Facebook and Instagram are run from one ad account, with a shared budget and shared audiences. The difference from Google is fundamental: on Google you catch people who are already searching; here you interrupt people who are not looking for anything. That is why the maths works differently - and why so many campaigns burn through their budget without selling.
What it costs: how you actually pay
You pay for impressions, not for results. The core metric is CPM: the cost per thousand impressions. Everything else - cost per click, cost per enquiry, cost per sale - follows from how well your ad turns impressions into action.
| Metric | Approximate figures for Bulgaria | What it depends on |
|---|---|---|
| CPM (1,000 impressions) | €2.50-6.00 | Audience, season, competition for attention |
| Cost per click to the website | €0.08-0.35 | Quality of the creative and the copy |
| Cost per enquiry (B2C services) | €3-12 | Offer, form, trust in the brand |
| Cost per enquiry (B2B) | €15-60 | Narrow audience, long decision cycle |
| Retargeting website visitors | 2-4 times cheaper | People already know you |
The figures are averages from accounts we manage and are meant for planning, not as a guarantee. November and December are the most expensive months of the year: competition for the same eyes grows and CPM rises noticeably.
What budget you need
There is a technical limit here that is worth knowing in advance. The ad system needs around 50 results per week per ad set to exit the learning phase and start optimising reliably. Below that threshold, delivery is unstable and costs are high.
The classic mistake is the opposite of what you would expect: not a small budget, but a scattered one. Five campaigns at €3 a day give you five ad sets that never leave the learning phase. One budget, one campaign, two or three creatives - that is what works.
What needs to be ready before you spend your first euro
Business portfolio and ad account
Set up in your name, with you as administrator. If an agency creates them from its own profile, you lose the history and the audiences when you part ways.
Pixel and server-side tracking
Today the browser pixel captures only some of the events. Adding a server-side connection recovers a significant share of the lost data - and improves optimisation.
Verified domain
Without domain verification, some event settings remain unavailable. It takes five minutes, yet it is regularly skipped.
Creatives in the right formats
Vertical 9:16 for Reels and Stories, square 1:1 for the feed. A stretched landscape photo is the cheapest way to look amateurish.
Choose the right campaign objective
The objective determines who the system shows your ad to. Choose “engagement” and you will get likes from people who like everything. Choose “sales” and the system will look for people likely to buy - but only if you feed it data on real purchases.
| Objective | When to use it | When it is a mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Sales | Online store with working purchase tracking | When you have no events set up |
| Leads | Services where you collect enquiries | When nobody handles the enquiries quickly |
| Traffic | Testing a new offer or content | As the main objective for an online store |
| Awareness | Large brands with a long-term strategy | Almost always for a small business |
Advertising does not fix an offer. If your offer does not interest someone who already knows you, paid impressions will only show it to more people who are not interested.
Audiences: where the real difference lies
For years, the art lay in hand-picking interests. Today the algorithm does better than most people, provided you give it data. In practice, the order of priority looks like this:
- Retargeting - website visitors, people who watched a video or sent a message. The cheapest and most profitable traffic.
- Customer lists - an uploaded database of real customers’ email addresses. Also the basis for the next point.
- Lookalike audiences - the system finds people who resemble your customers. Works well with at least a few hundred records in the list.
- A broad audience with a good creative - with enough data, it often beats hand-picked interests.
- Interests - useful at the start, while you have no data at all.
Don’t forget exclusions. A first-order ad shown to existing customers is a double cost: you pay to reach people who would have bought anyway, and you tell them that new customers get better terms.
The creative matters more than the settings
All else being equal, the difference between a good and a mediocre creative is a multiple, while the difference between a good and a mediocre setup is a matter of percentages. Three things we see working consistently on the Bulgarian market:
- Real people instead of stock photos. A photo from your premises or of your team beats a catalogue-style image almost every time.
- The first two seconds of the video. If you don’t stop the scroll there, the remaining twenty seconds don’t matter.
- Specifics in the copy. “Delivery within 24 hours in Sofia” works better than “quality and trust”.
And one maintenance rule: watch the frequency. When the same ad has been seen more than three or four times per person on average, results drop and irritation grows. That is the moment for a new creative, not a bigger budget.
How to tell whether it works
The Ads Manager report shows conversions attributed by the platform itself - usually a more optimistic number than the real one. So compare it with at least one other source: GA4 with correctly configured conversions and, for more expensive services, the simple question “how did you find us?” with every enquiry.
Only one number matters: how much a customer costs you compared with what they bring in. Everything else - reach, likes, views - is diagnostics, not results.
Conclusion
Facebook and Instagram ads make sense when the product is visual, the audience is broad and the buying decision is relatively quick. In Bulgaria, a realistic start is in the region of €300 a month, provided the budget is concentrated, tracking is set up and the creatives are made for a mobile screen.
If you sell something people are actively searching for, start with Google Ads. If you sell something people don’t yet know they want, you are in the right place here.
We run campaigns on Facebook and Instagram with clear reporting on what was spent and what it brought in. Get in touch for a review of your current account.
