01The two costs: ad spend and management
Ad spend is the money Meta charges to show your ads. You choose a daily or lifetime budget, Meta spends it in its ad auction, and you can pause or change it at any time. It is billed by Meta to your own ad account.
Management is what you pay a person or agency to run the account: strategy, audiences, the ad creative, setting up tracking, testing, optimisation and reporting. Keep the two separate in your head, because a cheap fee with weak creative usually wastes far more ad spend than it saves.
02What decides how far your budget goes
- Creative: ads that stop the scroll get more attention for the same money, which is why fresh creative is the biggest lever.
- Audience: very narrow or very competitive audiences cost more to reach.
- Season: costs rise when everyone advertises at once, such as festive sales and big shopping events.
- Objective: optimising for sales or leads costs more per result than optimising for views, but it is usually what matters.
- Your website: a slow or confusing landing page turns paid clicks into lost money.
- Tracking: if Meta can’t see who bought, it can’t find more people like them.
03How much to budget when you start
Start with a budget you can keep running for at least a few weeks. Meta needs time and data to learn which people respond, and switching campaigns on and off resets that learning.
It is better to run a small budget steadily, with several creative variations, than to spend a big budget for a few days on one ad. Once you can see which ads and audiences bring sales at a cost you are happy with, you move more budget there.
04What ByteShark charges
- Starter, $399/month: Meta and Instagram or Google Search, for ad spend up to $3,000 a month, with tracking setup, 6 new AI ad creatives a month, weekly optimisation and a monthly report.
- Growth, $899/month: Meta, Instagram and Google Search together, for ad spend up to $10,000 a month, with 12 new creatives a month, A/B testing, retargeting and a call every two weeks.
- Scale, $1,799/month: everything in Growth plus Performance Max and Shopping, for ad spend up to $30,000 a month, with 30 new creatives a month including AI video ads.
Your ad spend is always paid straight to Meta or Google. See every plan on our ads pricing page.
05Questions to ask any agency
- Is ad spend included in the fee, or paid separately? (It should be separate, from your own account.)
- Who owns the ad account and the data if we stop working together?
- How many new creatives will you make each month?
- How will you track sales and leads, and how often will I see the numbers?