Pick your platform and goal to instantly estimate the budget, reach, clicks, and leads from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or Pinterest ads — plus cost per lead and ROAS.
Results update live as you type
Facebook: $11 CPM · 0.9% CTR · 8% conversion
Estimates use typical platform CPM, CTR, and conversion benchmarks. Real results vary by audience, creative, and offer.
Figures use typical platform benchmarks — your CPM, CTR, and conversion rate will vary with targeting and creative.
Reach is approximated as impressions ÷ 2.5 average frequency; platforms de-duplicate differently.
ROAS assumes every lead converts at your average lead value — adjust for your real close rate.
What drives the cost — and the results — of social media advertising.
CPMs range from about $6 on Pinterest to $30 on LinkedIn. Cheaper impressions do not always mean cheaper leads — conversion rate matters just as much.
Match the platform to your audience: Facebook and Instagram for broad reach, TikTok for younger consumers, LinkedIn for B2B, Pinterest for visual products.
CPM is the price per 1,000 impressions and the foundation of social ad cost. It rises with audience competition, targeting precision, and seasonality.
Creative and targeting move your CTR and conversion rate more than budget alone. Strong creative can cut cost per lead in half on the same spend.
Organic social builds long-term community at low cost but limited reach; paid social delivers fast, scalable, measurable results. Most brands use both.
Once a campaign hits your target cost per lead, scale budget gradually — 20–30% increases — so the algorithm can re-optimize without losing efficiency.
Platform choice moves cost per result more than almost any setting inside the account.
Social ad budgets are easy to set and hard to set well, because the same money buys wildly different outcomes depending on platform, objective and creative. The auction prices attention, and attention on LinkedIn costs several times what it costs on TikTok — sometimes justifiably, often not.
Start from the outcome you need rather than the platform you prefer. If you need thirty qualified B2B enquiries, LinkedIn's high cost may still be the cheapest route. If you need broad local awareness, it almost certainly is not.
| Platform | Typical CPM / cost per lead | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|
| $8 – $16 CPM · $12 – $45 per lead | Broad local reach, older demographics, lead generation. | |
| $8 – $18 CPM · $15 – $50 per lead | Visual products, younger audiences, brand building. | |
| TikTok | $5 – $14 CPM · $10 – $35 per lead | Cheap reach and discovery; demands native-feeling creative. |
| $25 – $70 CPM · $60 – $200 per lead | B2B only. Precise targeting is the entire value proposition. | |
| YouTube | $8 – $22 CPM | Consideration and demonstration; weak for immediate response. |
| $6 – $14 CPM | Home, retail and planning-led purchases with long lead times. |
Expect all of these to rise 25–50% in Q4. If your business is not seasonal, shifting budget out of November and December buys materially more for the same money.
Meta needs roughly fifty conversions per ad set per week to exit learning. Budgets too small to reach that never stop paying the learning premium.
On social, creative explains more performance variance than targeting or bidding. Budget for producing several concepts, not just for buying media.
Many small ad sets each gather too little data to optimise. Fewer, better-funded ad sets almost always outperform a fragmented account.
Social creative fatigues in weeks. A budget with no production allowance will see rising costs by month two with nothing available to fix it.
Content production and community management are real costs that do not buy reach. Keep them separate or paid performance will look worse than it is.
Optimising a cold audience for purchases with too little data produces expensive nothing. Sometimes the right objective is the earlier one.
A thousand dollars spread across four platforms is four failed tests. Pick one, fund it properly, and add the second only once the first works.
Performance in the first week is not signal. Changing budgets or creative mid-learning restarts the clock and wastes the spend already made.
Cropped horizontal video underperforms native vertical consistently, and you pay the difference on every impression.
Weak conversion signal makes the optimiser bid blind. No budget level compensates for broken measurement.
If your budget cannot reach the learning threshold on a single platform, it is not yet a social advertising budget — it is a test budget, and it should be framed and judged that way. Fund one platform to a level where the algorithm can actually optimise, prove the unit economics there, and expand from evidence rather than from hope.
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