Facebook ads cost in Australia. Start with the sale.

How much do Facebook ads cost?

There is no single Australian price that tells you what it will cost to win a customer. You choose a budget; the campaign produces a response. What matters to your business is how much you spend to get a sale worth having.

A cost-per-click benchmark cannot tell you whether the advertising pays. A $1 click that never becomes an order can be more expensive than a $3 click that does. The useful question is: what can this business afford to pay for the next order?

At Run Ads, that question comes before the budget increase. The figures below are planning examples, not Australian market averages or a forecast for your account.

Put three costs on the table.

• The media spend. The amount spent with Meta to deliver your Facebook and Instagram advertising.
• The cost of running the advertising. Include the agency fee, internal time and relevant tools in your assessment of the investment. Ask what the proposed fee covers.
• The cost of fulfilling the sale. Product, payment fees, packaging, fulfilment, delivery subsidy and the cost of returns all affect what the order can leave you.

Use a consistent basis. If your revenue is after discounts and refunds, do not subtract the same discounts and refunds again. Keep GST out of both sides of a net-revenue comparison, or use another consistently defined basis with your accountant.

Work out your affordable cost per order.

Start with net revenue per order. Subtract the costs of fulfilling that order and any other costs you allocate to it. What remains is the amount available for advertising and the contribution you want to retain.

In this example, paying $30 for the order uses the whole allowance before advertising. Paying $20 leaves $10 after the included costs. That is a useful distinction when someone calls a campaign “profitable”. Any costs left out of the model still need to be paid.

Use our ROAS and break-even calculator to work through your own figures. The target is a planning boundary, not evidence that the campaign can achieve it.

Set a test budget you can learn from.

A useful test starts with a question. Can this sales argument acquire orders within the allowance? Does it attract new customers? Does the result hold across more than one strong day?

One way to frame the budget is the number of orders you want to observe multiplied by a working cost-per-order assumption. If you plan around 50 orders at $20 each, that is $1,000 of media spend. You may get fewer orders, more orders or none. This arithmetic gives the test a scale; it does not validate the assumption or establish statistical certainty.

Decide what you can afford to lose while learning. Include management costs, stock availability and the cash required to fulfil orders. A business with a narrow allowance should not borrow confidence from another brand’s budget.

Give the test a review window appropriate to your buying cycle and reporting delay. Record the hypothesis and the change you made. If you change several things at once, be honest about what the result can tell you.

Read the cost alongside the customer.

Cost per order uses orders as its denominator. Customer acquisition cost uses new customers. Those numbers can diverge when repeat buyers return through your advertising. A cheap order is not automatically a cheap new customer.

Compare platform reporting with your store records. Check the date window, discounts, refunds and the split between new and returning buyers. Two channels may both claim a purchase; adding their attributed revenue does not necessarily produce your store’s actual sales.

For the acquisition view, use our guide to customer acquisition cost for ecommerce. For the revenue view, read what a good ROAS actually means.

What would justify spending more?

A campaign deserves a larger budget when there is a commercial case for buying more of its response. That means looking at the value of the orders, the acquisition cost and what changes as spend rises.

If the additional orders cost more than the earlier ones, the average return can hide the weaker economics of the increase. Compare the extra spend with the extra response, allowing for attribution uncertainty, seasonality and changes in the business.

That is the work Run Ads takes on: Meta and Facebook advertising management with the buyer, the sale and the budget decision connected. Bring us your store, current spend and the result you need. We will discuss the scope and fee before you decide.