Setting Budgets, Durations, and Schedules for Facebook Ads: The Beginner’s Guide

Once your Facebook campaigns and structure are set up, the next crucial components to configure are budgets, durations, and schedules.

Properly optimizing these campaign elements helps ensure cost-effective and uninterrupted delivery of your ads. It allows you to control spending and align timeframes to your initiatives.

In this first part of our guide, we’ll provide an overview of how setting budgets, durations, and schedules contributes to Facebook ad success. Let’s get started!

Importance of Budgets

Budgets impact the reach and frequency of your campaigns. They allow you to control investment based on targets and capacity. With optimized budgets, you get the most results for your spend.

Significance of Durations

Configuring campaign durations allows you to have always-on efforts, align to initiatives, or schedule ads in the most high-value windows.

Value of Schedules

Schedules give you granular control to limit campaigns to certain days and hours when audiences are most receptive.

Optimizing Together

When objectives, budgets, durations, and schedules are cohesively optimized together, campaigns maximize results.

Facebook advertising is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes to reach their target audience and achieve their marketing goals. But with so many options and features available, it can be tough to know where to start.

We have managed hundreds of Facebook and Instagram campaigns for businesses of all sizes, and we know what it takes to achieve success.

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Strategies and tips for setting budgets:

Many small businesses starting out with Facebook ads don't need huge daily budgets. Here is a paragraph providing guidance on budget management for those with smaller budgets:

For small businesses new to Facebook ads, you likely don’t need a big daily budget. You can start with as little as $5-$10 per day, test results on a small scale, and gradually increase if you achieve positive return on ad spend (ROAS). The key is tracking performance data, optimizing for conversions, monitoring costs per result, and slowly scaling budgets over time for winning campaigns. With a meticulous, metrics-driven approach, small businesses can make Facebook ads work on modest budgets under $100/day. Focus on tight targeting, compelling creative, systematic testing, and ensuring profitability on small budgets before increasing investment. Proven success with limited funds is the best way for rookie advertisers to justify larger budgets down the road.

Key factors to consider when setting your Facebook ads budget

Determine Business Goals

First, be clear about what you want to achieve with your ads. Do you want 100 new leads? $10,000 in sales? 5,000 new email subscribers? Your goals heavily influence how much you’ll need to budget.

Evaluate Historical Spending

Look back at past ad campaign performance and costs to inform budget decisions for future efforts. If you spent $2,000 over 3 months for an older campaign, use that as a reference point when planning the next one.

Research Competitor Spending

Use third-party tools like SEMrush, SpyFu or SimilarWeb to analyze estimated competitor spending. See what companies in your industry are investing so you can gauge appropriate budget range.

Calculate Target Cost Per Result

Determine your target cost per conversion or action based on margins. For example, if you can profitably afford $25 per lead, and want 100 leads in a month, then your budget would need to be $2,500 for that time period.

Factor in Audience Size

The larger the audience you want to target, the bigger your budget needs to be to achieve sufficient reach and frequency. Saturating bigger audiences requires greater investment.

Allow For Creative Production

Allocate a portion of budget for producing compelling, professional ad creatives. Don't just account for media spend.

Build in Buffer Room

Pad your budget estimates by 10-20% to allow room for unpredictable pace fluctuations in the campaigns. Things rarely go exactly to plan.

Start Conservative

For new campaigns, begin with smaller budgets, prove the value, then ramp up the spending on efforts that are yielding a positive ROI.

Actively Monitor and Adjust

Continuously check campaign analytics and act quickly to actively adjust budgets up or down based on performance.

Now let's look at best practices for configuring campaign durations and schedules.

Choosing Campaign Durations

The duration you configure campaigns for can impact performance:

Always-On Campaigns

These campaigns run indefinitely without a pre-set end date.

Pros:

• Allow for ongoing optimization

• Build brand awareness over time

• Flexibility to change components at any time

Cons:

• Require constant monitoring

• Risk of “set and forget”

Temporary Campaigns

These campaigns run for a limited pre-set time period.

Pros:

• Align to specific initiatives or events

• Add urgency with end dates

• Concentrate budget on key periods

Cons:

• Require planning and reminders for next push

• Can interrupt momentum after ending

Setting Start and End Dates

Strategically use start/end dates for initiatives like:

• New product launches

• Holiday promotions

• Seasonal sales

• Market expansion drives

• Brand awareness pushes

Configuring Schedules

Fine tune ad delivery with schedules optimized for:

• Weekdays vs weekends

• Business hours vs evenings

• Morning vs afternoon

• High site traffic days/times

• Peak audience availability

Check Traffic Trends

Analyze site, app, industry, and event data to identify ideal schedules.

Test Schedule Options

Experiment to determine the best performing configurations.

Optimized durations and schedules keep your ads running during ideal windows for your goals, industry, and audience. This drives better results.