How much should a studio portrait photographer spend on Facebook Ads?

This is one of the first questions we’re asked when we meet with photographers. You probably want a straight-up answer and that would be to try between £20 and £50 per day. But there’s a lot more to think about when deciding your Facebook Ads budget and we want to go through some factors that might influence your decision on where to start.

The information below is regarding Lead campaigns, not Awareness, Traffic, Sales etc. For more information about campaign types, you can read here.

What factors can help me decide my Ad budget?

First of all, your Ad budget is never a guarantee of how many leads you’ll get. One campaign might achieve 6 leads in a day with a daily spend of £30, equaling a cost-per-lead of £5. However, you could run an identical campaign afterwards and achieve 3 leads at £10 per lead.

This can make managing Facebook Ads very frustrating which is why we can do it for you. The important thing to remember is that this is a game of averages throughout your customer’s journey with you. Some campaigns will cost you more, others will cost you less. Keep a close eye on your average cost-per-lead, cost-per-acquisition/booking and average customer spend.

There are a few things we want to talk about that might influence your decision.

How much are you willing to pay for a booking?

It’s all well and good for us to tell you how much to spend but ultimately it comes down to how much you want to spend. If you can afford to spend more than £20 per day on Ads then you should give it a go.

How much you want to spend, comes down to how much it costs to get a booking and how much you make from your customers. Here’s some quick maths and after we’ll explain why cost-per-acquisition/booking is important.

Let’s say you have a daily budget of £30 per day. That gets you 6 leads at £5 each. You have a conversion rate of 20% so for every 5-6 leads you should get 1 booking.

Would you happily pay £30 for a booking? If I walked up to you in the high street and said “Hey, here’s a guaranteed customer for your studio and you can have them for £30.” If you know your average customer spend is over £800, I think you’d say yes.

With that in mind, how much would you be happy to pay for a booking? This might be a good starting point for your Ad budget.

Your local area can influence your spend

Unfortunately, where your studio is located can have an influence on your Ad performance.

There have been exceptions to this, but we’ve noticed that if you’re in a rural location you may see higher costs. There is logic behind this. With fewer people around Facebook has to work harder to find your ideal target audience. Let’s say you’re a photographer in London, there are tens of thousands of people living within just 1 mile of your studio, therefore Facebook has many more options to serve your Ads to.

Take this with a pinch of salt because there are other ways to improve the uptake of your Ad. A scrolling-stopping Ad image and no-brainer offer will always help keep your costs down regardless of location.

Your booking fee

Consider your booking fee when deciding your Ad budget. If you spend the same amount as your booking fee per day, then 1 booking a day would mean breakeven and 2 would mean profit.

Just remember that your booking fee may influence your booking rate. If it’s too high you may find fewer people booking and therefore you’ll need more leads to find someone who will pay.

But spending that much every day adds up!

We’ve essentially just told you to spend £20 to £50 per day on your Ads and understandably that might have you worried.

Relax, we’re not saying every day. Not at least until you have run multiple campaigns, learnt from the data and optimised your images and text.

Start by spending your budget over a few days. Try over the weekend and then a second campaign during the week – figure out what works for you.

Once leads start coming in and your booking process is successful, you can look at running your Ads for more days in the month.

£50 per day over 30 days is £1500. That sounds a lot but how many paying customers do you need for that? We have photographers that will make that in 1 or 2 sales and if you can’t get a paying customer by spending £1500, then something is very wrong with your campaigns and we need to take a look!

How many leads will I get from my Facebook Ad budget?

This is another common question we get, “how many leads can you get me?” Honestly, we can’t give you a straight answer because Facebook results can be unpredictable. What can work one week or month, may not work the following.

Without starting a campaign we’ll never know. As we mentioned above, there are a few things you can do to get the most out of your budget. That includes making Ads that stop people scrolling and your offer is so good they wouldn’t risk scrolling and missing out.

Every business needs to take risks

To close this one off we’ll summarise our answer to how much you should spend per day on your lead generation Ads.

The simplest answer is to try between £20-£50 per day, whatever you’re comfortable with. This doesn’t have to be every day, start with a few days over the weekend, then try another campaign during the week and compare the results.

For a more complicated answer, you should take into account risk. How much would you like to spend to get a booking? How much are you willing to spend and lose if your first campaigns fail? The amount needs to be risky. Without risk, you won’t have a big enough budget. We find that spending a risky amount will also encourage you to make better Ad content.