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How much should I be paying for someone to set up/manage my Facebook campaign?
I’m early days into running a SaaS business, at the moment on the side alongside my day job. I want someone to set up, run and overall manage a Facebook campaign for me.
I can allocate around £1,800 per month, all in. That’s for management fees and ad spend. How that gets divided up between the two is TBD.
Right now I’m not necessarily looking for a huge amount of growth. Just enough high quality traffic to tweak my messaging and iterate my way to product/market fit.
I guess I have two questions really:
1. Am I right in thinking this rate will be too low for agencies to take me on?
2. What should I expect to be paying a freelance PPC consultant who really knows their stuff? I would rather pay top dollar for a great person and have less left over for ad spend, if that means I get someone who I can trust to manage the whole thing and who will deliver results.Note: if you think you’re a good fit, DM me!
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1 Reply
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Before you go pushing your 1,800 eggs into the Facebook basket, have a look at this Perry Marshall traffic wizard to help you figure out if it’s the right platform for you:
https://www.perrymarshall.com/ppc/
Might turn out you’re better off putting that spend into a different platform.
It’ll take all of 5 minutes and could change your thinking altogether.
And, since it’s from Perry, a known good guy in a world of charlatans, it’s 5m well spent.
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> Am I right in thinking this rate will be too low for agencies to take me on?
Most agencies, yeah. A base + % of ad spend is pretty common. That base is going to eat in the vast majority of your total budget. You’d be looking at 40-50% of your budget going to management fees even at fairly affordable rates.
> What should I expect to be paying a freelance PPC consultant who really knows their stuff? I would rather pay top dollar for a great person and have less left over for ad spend, if that means I get someone who I can trust to manage the whole thing and who will deliver results.
Expect to pay $100-350+ per hour for someone competent. Look for someone with prior SaaS experience, prior agency experience, and experience targeting your ideal demographic (i.e. if your SaaS is for dentists, someone who has targeted dentists before can be helpful). The lower hourly commitments, the higher the billable rate normally. Also if it’s a planned off boarding (i.e. I’ll get everything set up, off to the races, teach you what to look for, then phase out of the equation) people will often have a bit higher hourly rate than a simple “run and maintain” relationship that is indefinite and can scale with performance.
If you work with someone billing hourly, you’ll have a decent chunk of time that’ll happen month 1 where there’s set up, conversion tracking implementation, learning your target audience and business, campaign set-up, kick-off, and then initial optimizations / adjustments. Depends on the person but that can eat up time (particularly if you have competitors you want to look at, if you have more advanced creative needs, if you’ve got a difficult proposition to communicate, if you have a weird tech stack that is more difficult to set up tracking, if you want integration to some kind of CRM, etc.). Back of napkin math from my side would be 5-15 hours depending on complexity and other needs; but everyone has an approach and timing will depend on who you talk to.
The ongoing maintenance on FB for ~$1-1.5k/m in media is not significant. Anyone billing you more than 5 hours per month for that is overworking the account or just rearranging proverbial deck chairs to look busy; you simply aren’t getting enough data day-to-day on FB to be adjusting any more than that. As you scale up in spend, that time commitment can scale as well. On most digital ads, but especially Meta, the more you spend – the more opportunities to test and adjust things.
Reporting is another potential time suck if you are hourly. If you want weekly calls, that’s time. If you want a custom data studio report, that’s time. Consider how much detail you need vs. the hourly cost trade-off. I don’t really work with clients at your spend level often, but when I have I usually tell them the best ROI for their time is just to get on a call with me and show you things in platform. If I’m spending time prepping or building out reports, then that’s money going away from working media dollars.
So if you go hourly, expect the bulk of your budget to go to campaign set-up and kick-off stuff month 1. If you are a technical founder and willing to take on the conv tracking and tech stack side of things, that can help alleviate a big chunk of time. Month 2 onwards, expect it to be more manageable.
FWIW consider the channel selection as well. I know you said Meta; but depending on your target audience and goals, there might be better options to start with.
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First of all, I’m unsure if FB is for you, but let’s suppose it is.
There will be two case:
1.) Sometimes the algo can help you a lot and better to spend on traffic & conversions (which gives feedback to the algo) than give it to someone and then you’ll have less traffic & less conversion the system can optimize for.
2.) You won’t waste money on ads that won’t work and more likely you’ll get higher conversion rate from the budget you spend on Facebook.The problem is, it’s very hard to tell which category you’ll fell in advance.
Here is my suggestion though:
– If you don’t want to pay for someone to manage the campaign that’s fine, BUT at least hire someone to setup the tracking, to make sure you track the right events. Facebook’s algo is pretty good to send you people that’ll act according to the campaign goals, if you track menu click and not form submissions for example.. you’ll have a lot of visitors who clicked on your menu and not the form for example. + you need to setup some micro conversions for the first time. Once the campaigns generated enough micro conversions you can switch to a more meaningful conversion for the business.– At least consult with someone about the messaging & assets you’ll use. The assets are really important, if you’d like to use a few static images, you’ll most likely fail, so consult with someone about that.
You can save money by uploading the ads for yourself or checking the account etc, but if you do at leat that two you’ll eliminate a large portion of potential failure.
Also DMd you. -
It’s not just about setting up and managing your campaigns. It’s all about **data analytics** and converting insights into actionable strategies. This is a skill not everyone has.
To give you an idea for a freelancer’s rate, i charge my clients 10% of their monthly ads budget.
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I own an agency for years now but won’t charge you to point you in the right direction. DM me if you want to have a chat. —Rocco
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I can write a long answer to this but the long answers written by the guys are actually factual, correct and on point.
If you are just starting out, and or a small business I feel that you should start off by yourself.. try to test the waters! Just setup a regular ad, this should give you budget that you can test on your ads.
Specially if your budget is tight the more you save, the more you can put in the ad-spend! But that is just my opinion.
I also have an agency, mostly focused on e-commerce in the North American market. So I think that I can help you point you to the right decision.
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10% ad spend + $1500 a month is what I charge
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If ur budget is that low, I recommend u hire a freelancer. One that can also create good ads. Once it becomes profitable. Then u can scale or hire someone who can scale. Rates vary, it depends on the person experience and work.
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