How much do Facebook ads cost? 2026 prices

The short answer

There's no fixed price for a Facebook ad. You decide how much to spend, and Meta charges based on an auction in which you bid against everyone else who wants to reach the same people. The price per impression, click and purchase is therefore a result of your account, your creative and the time of year.

The total bill is made up of the media budget, which goes to Meta, the management of the account and the production of the ads. The media budget is almost always the biggest item. The other two decide how much you get for it.

An answer without numbers isn't much help when you're setting a budget. So below we show what it has actually cost at the webshops we run ads for ourselves.

Real numbers from four Danish webshops

The numbers are from four Danish webshops we run Meta for, January–October 2026. Together, around DKK 500,000 was spent on ads in the period. We don't name the shops, but they sell different products at different prices, and you can see that in the numbers.

• Price per 1,000 impressions (CPM): between about DKK 25 and 72. Two of the four sat between DKK 35 and 50.
• Price per link click: DKK 3–5 for three of them. The fourth, with lots of repeat buyers and a lot of retargeting, was under DKK 1.
• Price per purchase: from about DKK 20 to 250.

Why the numbers range so widely

The range is wide, and that's the point. There's no single price for Facebook advertising. The biggest difference is in cost per purchase, and that comes down mostly to two things: how much an order is worth, and how much of the sales come from customers who've bought before.

The price of an impression varies far less than the price of a purchase. That tells you the difference between the shops isn't in what Meta charges to show the ad. It's in what happens after people have seen it.

What do 1,000 impressions cost?

CPM is the price of showing the ad 1,000 times. It's the number the auction sets directly, and the starting point for everything else. With a CPM between DKK 25 and 72, 10,000 impressions cost between DKK 250 and 720 at the four webshops.

CPM rises when lots of advertisers bid for the same people. That happens in November, when everyone runs offers at the same time, and it happens when the audience is narrow. A high CPM isn't a problem in itself. An ad that costs more to show can easily give cheaper purchases if it reaches people who buy.

The quality of the ad plays a part too. Meta rewards ads that people stop at and react to with cheaper delivery. That's why two webshops in the same industry can have very different CPMs.

What does a click on Facebook cost?

At three of the four webshops, a link click cost DKK 3–5. The fourth was under DKK 1. That shop has lots of repeat buyers and spends a large part of its budget on retargeting, meaning people who already know the shop. They click more often, and that makes each click cheaper.

Cost per click is easy to look at, but it tells you less than you'd think. A cheap click from someone who never buys is more expensive than a pricey click from someone who does. Use cost per click to find ads that aren't working, and cost per purchase to steer the budget.

What does a purchase cost?

Cost per purchase ranged from about DKK 20 to 250 at the four webshops. That sounds like a huge range, but it makes sense when you look at what's being sold. A shop with a high order value can easily pay DKK 250 for a purchase and make good money on it. A shop with small orders can lose money at a fraction of that.

Repeat purchases pull the price down. Customers who've bought before are cheaper to get to buy again, and an account with lots of them gets a low cost per purchase. That's good, but it's a different thing from winning new customers. If you want to grow, you need to see the cost per new customer on its own.

That's why it's risky to compare your cost per purchase with other people's. The only thing that counts is whether the price is below what an order leaves you.

When the goal is enquiries rather than purchases

Not everyone sells online. For a clinic we run Meta for, an enquiry cost about DKK 145–310 in the first half of 2026, and CPM was between about DKK 60 and 140.

CPM is higher than for the webshops. A local audience is smaller, and a narrow audience quickly gets more expensive to reach. Whether DKK 145–310 per enquiry is expensive depends on how many enquiries turn into customers and what a customer is worth. That maths has to be done before the budget is set.

How the auction sets the price

Every time there's room for an ad, Meta holds an auction. The winner is the ad that delivers the most total value, and that isn't necessarily the one that bids the most. The value is worked out from your bid, from how likely Meta thinks it is that the person will do what you're optimising for, and from the quality of the ad.

That means you can win auctions against competitors who bid more, if your ad is more relevant. It's also why creative matters more for the price than bid strategy. Most webshops should let Meta bid automatically and spend their time on the ads.

By default you pay per impression, even when you optimise for purchases. Cost per click and per purchase are worked out afterwards. They aren't something you buy directly.

What drives the price up

Season is the biggest single factor in Denmark. November is much more expensive than January, because everyone bids for the same people. Audience size comes next: a narrow audience in a small market gets expensive quickly, because frequency goes up.

Then there's the quality of the creative. An ad people stop at gets more impressions for the same money. The gap between good and bad creative is bigger than the gap between two setups of the same account.

Beyond season and creative, there are four things in particular that we see making an account more expensive than it needs to be:

• Lots of small ad sets that each never get out of the learning phase.
• Manual placements that lock the budget onto the most expensive slots.
• Ads that have run so long that the same people have seen them again and again.
• Tracking that misses purchases, so Meta optimises against an incomplete picture.

Minimum budget in practice

There's no formal minimum that matters for a webshop. The practical limit is the learning phase. Meta recommends around 50 optimisation events per ad set per week before delivery is stable.

That can be turned into money. If a purchase costs DKK 20, an ad set needs to spend around DKK 1,000 a week to reach 50 purchases. If it costs DKK 250, the figure is around DKK 12,500 a week. Those are the two extremes from the four webshops, and they show why the same budget can be plenty for one shop and far too little for another.

If the budget can't carry that, there are two ways forward. Put everything in one ad set, so the purchases that do come in all feed the learning in the same place. Or optimise for an earlier step for a while, such as add to cart, which happens more often. A budget too small to learn gives more expensive results than a slightly bigger one that can.

The three items in the budget

The media budget goes to Meta and is usually by far the biggest item. You decide the amount yourself and can change it from day to day.

Management is the time spent building, monitoring and adjusting the account, either your own or a partner's. At Oaksmond, we price the management per job, based on scope. There's no setup fee, and you pay the media budget straight to Meta.

Ad production is the item most often underestimated. When targeting and bidding are automated, the ad is the lever that's left, and an account without new creative gets more expensive month by month. Count it in from the start.

How to find your own number

Work backwards from contribution margin. What do you make on an order after cost of goods, shipping and returns? That amount is the ceiling for what an order can cost in ads.

Sell for DKK 700 at a 45% margin and you have DKK 315 to play with. If a click costs DKK 4 and 2% convert, an order costs DKK 200 in media. There's room. If only 1% convert, it costs DKK 400, and you lose money on every order. That calculation tells you more than any industry average.

1. Find the contribution margin per order after all variable costs.
2. Find the conversion rate for traffic from the ads, not for the whole shop.
3. Multiply the two. The result is the highest cost per click the maths can carry.
4. Compare it with the cost per click you actually pay, and adjust the budget accordingly.

First order or the whole customer

A new customer who buys again later is worth more than their first order. If you have numbers on how many come back and what they spend, you can allow a higher price for the first order and grow faster than a competitor who only counts that one.

If you don't have those numbers, stick to the first order until you do. It's better to grow a little more slowly on maths that holds than quickly on maths built on hope.