. Enough data to optimise, small enough that fee efficiency matters, so pick a management fee that is a sensible fraction of media.
- $5,000 to $15,000 a month. Now creative volume becomes the constraint. You will need new angles every few weeks because audiences fatigue.
- $15,000 a month and up. Structure, incrementality and retargeting economics start to matter more than any individual ad.
Whatever the number, ad spend is paid directly to Meta from your own card. It should never be bundled into an agency invoice.
Management Fees Are A Separate Line.
Agency fees in Australia for Facebook and Instagram management run from about $800 a month for a freelancer to $3,500 and beyond for a mid-size agency, or 10 to 20 per cent of ad spend. We charge $1,250 a month to manage a single channel and $2,250 a month for the version where we also call and qualify every lead and book appointments. Every price we charge is published here.
The ratio worth watching is fee divided by ad spend. At $2,000 of media a $1,250 fee is more than half your media again, which is steep. At $6,000 of media the same fee is about a fifth, which is normal. If a fee looks expensive, the honest question is usually whether the budget is big enough yet, not whether the fee is unfair.