How much does advertising on social media cost?

Advertising on social media has no fixed price: you set your own budget and the platforms charge per click (CPC) or per thousand impressions (CPM). What a click or impression costs depends on the channel, your audience and the competition for the same people. Business audiences on a platform like LinkedIn are generally more expensive than a broad audience elsewhere. Naming a hard amount would be misleading; far more important than the price per click is what you ultimately pay per lead or per customer.

What determines your advertising costs?

A few factors together determine what you pay:

• Channel. One platform demands a higher CPM than another for the same visibility.
• Audience. The more specific and business-oriented your audience, the more advertisers compete for it.
• Quality. Relevant ads and good landing pages lower your cost per result.
• Goal. Charging for brand awareness works differently from steering on concrete enquiries.

The budget you set is therefore only the beginning. How efficiently that budget works decides the difference between expensive and profitable advertising.

Vanity reach or real leads?

It is tempting to steer on big numbers: many impressions, many clicks, a low amount per click. But reach does not pay the bills. Cheap clicks that never become an enquiry ultimately cost you more than more expensive clicks that do deliver customers. At Customer Impact we therefore steer on cost per lead and on contribution to revenue, not on vain reach numbers. We work B2B, never for online shops, so we aim at qualitative enquiries, not at as many clicks as possible.

How much do you need to invest to start?

Enough to reliably learn what works. Too small a budget delivers too little data to optimize campaigns well; too large a budget you waste while you are still testing. We prefer to start in a controlled way, measure what a lead costs and only scale up what proves itself. Want an estimate that fits your goals and market? Check our social ads service or request a tailored calculation via /en/pricing/.