In short: There is no fixed price for Instagram or Facebook ads in Australia, because you are not buying a product. You are bidding in an auction that reprices constantly. Two separate numbers get confused: the budget you pay Meta, which you set yourself and can change any day, and the fee you pay whoever builds and runs the campaigns. What matters is neither of those. It is what a sale ends up costing you, and that depends on your product, your price, your photographs and your website. Anyone quoting you that figure before looking at your shop is guessing.
The two numbers, kept apart
Almost every confused conversation about ad costs comes from these being mashed together.
Two separate numbers
The ad budget
Paid straight to Meta, from your card, on your account. You set it, you change it any day, you stop it whenever you like.
Never passes through me.
The work
Setting up the account and tracking, building the campaigns, making the creative, reading the results.
Quoted to the scope of the job.
The budget is not a fee and not a subscription, and it should never be paid to an agency to hold for you. On my own work it goes to Meta directly and never passes through me. Expect that as standard.
Why there is no fixed price per click
Meta runs an auction. What you pay to reach a thousand people is set, moment to moment, by how many other advertisers want the same people and by how well your ad holds attention when it gets there. So the price moves with:
- The season. The weeks before Christmas are the most expensive of the year in Australia, because every retailer in the country is bidding at once. The campaign that was affordable in August costs more in November for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
- Who you are trying to reach. Broad audiences are generally cheaper to reach than narrow ones, which is one reason the old habit of stacking interests mostly stopped being good advice.
- Whether your ad is any good. This is the part in your control. An ad people watch, save and share gets shown more cheaply than one they scroll past. Good photographs are not just nicer. They are literally cheaper to run.
Anyone giving you an average cost per click for "Australia" is quoting a number that blends dropshippers, insurance companies and local cafés. It will not describe your business.
The number that actually decides everything
Not cost per click. Not cost per thousand views. What it costs you to get one sale, against what you keep from that sale.
Work out what is left after materials, your time, packaging, postage and platform fees. That figure is your ceiling. If you keep $30 on a sale and it costs $45 to bring in a buyer, the campaign loses money no matter how good the engagement looks. If you keep $30 and it costs $12, you should be spending more.
One thing moves this more than any setting: whether people come back. A customer who buys three times a year is worth far more to meet than one who buys once. Most small businesses undercount this and conclude too early that ads do not work for them.
How to set your own budget
Rather than copying a figure from someone with a different product, work from your own.
- Take what you keep on a typical sale.
- Decide the most you would happily pay to win one customer, remembering repeat purchases.
- Multiply that by the number of sales you would need per week for the test to tell you something real. A handful, not one.
- That is roughly your weekly test budget. Divide by seven for the daily figure.
Then a hard rule. Whatever you land on, leave it running long enough to learn something. Meta's delivery needs an uninterrupted stretch before its results mean anything, and stopping and restarting is how people pay for the learning period repeatedly without ever reaching the part where it works. A budget you can sustain for several undisturbed weeks beats a bigger one you switch off after four days.
What the work costs
That depends entirely on what needs doing. Setting up a clean account, tracking and a first set of campaigns for a shop that already works is a different job from one where the product pages need fixing first. If that is the case, fixing them usually matters more than the ads. I quote the whole thing in writing before anything starts, and the ad budget stays yours.
Worth reading next: whether Instagram ads work for a small business at all, and how many ads you should be running, which affects your budget more than any setting.
If you want the numbers worked out against your actual shop before you spend anything, that is the first conversation I have when setting up Meta ads for a Melbourne business.