How much to spend on Facebook ads in South Africa

Most small businesses decide an ad budget by asking what they can afford to lose. That is the wrong direction of travel. Start from what a customer is worth to you and work backwards.

The arithmetic

Three numbers matter: gross profit per sale, the share of enquiries you close, and what you are willing to pay to acquire a customer.

Say you are a salon. Average visit R450, gross margin about 70%, so R315 of profit. A first-time client returns three times on average, so lifetime gross profit is roughly R945. You are willing to spend a third of that to acquire one: R315 maximum cost per customer. If one in three enquiries books, you can pay up to R105 per enquiry.

R105 is a comfortable target for click-to-WhatsApp in this market. If your model only supports R20 per enquiry, paid social is going to be difficult and the fix is the offer or the margin, not the targeting.

SA benchmark numbers

Published South African figures put search CPC between R5 and R80, with most accounts averaging R5 to R50. A worked example from a Johannesburg web-design agency ran R20 per click at a 3% landing-page conversion rate — R10 000 of spend producing about 500 clicks and 15 enquiries, roughly R667 per lead, against an average client value near R25 000.

That R667 is fine for a R25 000 sale and catastrophic for a R450 haircut. Benchmarks are only meaningful against your own margin.

The minimum that is worth running

R3 000 a month is the floor where the data becomes readable. Below that you get a handful of conversions a month, cannot distinguish a good week from luck, and are paying management fees on a rounding error. R5 000 to R8 000 a month is where creative testing becomes possible, which is where most of the gains actually come from.

Two things that waste more money than targeting

First, broken tracking. If the pixel is not firing a real conversion event, the algorithm is optimising toward nothing and you are buying traffic at random. Fix this before increasing spend — always.

Second, one creative running for four months. Targeting is largely automated now; the advert is the variable you control. Expect a small SA budget to fatigue a creative in four to eight weeks, and have the next angle ready before the numbers soften.

Where the budget should actually go

For a business spending R5 000 a month: put roughly 70% behind the single offer that converts, 20% on testing new angles, 10% on retargeting people who visited and did not enquire. Review weekly, kill anything that has spent R500 without producing an enquiry, and move that money to what is working. That is the whole job.