Cost guide
What you actually pay for, what drives the price and when your budget starts to make sense. Nothing asked in return.
If your clients ask for Instagram ads and nobody on your team runs them, I can run their accounts under your brand. Your client only sees your agency.
Want the number for your client's account?
Tap Boost Post in the app and Instagram builds a campaign with the little you've told it. It picks the goal, audience and bid. It's quick, which is why so many people use it.
The trouble is what you can't do there. You have less control over the objective, can't properly exclude past buyers, can't separate placements and, most importantly, can't optimise for a real conversion on your website. You can end up paying for engagement that goes nowhere.
Meta Ads Manager is the same platform with the controls in your hands. Everything below is about that, not the Boost button.
Google works on intent: someone searches for what you sell, and you pay when they click. Instagram interrupts: your ad appears between friends' photos, and you pay for every thousand times it's shown, whether anyone clicks or not.
That measure is CPM, cost per thousand impressions. Cost per click is a number you calculate afterwards, not the thing you're buying.
That changes where the effort goes. On Instagram, creative isn't decoration. It affects the price. A video that holds attention can lower cost per result far more than a bid adjustment.
As a rough guide, in Spain, where I run most of my accounts, conversion and lead campaigns see CPMs between €2.50 and €8. That's a wide range because audience, sector and format all matter.
Timing matters too. In November and December every ecommerce advertiser is competing for the same people, so reaching them costs much more than it does in February. If your client's business isn't seasonal, that's one straightforward way to save.
Meta needs data to optimise. Each ad set goes through a learning phase, and it takes roughly 50 conversions a week to leave it. Below that, spend is allocated with little to go on, and results swing around without a pattern you can use.
For lead generation, a realistic starting budget is around $600–$900 a month, or $20–$30 a day. You can advertise for less, but don't expect the system to learn much.
One mistake I see in almost every small account I audit: splitting that budget across six ad sets. Six sets on $5 a day each don't learn. One on $30 has a chance.
Enter your monthly spend, estimated CPM, click-through rate and conversion rate. This gives you a ballpark figure, not a promise.
This is a rough estimate, not a promise. Real numbers depend on your sector, your competition, your website and how well the account is run.
Three recurring leaks, none of them about bidding.
Audiences that are too small. Put spend behind an audience of 20,000 and, two weeks later, each person may have seen your ad eight times. Frequency climbs, results fall, and it looks like the creative is the problem.
Automatic placements left unchecked. They put your ads in places you didn't choose, and Audience Network can include very low-quality inventory. Check the placement breakdown before calling the results good.
One creative running for months. On Meta it wears out much faster than on Google, because the same people see it again and again.
63to 121
Attributed purchases
1.83×to 3.12×
ROAS
−37.0%
CPA: €48.38 to €30.47
+21.0%
Ad spend
I reorganised acquisition and remarketing and tested new creative messages. Attributed purchases rose from 63 to 121 and ROAS from 1.83× to 3.12×, with 21.0% more ad spend. Comparison of February 1–28 and March 1–28, 2026: the before-and-after does not establish causation. Attributed value is neither profit nor net revenue.
1.6%to 6.1%
Form completion rate in 3 weeks
8.08%
Video CTR, over 20x the LinkedIn B2B average
+46%
Clicks vs previous week
1to 13
From one inherited campaign to 13 across three funnel stages
I took over an account running one conversion campaign with a single worn-out creative. I rebuilt it as a full funnel, with static, video, carousel, document and thought-leader formats. I rewrote the lead form and refreshed the creative. Form completion went from 1.6% to 6.1% in three weeks. The most efficient campaign brought leads in at $163, against an account average close to $970.
9.96%
Search CTR, well above average
$28
Cost per lead
5.52%
Conversion rate
$1,300
Total campaign budget
An internship programme with two audiences at once: students on one side, companies on the other. I ran Google Ads to catch searches from recent graduates and LinkedIn Ads to reach HR leads at companies. Each audience got its own landing page. I started on exact match to keep the traffic clean and opened up the winning keywords once they were proven. With target CPA and some device and age exclusions, it closed at 29 conversions at $28 each on a $1,300 budget.
Data anonymised under client confidentiality agreements.
Start here
Want the exact number for your client's account? We can work it out in the account audit.
The audit has a fixed price of $350 and does not commit you to anything else. If you then want to delegate your client’s campaigns, I’ll prepare a proposal based on what I’ve reviewed.
How it works
What I need to run it
