What is the minimum ad spend you recommend?

There is no single number, because it depends on the channel. On Google we would not recommend running under $3,000 a month. On Meta, $1,500 can work. The channels behave differently and a budget that is fine on one is not fine on the other.

Before anything else: these are ad spend numbers. They do not include our fee. Ad spend goes to the platform. Our management fee is separate, and it is 10% of spend with a $1,500 monthly minimum. See how the management fee works.

What we recommend by channel

Google Search: $3,000 a month minimum. Search runs every day, in a live auction, and in competitive service categories a single click is not cheap. Below $3,000 the campaign struggles to produce the conversion volume Smart Bidding needs to learn from.
Meta, Facebook and Instagram: $1,500 can work. Meta is not an all-day, every-day intent auction the way search is. You are buying impressions against an audience rather than bidding on someone typing a problem into a search bar, so a smaller budget still buys meaningful reach and enough signal to optimize on.
Geofencing: $5,000 a month. Below that the impression volume inside a drawn boundary is too thin to move anything.
CTV and OTT: $10,000 a month for a tightly targeted single market, and $15,000 or more for a full metro or when streaming is your primary awareness channel. Video needs roughly three exposures to register, so the budget has to buy enough impressions to hit the same household more than once.

For LinkedIn, Microsoft Ads, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit and the rest, the right floor depends on your category and competition and we will give you a real number during discovery rather than guess at one here.

Why Google has the higher floor

Do this math yourself before you commit a budget anywhere. Take the monthly number and divide it by 30. That is your daily budget. Now look up what a click costs in your category in Google Keyword Planner, which is free and takes ten minutes. Divide one by the other. That is how many chances a day you get.

At $1,500 a month you are working with roughly $50 a day. In a competitive service category that can be a handful of clicks, which is not enough conversions for the bidding algorithm to learn from. What usually happens next is heavy day parting, squeezing the whole budget into a few hours so it is not gone by lunch. That works, sort of. It also means you are invisible the rest of the day and your competitors are not.

What a real month costs

At our Google recommendation, one platform: $3,000 to Google plus $1,500 to us. At $1,500 on Meta: $1,500 to Meta plus $1,500 to us. The fee does not scale down with a smaller budget, which is worth knowing going in, because 10% does not reach the $1,500 minimum until you are spending $15,000 a month.

We would rather show you that math now than have you find it in month two. You get what you pay for, and a budget that is too small mostly buys you a slow answer to whether it was ever going to work.

You pay the platforms directly

Ad spend goes on your own ad accounts and your own card. We do not front it and we do not mark it up. You own the ad account, you see every dollar as it is spent, and you keep the account and its history if we ever part ways.

When a smaller budget still makes sense

A tight geographic radius with low competition. One high-value service instead of a full menu. Remarketing only, where the audience is already warm. Local Service Ads, where you pay per lead instead of per click, which changes the math entirely. See our paid advertising services.

If your budget is under these numbers, tell us in discovery. Sometimes the honest answer is that your money should fix the website or the tracking first, and we will say so.

Book a discovery call and we will give you a number for your channel and your market.