Facebook ad cost is driven by CPM rather than a price per customer. A budget divided by CPM gives impressions, multiplied by CTR gives clicks, multiplied by conversion rate gives orders. Meta CPMs typically run $8 to $15, and Facebook Ads average between a 1.05% and 3.92% CTR and a $0.74 to $9.78 CPC depending on industry.
How Facebook ad costs actually build up
You do not buy conversions on Meta, you buy impressions, and everything downstream is a conversion rate applied to them. A budget divided by CPM gives impressions; impressions times CTR gives clicks; clicks times landing page conversion rate gives orders. Cost per acquisition is an output of that chain, never an input.
Working the funnel forward is what makes a budget defensible. It shows which assumption a forecast depends on, and it makes the sensitivity obvious: halving CTR halves orders just as surely as halving the budget does, and costs nothing to fix by comparison.
Use your own rates, not benchmarks
Pull CPM, CTR and conversion rate from your own Ads Manager over a recent window rather than from an industry article. Account-level rates vary so widely by audience, placement, country and season that a borrowed benchmark will produce a forecast with no relationship to what you will actually see.
Two cautions on the numbers you pull. Use landing page conversion rate rather than the platform's reported conversion rate, since the latter is measured on attributed conversions rather than sessions. And treat a CPM from a small test as provisional, because CPMs typically rise as you scale spend into broader inventory.
Using it as an ad budget calculator
Run the same chain backwards to size a budget rather than forecast one. Decide how many customers you need, divide by your landing page conversion rate to get the clicks required, divide by CTR to get the impressions, then multiply by your CPM and divide by 1,000. That is the budget, derived from a target rather than guessed at.
The method is platform agnostic even though the page is named for Facebook. An Instagram ad budget uses the same arithmetic on Meta's shared auction. A TikTok, LinkedIn or Google ad budget only differs in the CPM and conversion rate you feed it, and LinkedIn in particular runs CPMs several times higher than Meta, which is why borrowing Meta numbers to plan a LinkedIn budget produces a forecast that is wrong by an order of magnitude.
A forecast is not a profit projection
The ROAS this calculator returns is platform-reported ROAS on gross revenue. It does not account for product cost, shipping, payment fees or returns, and it does not adjust for the gap between what Meta attributes and what is genuinely incremental.
Take the ROAS figure here and check it against your break-even ROAS before treating any forecast as a plan. A forecast showing 1.7x is a projection of a loss for most brands, even though it looks like a positive number.
Facebook ad cost benchmarks
Benchmarks are a sanity check, not a target. Your own account history on the same audience and placement is always the better comparison, but these are the numbers to reach for when you have none.
Facebook Ads benchmarks by industry
Use your own account rates where you have them. These are the fallback when you do not.
| Industry | CTR | CPC | Conversion rate | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arts and entertainment | 3.92% | $1.08 | 9.34% | $18.17 |
| Attorneys and legal services | 2.11% | $4.10 | 10.53% | $18.17 |
| Beauty and personal care | 2.55% | $3.06 | 5.29% | $51.42 |
| Career and employment | 2.81% | $0.86 | 5.77% | $17.64 |
| Dentists and dental services | 1.05% | $9.78 | 6.38% | $76.71 |
| Education and instruction | 1.86% | $1.65 | 10.08% | $28.22 |
| Furniture | 1.48% | $2.18 | 3.77% | $40.04 |
| Health and fitness | 1.72% | $2.64 | 5.63% | $52.98 |
| Home and home improvement | 1.94% | $2.23 | 5.22% | $41.26 |
| Industrial and commercial | 2.08% | $1.80 | 9.34% | $37.34 |
| Personal services | 1.99% | $2.08 | 6.51% | $30.57 |
| Physicians and surgeons | 3.02% | $2.23 | 4.51% | $47.47 |
| Real estate | 3.75% | $1.57 | 9.53% | $16.61 |
| Restaurants and food | 2.97% | $0.74 | 18.25% | $3.16 |
| Sports and recreation | 3.41% | $1.07 | 5.48% | $19.30 |
Source: Facebook Ads benchmarks
Average CPM by platform
Typical ranges for 2025 to 2026. Platform choice moves CPM more than industry does.
| Platform | Typical CPM | Representative figure |
|---|---|---|
| Google Display Network | $2 to $4 | $2.80 |
| TikTok | $4 to $13 | $6.21 |
| YouTube | $5 to $10 | $9.29 |
| Meta (Facebook and Instagram) | $8 to $15 | $13.48 median |
| $30 to $40 | $31 to $38 median |
Source: What is a good CPM
Frequently asked questions
How much do Facebook ads cost?
Meta charges for impressions, so the real question is your CPM and what happens after. CPMs vary widely by country, audience, placement and season, and the cost of an actual customer depends on your click-through rate and landing page conversion rate on top of that. Use your own account's rates in the calculator above rather than a published average.
How do I forecast Facebook ad results from a budget?
Work forward through the funnel. Divide budget by CPM and multiply by 1,000 for impressions, multiply by click-through rate for clicks, then by landing page conversion rate for orders, then by average order value for revenue. Every step is a rate you can pull from your own Ads Manager.
How do I calculate an ad budget?
Work backwards from the outcome. Divide the customers you need by your landing page conversion rate to get required clicks, divide that by your click-through rate to get required impressions, then multiply by CPM and divide by 1,000. That produces a budget derived from a target rather than a round number picked in a planning meeting.
Does this work for Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn budgets?
Yes, the arithmetic is identical on every platform. Instagram runs on Meta's shared auction so the inputs are usually the same. TikTok, LinkedIn and Google differ only in the CPM and conversion rate you enter. LinkedIn CPMs in particular run several times higher than Meta, so do not carry Meta numbers across.
Why is my actual cost per purchase higher than the forecast?
Usually because the conversion rate used was the platform-reported one rather than the landing page rate, or because CPM rose as the budget scaled into broader inventory. Both make forecasts optimistic. Re-run with rates measured at the spend level you are actually planning.
Does this account for profit?
No. The ROAS returned here is platform-reported ROAS on gross revenue, before product cost, shipping, payment fees and returns, and before any adjustment for attribution. Check the result against your break-even ROAS to see whether the forecast is actually profitable.
Related calculators
Measuring is the easy half
Every metric on this page is something your ad account already knows. The work is acting on it while the auction is still open. Hawky’s Performance Agent reads them live, buys against your KPI, and logs every decision with the data that triggered it: reversible, guardrailed, and running whether or not anyone has the dashboard open.
