How much do Facebook ads cost is a question with two honest answers. The first is on Meta's invoice, and it is small. An Australian click often costs less than a flat white. An instant form enquiry can arrive for a fraction of what the same person costs on Google. The second answer turns up days later, when someone sits down with the list and starts dialling.
This page puts Australian numbers on the first answer. Then it follows the second answer out to the phone, where cheap clicks turn into dear conversations. One figure decides the channel, and it is your cost per contactable enquiry.
By Andreas, PrimeLeads founder · Last updated 19 August 2026
There is no rate card. You give Meta a daily budget, from a few dollars up, and an auction decides what that money buys in any given week. Most Australian small businesses running the channel seriously spend somewhere between $500 and $3,000 a month. The spend is the stable part. What the spend purchases is the part that moves.
These are indicative planning ranges, not quotes. Audience, season and creative all move them, and creative moves them most: a strong ad can halve what the same audience costs to reach.
The bottom row is the one that gets quoted in meetings. Instant forms are cheap because Meta prefills them from the contact details it already holds. An enquiry takes two taps, and the person never leaves the app. Nothing about that is a trick. Meta removed the friction on purpose, and it works. The same missing friction is why the rest of this page exists.
A Google ad answers a question someone just typed. A Facebook ad interrupts someone who was doing something else, watching a clip or half following a stranger's kitchen renovation. The person who taps is real, and the interest is often real too. What is missing is memory. They were not looking for you, and once the form goes in, the feed closes over it.
You learn what that means the first time you ring a batch. Some numbers ring out, because prefill submits whatever Meta has on file, not the number the person carries now. Some people answer, politely, and cannot place you. Two taps while the kettle boils is a reflex, not a decision. A reflex leaves nothing behind for an unknown caller to jog two days later.
None of this is the platform being dishonest. Low friction is the product, and it delivers exactly what it promises, which is volume. But volume built on weak recall answers the phone at a materially lower rate than search traffic does. Every call that rings out raises the true price of the enquiries that are left.
The dashboard reports cost per lead. Your bank account feels cost per conversation. One contact rate sits between those two numbers, and it pays to run the sums with an honest one before you scale anything.
Those numbers are examples, so rerun them with your own. The lever that moves your true cost is the contact rate, not the click price. The cheapest way to lift it is speed. Someone called three minutes after tapping still remembers the form. The same person called tomorrow morning often does not, and no bidding strategy buys that memory back.
It helps to make the count official. Tag each Facebook enquiry in your CRM when it is first contacted. Read the channel on that column, not on the platform dashboard. Once the report shows contactable enquiries, Facebook stops competing with its own click prices. It starts competing with every other way you can buy a conversation. Sometimes it still wins. It just has to win honestly.
It would be easy to read all that arithmetic as a case against the platform. It is not one. It is a case against judging the platform on the dashboard number. There are jobs Facebook does better than anything else you can buy:
What no Facebook budget can buy is the moment of decision. When someone has resolved to refinance and starts typing the question, they are on Google, and that click is priced accordingly.
A disclosure first: PrimeLeads sells leads, so read this section as an interested party showing its working, and check the sums yourself.
People compare the wrong pair: the dashboard cost per lead against a quoted price per lead. The fair test is cost per contactable enquiry on both sides. On one side is a $25 form fill that is really $50 once the dead numbers are counted. Nobody has checked it, and it goes cold in a spreadsheet while everyone is busy. On the other is a fixed cost per lead agreed upfront. That price buys an enquiry that is exclusive to you and SMS verified before delivery. It lands live in your CRM while the person still remembers asking. There is no retainer and no lock in, and nothing we sell comes off a shared list. The service is built in Brisbane, and the data stays in Australia. Facebook lead ads versus verified leads walks the same comparison record by record.
In practice you rarely have to pick one. Run Facebook for reach, retargeting and the demand you have to create. Run search for the moment of decision. Buy leads when you want a known unit cost without funding either learning curve.
You can start at a few dollars a day. A meaningful test usually needs $20 to $50 a day, so the account gathers enough data to learn from. Most Australian small businesses running the channel seriously spend between $500 and $3,000 a month.
Instant form enquiries often land between $10 and $40 in Australia, and WordStream's 2025 US benchmark averaged US$27.66 across all industries. The figure that matters is cost per contactable lead. Once the dead numbers and no answers are removed, it usually sits at least double the dashboard price.
Per click, almost always. Per genuine enquiry, often not. A Google click costs more because the person is searching for the thing you sell at that moment. More of those people convert, remember enquiring and answer the phone when you ring.
Because the form was easy and the person was not looking for you. Prefill also submits whatever contact details Meta had on file, which can be years old. Ringing within minutes lifts the contact rate more than anything else, and one qualifying question on the form trades volume for people who meant it.
Instant forms cost less per enquiry and produce more of them. Website visits produce fewer, warmer enquiries, because reading your page builds the memory that gets your call answered. Judge both on cost per contactable enquiry, and expect the form version to need more filtering. The cheapest option per lead is rarely the cheapest per conversation.
For awareness and retargeting, yes. For direct enquiry they are patchy, because finance and property decisions happen at the moment of active search, not mid scroll. Brokers who do well on the platform mostly use it to warm an audience they close somewhere else.
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