What ad budget? If someone answers with a number, walk away.

The honest answer is two words

It depends.

I know that isn't what you came for. You came for a number, a range, something to put in a spreadsheet. And I could give you one, it costs nothing. It would be wrong.

An advertising budget depends on your trade, your sector, the channel you use, your competition, what you already have in hand, your structure, your ability to absorb a month with no return. Change one of those and the amount moves by a factor of ten.

Anyone who answers “you need to spend X” without asking a single question knows neither your trade nor your market. They're reciting a figure.

Now, you're not here to read that and leave. So let's do this differently. I won't give you the amount, I'll give you the mechanics that decide it. Once you understand them the question changes, and you'll know how to ask it properly, to me or to anyone else.

Why the question is badly framed

Before we talk money, three beliefs have to go. As long as they hold, no budget will work, whatever its size.

You're not buying views, you're buying learning

This is the most important reversal in this article. The first month of advertising isn't there to make you money. It's there to tell you whether this channel can.

You're paying to find out which message lands, which audience responds, what a contact actually costs you. That information exists nowhere else. You can't guess it, you can't buy it in a course, you pay for it in spend.

So it isn't money lost. It's money invested in learning, and that has to be accepted before you start, not discovered afterwards.

Ad platforms won't let you spend how you like

Plenty of people assume they can make up for a short run with a big amount. A thousand euros over two days rather than over a month. It doesn't work, and it isn't even allowed.

Platforms cap your daily spend, particularly on a new account. This isn't commercial obstruction: massive instant spending was for years the instrument of hacking, spam and fraudulent campaigns. So the platforms imposed systematic limits.

The direct consequence: duration isn't a variable you control, it's a constraint you're handed. You decide the amount, not the speed at which it goes out.

What a campaign costs before it costs anything

Media spend isn't the first cost. Before a single euro goes into distribution, you have to build what gets distributed, and the means to measure what happens.

In practice, the minimum is:

• the visuals and videos, in several versions, because nobody knows in advance which one works;
• the ad copy, likewise written in variants so it can be compared;
• the landing page, which has to carry the promise made in the ad;
• the tracking setup: cookies, consent, events, conversions;
• the plumbing between tools, typically Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, so every enquiry is tied back to its source.

Without that groundwork you're broadcasting blind. You'll watch money leave and have no way of knowing what it produced. That's precisely playing blindfolded, and paying for the privilege.

This work costs money or time. It belongs in your advertising budget, otherwise your advertising budget is an imaginary number.

If you have a hundred euros a month, keep them

I'll be blunt, because this is the most common situation and nobody says it plainly.

A small budget doesn't produce little, it produces nothing

This isn't a matter of proportion. You might assume that ten times less budget buys ten times fewer customers. That isn't how it behaves.

Below a certain volume you never cross the threshold where things start producing. The algorithm hasn't had time to learn, you don't have enough data to tell what works from what doesn't, and there's nothing you can correct. You don't get a small result, you get noise.

What those hundred euros do better elsewhere

That money isn't useless. It's badly placed.

A hundred euros can fund a real reason to come to you. A launch offer. Something given to whoever walks through the door. A free appointment. One decent video that will serve you for two years. Something that gives a concrete motive to get in touch.

Bring people in for real rather than buying the theoretical possibility of being seen. The result is immediate, it's measurable, and it depends on no algorithm.

The Boost button is a gateway product

Instagram offers it. Facebook too. Google is heading the same way. A notification, a round promise, “reach up to X people for €10”, and a button.

What you buy there is not a campaign. No structure, no serious targeting, no conversion objective, no tracking. You're buying exposure, and exposure produces exactly what it's designed for: likes, a few followers, a view counter going up.

In other words, numbers that pay nobody. The button exists to pull you into the machine and sell you something bigger later. It's a gateway product, not an acquisition tool. And it's often where the social budget goes up in smoke, without anyone having done their job badly.

A short campaign isn't a campaign

An algorithm learns, and learning takes time

Every ad platform works the same way: an algorithm decides who sees your ad, and adjusts based on what it observes.

To adjust, it needs material. Impressions, clicks, conversions, in quantities large enough to reveal patterns. Until it has that volume it distributes on educated guesswork. That's the learning phase, and it's counted in weeks, not hours.

A three-day campaign stops inside that phase. You paid for the learning without ever collecting what it was supposed to produce.

The genuine exceptions

They exist. A sales operation, a clearance, an opening, a real deadline. There, a short campaign makes sense because the offer itself is short.

But look closely: those operations work because they lean on an account that's already warm, an audience already built, a conversion history already there. The exception confirms the rule rather than cancelling it. You don't start with an exception.

The cost per click changes everything

This is where the amount really starts to take shape. Not as a percentage of revenue, but as the price of one visit to you.

Google Ads: they're looking for you, but you pay for it

On Google you buy intent. Someone types a query, they have a need, right now. That's what makes the channel so effective, and that's what makes it expensive.

Take my own sector. “Web agency”, “website design”, “digital agency”: on those keywords a click costs between seven and fifteen euros. One click. Not a customer, not a quote, not a call. A visit.

And among those visits are competitors coming to see what you're saying. It's common enough that software exists whose only job is to filter those clicks and stop you paying for them.

Run the numbers on a small budget: two hundred euros buys you around twenty visits. From twenty visits you can conclude nothing, compare nothing, correct nothing. You spent without learning.

Meta and social: the click is cheap, the attention isn't

On Meta, meaning Facebook and Instagram, a click often lands between twenty and forty cents. For the same budget you buy thirty times more visits than on Google. That's enormous, and a real advantage for learning quickly.

Except those people weren't looking for anything. They were scrolling a feed, your ad went past, they clicked out of curiosity. The intent isn't the same, so the quality of the contact isn't either.

In exchange you get levers Google doesn't offer: age, location, interests, behaviour, time of day. That targeting precision is what compensates for the missing intent.

Expensive click and strong intent on one side, cheap click and weak intent on the other. Neither is better in the abstract. They're two different jobs.

Cost per click isn't the number to watch

This is the classic trap. People compare channels on cost per click, when what matters is the cost of a customer.

A ten-euro click that converts one time in ten costs you a hundred euros per contact. A thirty-cent click that converts one time in a thousand costs you three hundred. The cheaper channel per click is the more expensive one per customer.

And that conversion rate barely depends on the ad platform. It depends on what happens after the click, which is to say on your side.

The lever almost nobody pulls

If you take one section away from this article, take this one.

1% or 3%: same budget, three times the customers

Here's a deliberately simple case, with round numbers.

• You put €100 into advertising.
• A click costs you €1, so you get 100 visits.
• Your page converts at 1%: one visit in a hundred becomes an enquiry.
• Result: 1 enquiry, which cost you €100.

Now you touch neither the budget, nor the channel, nor the targeting. You work only on the landing page, and you reach 3%.

• Still €100, still 100 visits.
• Your page converts at 3%.
• Result: 3 enquiries, at €33 each.

You didn't gain two percentage points. You divided your acquisition cost by three. On the same budget. Without negotiating with anyone.

Which is why I consider a campaign launched onto a site that doesn't convert a decision made backwards. You're paying full price to pour water into a sieve. And it's also why a site should be judged on what it produces: the most beautiful site in the world is useless if it doesn't convert.

On a hundred visits, you know nothing

Take the example above, but in real life.

A hundred visits and one enquiry doesn't mean you convert at 1%. It means one thing happened, once. The next enquiry might come on the hundred-and-tenth visit or the three-hundredth. At those volumes you're not measuring anything, you're observing chance.

That's exactly why small budgets are a trap. It isn't only that they return little. It's that they teach you nothing, so they don't even let you decide whether continuing was worth it.

Never to the homepage

I'll labour this one, because it's the most common and most expensive mistake.

An ad must never, ever point to your homepage.

A homepage is a junction. It presents the company, the services, the values, the team, the work. It offers everything, so it asks for nothing. The visitor arrives with a precise intent, lands on a menu, and leaves.

An ad promises one thing. The page receiving it has to deliver that thing immediately and offer a single action. That's the whole point of a dedicated landing page, and that change alone often separates a profitable campaign from a wasted one.

Add to that the fact that nobody will make the effort to hunt for where to click, and you see why this detail outweighs the choice of platform.

What the amount actually depends on

Here are the dials. They're what decides, and they have to be read together, not one at a time.

Is anyone searching for you?

That's the first question, and on its own it settles half the subject.

Plumber, heating engineer, plasterer, restaurant, hairdresser, locksmith. Identified trades, named needs, daily searches. The demand already exists, you just have to be where it shows up. The reasoning is simple, cost is the only real variable.

A new product, a service nobody knows, a category that doesn't yet exist in people's heads. There, nobody types your name into a search engine, for the simple reason that nobody knows it exists. Demand has to be created, and that happens elsewhere, more slowly, and costs more up front.

What do you already have in hand?

A business never turns up empty-handed, and what it owns changes the equation completely:

• happy customers willing to vouch for you;
• a visual trade, easy to film and photograph;
• someone in the company or nearby who is comfortable on camera;
• partners, a local network, people who refer you;
• an existing customer base you can reactivate.

Each of those assets lowers the budget required, sometimes drastically. A company that produces content regularly pays less for its acquisition than one that has to buy everything. That isn't an opinion, it's arithmetic.

What are you prepared to invest in learning?

Rarely asked, and decisive. Before you start, you need to know how much you can commit without it putting you in difficulty if it returns nothing.

That isn't excessive caution. It's what will let you hold on long enough to know. Someone who can't stand watching a thousand euros leave without an immediate return will cut after two weeks, which is the worst possible moment, and they'll have lost everything instead of having learned.

Who are you up against?

On paid channels you don't buy at a fixed rate. You take part in an auction. The price of your visibility is set by what your competitors are willing to pay.

A crowded sector pushes the click up, mechanically. An ignored sector lets you buy attention for almost nothing. Looking at what your competitors are doing isn't espionage, it's the only way to know what kind of market you're stepping into.

Where are you in the story?

A company starting out, a company fifteen years established and a company launching a new activity don't have the same problem.

The first has to build everything, trust included. The second already has customers, reviews and a local reputation, and mostly needs to stop wasting them. The third leans on what it has to open a new front. Three budgets, three channels, three horizons.

The channels, and what they assume

Once the dials are set, the choice of channel almost makes itself.

Google Ads is usually the simplest starting point, on one condition: that people are searching for you. If your trade is identified and your area is local, go where the demand already shows up. The trade-off is known, it's the price per click, which can demand a substantial budget depending on your sector's keywords.

Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest answer a different situation: nobody is looking for you, so you have to be discovered. This is the ground of visual products, demonstration, content that creates desire. The click is cheap but everything rests on the quality of what you show. Without decent images or video, these channels don't work.

And this isn't about being everywhere. Every extra channel demands content, monitoring and steering. Knowing where your traffic actually comes from beats opening five accounts nobody will feed.

Two cases that prove there is no default move

The plumber who didn't need Google Ads

You're a plumber. The reflex, mine as much as anyone's, is Google. People are searching for you, so go there.

Except that in this market the click is expensive and the field is crowded. You pay to appear next to three other firms. The prospect calls you, then calls the other three, compares, and there you are haggling over price. You paid to enter a price war.

Now, that same plumber does jobs that film beautifully. Before and after, a repair in progress, a tricky bit of craft, a difficult job that ends well. He's comfortable with his phone and edits the clips himself with the free tools that exist today.

He posts regularly, anchored locally, on jobs done nearby. Bit by bit he becomes a familiar face in his area, the one people recognise, the one people recommend. It's exactly what the car detailing, sofa cleaning and renovation trades do. Their videos travel because the result is visible.

Advertising cost: close to zero. Time cost: real. And the enquiry that arrives this way isn't comparing three quotes, it chose you.

The obvious solution wasn't the right one. It wasn't, because this particular plumber had an asset his competitors didn't.

The hair salon for which social media is a handicap

Take the opposite. A hair salon, a visual business if ever there was one. Everyone will tell you to go to Instagram.

Plenty of salons do. They post, they spend time on it, and a year later they have a hundred and fifty followers, half of them existing clients and fellow hairdressers.

The problem isn't the absence of results, it's that the account becomes a liability. A visitor discovering a salon, landing on an account with a hundred followers and photos shot in a hurry under a strip light, draws a conclusion about the quality of the salon. Often an unfair conclusion, but an immediate one.

For that salon, working on customer reviews and local presence will produce more, faster, for less. It's the same reasoning as with “Instagram is enough for me”: a channel is only good if it's served properly.

A campaign has to be steered

Last point, and probably the most important over time.

What you look at after a month

A campaign isn't a decision, it's a series of decisions. After a month you sit down and look at specific things:

• how many real enquiries arrived, not how many clicks;
• what each of those enquiries cost you;
• how many turned into actual customers;
• where people drop out: before the click, on the page, in the form;
• which ads and which audiences are carrying the result.

Each of those calls for a different fix. Few impressions is targeting or bidding. Lots of clicks and no enquiries is the page, not the ad. Enquiries that don't convert is the offer or the sales follow-up. Confusing those three means correcting the wrong thing.

Changing channel isn't a failure

“Set it up and let it run” doesn't exist. It isn't a lazy method, it's a method that doesn't work.

Steering means agreeing to cut what returns nothing, to move budget towards what works, sometimes to drop a channel and test another. A channel abandoned after a month of clean analysis isn't a failure, it's an answer. You now know something you didn't know before.

And to know, you have to measure. Numbers can be made to say a lot of things, but read in the right places they give you the trends, and trends are enough to decide. Without tracking, only instinct is left, and instinct is expensive in advertising.

It's also why I'm wary of campaigns handed to someone with neither the time nor the mandate to steer them: an apprentice isn't a marketing director, and nobody should carry that responsibility alone.

So, what budget?

You won't get your number, and now you know why.

What you have instead are the right questions. The ones that produce the amount rather than guessing it:

• Is anyone searching for what I sell, or does demand have to be created?
• What do I already own: content, reviews, a network, customers to reactivate?
• What does one visit cost me on the channel I'm considering?
• Is the page receiving that visit built to convert, or is it a homepage?
• How much can I commit for three months without putting myself in difficulty?
• Will I know, at the end of the month, what actually happened?

Answer those six and the budget appears on its own. It won't be a round number, it won't look like your neighbour's, and that's a good sign.

An advertising budget isn't an amount you decide. It's the consequence of a situation you've understood.

If you'd like to go through yours properly, write to me. We'll look at your business, what you already have in hand and what your site produces today, and I'll tell you straight whether advertising is your next step or whether your money works better elsewhere.