Hi there,
Thanks for your enquiry about running a small budget Facebook ad for 24 hours and I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and guidance on that. To be honest, the whole idea of a 24-hour test is one of the biggest myths in paid advertising, and it's probably the fastest way to just throw money away without learning anything useful. The good news is there's a much better way to approach it, and it doesn't have to be complicated or expensive.
I'll walk you through how to think about testing properly, so you can actually get data that helps you make real decisions, instead of just guessing.
We'll need to look at why a 24-hour test is a waste of money...
Right, let's get this out of the way first. A 24-hour test on Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is pretty much useless. I know it feels like a cheap and quick way to 'test the waters', but you're actually setting yourself up to fail before you even start. There's a few reasons for this.
First off, you need to understand how the Meta ads algorithm works. When you launch a new campaign or ad set, it enters what's called the "learning phase". During this time, the system is actively trying to figure out who in your target audience is most likely to take the action you want them to take (like clicking, signing up, or buying something). It does this by showing your ad to a wide range of different people within your audience to see who responds best. This phase can take a few days and needs about 50 conversions per ad set within a 7-day period to complete. If you only run an ad for 24 hours with a tiny budget, you give the algorithm no time to learn. It'll just randomly show your ad to whoever is cheapest to reach, and the results you get will be completely random too. You can't make any sensible decisions based on that.
There's an uncomfortable truth here that most new advertisers don't realise. When you tell the platform to just "find people" for a short amount of time with a low budget, you're basically giving it a command to find you the largest number of people for the lowest possible price. And who do you think those people are? They're the ones who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and definitely least likely to ever buy anything. Their attention is cheap because no other advertiser wants it. So you end up actively paying this massive advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product. It's a total waste of time and money.
You also mentioned TikTok ads being around $70 a day. Tbh, that sounds way off. Their minimum daily budget is actually only $20 at the campaign level. Facebook's is even lower, you can technically run ads for as little as £1 a day. But just because you *can*, doesn't mean you *should*. A budget that low spread over just one day gives you almost no data. You might get a few clicks, you might get none. Either way, you'll have no idea if it was the ad, the audience, or just bad luck on that particular day.
So, the real question isn't "how much should I spend for 24 hours?". The real question should be, "What is the absolute minimum I need to spend, over a proper amount of time, to get data that actually tells me something useful?".
I'd say you need to think about your objective first...
Before you even think about budget or audiences, you have to be brutally honest about what you're actually trying to achieve. Just 'testing the waters' isn't an objective. What action do you want someone to take after seeing your ad? Do you want them to buy a product? Sign up for a newsletter? Book a call? Fill out a lead form?
This is probably the single most important thing to get right. The campaign objective you choose tells Meta's algorithm exactly what kind of person to look for. If you choose a 'Traffic' objective, it'll find people who like to click on links. If you choose an 'Engagement' objective, it'll find people who like and comment on posts. If you choose a 'Sales' or 'Leads' objective (a conversion objective), it'll go and find people who have a history of actually buying stuff or filling in forms. For any business that needs to make money, you almost always want to be optimising for a conversion.
This links back to your whole offer. The number one reason I see campaigns fail, time and time again, is because the offer itself is weak or there's no real demand for it. You can have the best ads in the world, but if you're trying to sell something nobody wants, you're going to fail. You need an offer that solves a specific, urgent problem for a specific group of people. I see so many founders chasing an idea, building loads of features, and then they struggle to get any traction because they never validated that people actually have the problem they're trying to solve.
Forget trying to appeal to everyone. Think about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), but not in the way most people do. "Men aged 25-40 who like football" is useless. You need to get into their heads. What is the specific, urgent, expensive nightmare that keeps them awake at night? Your product or service needs to be the solution to that nightmare.
For example, if you sell a project management tool, the nightmare isn't 'needing better organisation'. The nightmare is a manager terrified of a massive project failing, missing a critical deadline, and getting fired. Your ad and your offer need to speak directly to that pain. Once you know that, you can start building an audience around it. What podcasts do they listen to? What industry newsletters do they read? What software do they already pay for? That's how you build an audience that's pre-qualified to be interested in your solution.
So, before you spend a single penny, your first job is to define that conversion action. What is the one thing you want people to do? Then, you need to make sure your website or landing page is set up to make that action as easy as possible. This is your foundation. Without it, any budget you spend is just a gamble.
You probably should focus on a proper testing structure...
Okay, so now that we've established that a 24-hour test is a bad idea and that you need a clear conversion objective, let's talk about how you should *actually* structure a test. The goal here is to learn what works so you can stop wasting money on what doesn't.
For a new account with no data, you can't use the really powerful stuff like Lookalike audiences or retargeting yet. You need to build up some data first. So your best bet is to start with what's called 'detailed targeting'. This is where you target people based on their interests, behaviours, and demographics on Facebook.
I would set up your test like this:
-> 1 Campaign: Create a single campaign with a 'Sales' or 'Leads' objective (whichever makes most sense for you). This tells the algorithm your overall goal.
-> 2-3 Ad Sets: Inside that campaign, create 2 or 3 different ad sets. Each ad set will target a different audience. This is how you'll test which group of people responds best to your ads.
-> 2-3 Ads: Inside each ad set, have 2 or 3 different ads. You could test different images or videos, or different headlines. The system will automatically show the best-performing ad more often.
The key here is how you build your audiences in each ad set. Don't just throw in a bunch of random interests. You need to be strategic. Think in themes. For example:
- Ad Set 1: Competitor Audience. Target people who have shown an interest in your direct competitors.
- Ad Set 2: Tools & Software Audience. Target people interested in the tools, software, or publications your ideal customer uses.
- Ad Set 3: Problem/Solution Audience. Target interests related to the problem you solve or the solution you provide.
This kind of structure lets you run a clean test. After a few days, you'll be able to see which *theme* is performing best. It’s much more insightful than just lumping everything together. For this test to be valid, you need to give it two things: time and enough budget.
Time: Forget 24 hours. You need to let this run for at least 5-7 days. This gives the algorithm time to get out of that dreaded 'learning phase' and gives you data across different days of the week, as user behaviour can change.
Budget: You need to give each ad set enough money to actually get some results. If your budget is too low, one ad set might get a lucky conversion early on and the system will pour all the money into it, even if another audience might have been better in the long run. I'd recommend a minimum of £10-£15 per day, *per ad set*. So for a test with 3 ad sets, you'd be looking at a total daily budget of £30-£45. It's more than you wanted to spend for one day, but spending £200-£300 over a week and getting real, actionable data is infinitely better than wasting £50 in a day and learning nothing.
This is the kind of basic structure we'd implement for a new client. It's simple, but it's based on a solid methodology of testing and learning. I often see accounts where people are just testing random audiences with no logic, and it's no wonder they're not getting results.
You'll need a way to calculate your budget and what to expect...
This is where things get really interesting, and where you can move from guessing to making properly informed decisions. The question of "how much to spend" isn't about picking a number out of thin air. It should be based on what a customer is actually worth to you.
The most important metric you can know in your business is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Most people skip this, but it's the secret to unlocking aggressive, intelligent growth. It tells you how much profit a typical customer will generate for you over their entire relationship with your business. Here's a simple way to calculate it:
How to Calculate Your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
You need three numbers:
1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year? (Let's say £100/month for this example)
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (Let's say it's 70%)
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? (Let's say it's 5%)
The Calculation:
LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate
LTV = (£100 * 0.70) / 0.05
LTV = £70 / 0.05 = £1,400
In this example, each new customer is worth £1,400 in gross margin to your business. Now you have the truth. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for a customer worth £1,400, you can afford to spend up to £1,400 / 3 = ~£466 to acquire them.
Suddenly, the numbers look very different, don't they? You're no longer thinking "can I get a click for 50p?". You're thinking "I can spend up to £466 to get a customer and still have a brilliant business". This single piece of information frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality leads.
Now, how does this relate to your Facebook test? Well, now you know what you can afford to pay, you can look at some industry benchmarks to see what's realistic. The cost per result varies massively, but here are some very rough ballpark figures from what we see across many accounts.
| Objective & Region | Typical Cost Per Result (CPA) | Commentary |
|---|---|---|
| Signups / Simple Leads (e.g. newsletter) - Developed Countries (UK, US, etc.) | £1.60 - £15.00 | This is for a low-friction action. A simple email submit. |
| Signups / Simple Leads - Developing Countries | £0.33 - £5.00 | Cheaper, but the quality of the lead is often much, much lower. |
| eCommerce Sales - Developed Countries | £10.00 - £75.00+ | This depends hugely on product price. You'd focus on Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) here, not CPA. |
| eCommerce Sales - Developing Countries | £2.00 - £25.00 | Again, cheaper costs but often lower order values and lower quality traffic. |
| Qualified B2B Leads (e.g. demo request) | £50 - £300+ | B2B is far more expensive. I remember one B2B software client getting leads for $22 on LinkedIn, which is great, but that's after a lot of optimisation. |
Now you can connect the dots. If your LTV tells you that you can spend up to £466 to acquire a customer, and you know that your sales team converts 1 in 10 qualified leads, then you can afford to pay up to £46.60 per lead. Looking at the typical cost per result ranges I've discussed, that seems perfectly achievable for a B2C offer and on the lower end for B2B. This is how you set your target CPA for your test. Your test's goal is to see if any of your audiences can generate leads for under £46.60.
This is the kind of maths that underpins every successful campaign we run. It moves advertising from a cost centre to a predictable, scalable growth engine.
I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:
I know this is a lot to take in, especially when you just wanted a simple budget number. But I hope you can see that a bit of strategic thinking up front will save you a lot of money and frustration down the line. Here is the main advice I have for you, broken down into a simple plan:
| Step | Action To Take | Why It's Important |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Mindset Shift | Forget 24-hour tests. Commit to a proper testing period of 5-7 days. | Gives the Meta algorithm enough time and data to exit the 'learning phase' and find the right people. Provides reliable data. |
| 2. Define Your Goal | Choose a single, specific Conversion Objective for your campaign (e.g., Sales, Leads). | Tells the algorithm to find people likely to become customers, not just cheap viewers who will never convert. |
| 3. Do The Maths | Calculate a rough Lifetime Value (LTV) for your customers and determine your maximum affordable Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). | This turns advertising from a vague expense into a measurable investment and gives you a clear target for success. |
| 4. Structure Your Test | Set up 1 Campaign -> 2-3 themed Ad Sets (testing different audiences) -> 2-3 Ads per ad set. | This is a clean, methodical way to identify which audiences and creatives work, allowing you to scale the winners. |
| 5. Set A Viable Budget | Allocate a minimum of £10-£15 per day, per ad set. For a 3 ad set test, that's £30-£45/day. | Ensures each audience test gets enough spend to gather meaningful data and compete fairly for impressions. |
| 6. Analyse & Optimise | After 5-7 days, review the results. Turn off the ad sets that are not hitting your target CPA. Move budget to the winner(s). | This is the core loop of paid advertising: test, learn, and double down on what works. It's an ongoing process. |
It's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. As you can see, it's about understanding your audience, your numbers, having a solid testing methodology, creating compelling ads, and constantly fine-tuning your landing page and offer. It's a process of continuous improvement.
That's where professional help can make a huge difference. With years of experience and a deep understanding of what actually works, we can help you skip a lot of the expensive trial-and-error and implement strategies that drive down your costs and increase your returns from day one. I remember one campaign where we generated $115k in course sales in a month and a half, and another where we reduced a client's Cost Per Acquisition from a painful £100 down to just £7. This is the result of applying this kind of rigorous, data-driven process.
If you'd like to have a chat about how this could apply to your specific situation, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can review your plans and give you some direct feedback. It might be a good next step once you've had a chance to digest all of this.
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
