Social media advertising: what budget, what results

“We put €1,000 into Facebook and got nothing.” You hear it often, and it rarely means the platform does not work. More often it means the budget was set before anyone knew what it was supposed to buy. This article from our online advertising section suggests another way of asking the question: start from the result you expect, and work back to the amount.

Why a round figure means nothing

A budget of €1,000 is neither small nor large in itself. It is small if it buys three enquiries when you need thirty to sign a customer; it is comfortable if it buys fifty when five are enough. Everything depends on two numbers you already know, or should know: how many enquiries you need for one sale, and what a sale is worth.

What an enquiry costs, as an order of magnitude

Public benchmarks give a starting point, not a promise. The annual benchmark by WordStream and LocaliQ on Facebook campaigns in the United States, reported by PPC Land, gives these reference points for lead generation campaigns:

Three caveats before you use them. These are US averages, all sectors mixed. An enquiry on Meta does not have the same value as one from a Google search: someone scrolling their feed asked for nothing. And the cost of an audience targeted precisely by job and sector, as on LinkedIn, is of another order: the platform charges for access to a target the others cannot isolate. Our comparison Google Ads or Meta in B2B explains when each platform makes sense.

The backwards calculation

The budget for a test is built in four lines.

1. 01The number of sales the test must produce.

   Enough to judge: a single signature proves nothing.

2. 02The number of enquiries per sale.

   Your current closing rate, read in the CRM, not estimated from memory.

3. 03The cost of an enquiry on the platform.

   Public averages at the start, your own figures from the second week.

4. 04The duration.

   Enough weeks for the algorithm to leave its learning phase and for enquiries to have time to become sales.

Multiply, and you get a budget that makes sense. If it exceeds what you are prepared to risk, the conclusion is not to lower the amount and hope: it is to narrow the scope. One offer, one audience, one platform, rather than three underfunded campaigns that will prove nothing.

What results to expect, by objective

Not every campaign aims for an immediate enquiry. The platform and the budget change depending on what you are after.

Social networks excel in the first column: driving discovery, retargeting site visitors, maintaining a presence with an account your sales team is already working. Asking them for signatures every week on a complex offer means judging them on a job they do badly.

Judge on sales, not clicks

A form is not a customer. The only judge of an advertising test is what enquiries become three or six weeks later: a meeting, a quote, a signature, or nothing. That means every enquiry must arrive in the CRM with its source, and the result of the sale must be able to flow back to the platform so that it learns from the right conversions. Our article on offline conversions explains this connection.

Our view

The social media advertising budget is first a question of measurement. A team that knows its closing rate and follows every enquiry through to the sale can test with a modest budget and decide quickly. A team that does not know it can spend a lot without learning anything.

That is the order our digital marketing offer follows: connect the measurement, calculate the budget backwards, launch a tight test, then expand what produces sales. To follow results without spending your Mondays in spreadsheets, our article on automated marketing reporting shows how to bring together the figures from the platforms and the CRM.

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