Two numbers, and only one of them comes to us.
Most confusion about ad pricing is one confusion: what you pay the person running them is not what you pay Meta.
The two numbers
The budget goes to Meta. It buys the impressions, you set it, you can change it on a Tuesday, and none of it passes through anybody else's hands.
The fee goes to whoever builds and watches the campaigns. It pays for the writing, the targeting, the daily checking and the honest report at the end of the month.
Why a percentage is the wrong shape
An agency taking a cut of spend earns more when you spend more. That is a direct conflict with the only thing you want, which is the same result for less.
It also punishes a good month. Sell out and cut the budget, and the person who helped you sell out gets paid less for it. A flat fee is charged here for that reason and no other.
What decides the fee
How many campaigns are running, how many languages they run in, and whether the creative is being made or supplied. One campaign in one language, from photographs you already have, is the small end.
Three campaigns in Albanian and Italian, with the images shot for them, is a different amount of work every single week, and it is priced as such.
What to put in the budget
Enough for the platform to learn, which in practice means not stopping and restarting it. A small budget running steadily beats a larger one switched on and off, because every restart throws away what it learned.
If the number you can afford is genuinely small, that is worth saying out loud before anybody takes a fee for managing it. Sometimes the right answer is to spend it on photographs instead.
Where the money actually leaks
Not in the targeting. It leaks between the ad and the reply: an ad in one language landing on a page in another, or a message arriving on a Friday and answered on a Monday.
Fix those two before raising the budget. They cost nothing and they are the difference between paying for attention and paying for attention you then drop.
Questions worth asking
Do you take a percentage of what I spend?
No, and we would rather explain why than simply say no. A cut of spend pays us more for spending more of your money, which is precisely backwards. The fee is flat and it is separate from the budget on every invoice.
Can I run ads without a website?
You can, straight to a message or a WhatsApp thread, and for some trades that converts better than a page would. What you give up is the ability to explain anything, which matters more the more the thing costs.
How long before I know whether it works?
About two weeks of steady running for a first read, and it is a read rather than a verdict. Anybody declaring success straight away is looking at a number that has not settled yet.
What if it does not work?
Then it gets said, in the report, in the month it happened. If the honest conclusion is that your budget is too small to be worth managing, you get told that instead of being billed to find out slowly.
Do I need new photographs?
Usually yes, and usually not professional ones. Pictures of the real thing in daylight beat bought ones because people can tell, and the difference shows up in the click rate long before it shows up anywhere else.
Tell us what you sell and who you sell it to, and we will say whether ads are the right thing for you at all yet. Get a free audit.
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