Solved: Right Budget with Small Audiences on Facebook Ads

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! That's a really sharp question, and honestly, it's something most advertisers spending big money should think about more often but don't. It's easy to just keep pumping up the budget, but understanding the relationship between your spend, your audience size, and ad fatigue is where the real skill comes in.

I'm happy to give you some of my thoughts on this. The short answer is you can probably raise the budget, but the way you're thinking about the problem needs a bit of a reframe. It's less about the audience "regenerating" and more about how you manage your pressure on that audience. Let's get into it.

We need to talk about the "Audience Regeneration" Myth...

Okay, first things first. Let's scrap the idea of an audience "auto-regenerating". It's a nice thought, but it's not really how Meta's audiences work. People don't neatly cycle in and out of interests or demographic groups on a predictable 30-day schedule. Someone interested in 'local restaurants' today will likely still be interested next month. While there is some churn, it's slow, unpredictable, and not something you can build a reliable media plan around.

The trap you're falling into is thinking of the audience pool as a bucket of water you're emptying. A better analogy is a small town square. You can't just keep shouting the same message from the rooftops every single day. At first, people listen. After a week, they start to ignore you. After a month, they actively avoid you and tell their friends you're annoying. You haven't "depleted" the town square of people; you've depleted their patience and attention.

This is Ad Fatigue, and the metric that measures it is Frequency. This is the number you should be obsessed with, not just impressions. Frequency is simply your total impressions divided by your total reach. If you served 180,000 impressions to 90,000 unique people, your frequency is 2. This means, on average, each person in your audience saw your ad twice. This is the key to unlocking your budget question.

Your new best friend: The Frequency Cap

So, if frequency is the problem, how high is too high? My thoughts:

• Top of Funnel (ToFu - Cold Audiences): This is your 1M potential new customers. Here, you want to be careful. You're introducing yourself. Shouting at them repeatedly is a terrible first impression. I'd aim to keep your 30-day frequency for cold audiences below 4. Once it starts creeping past 5, you'll almost certainly see your Click-Through Rate (CTR) drop and your Cost Per Result (CPA) start to climb. People are getting tired of your ad.


• Middle/Bottom of Funnel (MoFu/BoFu - Warm/Hot Audiences): This is different. These are people who have visited your website, watched your videos, or engaged with your page. They know who you are. Here, a higher frequency is not only acceptable but often necessary to get them to take action. For a retargeting audience, a frequency of 8, 10, or even 15 over a month can be perfectly fine, especially if the buying cycle is longer.

Your current 180k impressions per month on a 1M audience is likely resulting in a very low frequency, which is why you're correctly wondering if you can push it. You absolutely can. The question is, how much?

I'd say you need to calculate your maximum effective budget

Instead of guessing, we can use a simple model to work out your approximate spending ceiling. It's based on the principles we just talked about. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than just adding 20% to the budget and hoping for the best.

1. Decide your Target Reach Percentage: You'll never reach 100% of your potential audience. A realistic goal for a month is to aim to reach 30-50% of the total pool. Let's be ambitious and say 40%. For your 1M audience, that's 400,000 unique people.
2. Set your Frequency Cap: As we discussed, for a cold audience, a cap of 4 for the month is a solid, safe ceiling.
3. Estimate your CPM: This is your Cost Per 1,000 Impressions. For local UK brands, this can range from £5 to £15 depending on the industry and competition. Let's use £10 as a middle-ground estimate.

Now we just do the maths:

Total Impressions Needed = Target Reach x Frequency Cap = 400,000 people x 4 = 1,600,000 impressions.

Maximum Monthly Budget = (Total Impressions Needed / 1,000) x CPM = (1,600,000 / 1,000) x £10 = £16,000 per month.

Suddenly, your current spend looks very conservative, doesn't it? This calculation shows there is likely significant room to scale your budget before you saturate the audience, *provided you manage it correctly*. To make this easier for you, here is a calculator you can use to play with your own numbers.

You probably should worry more about your ads than your audience

Here's a bit of a contrarian take for you. The advertisers who worry most about frequency are usually the ones running one or two boring ads on repeat. The truth is, your creative will fatigue long before your audience does. People don't get tired of seeing a brand; they get tired of seeing the same damn ad over and over again.

The solution isn't just to cap your budget. It's to build a system for refreshing your creative. If you can show the same audience three or four different, interesting ads over a month, your frequency of 4 suddenly feels much less repetitive. Each ad is a fresh touchpoint.

Here’s a simple process to manage this:

• Launch with Variety: Never start a campaign with just one ad. Launch with at least 3-5 distinct creative concepts. This means different images/videos, different headlines, and different angles in the copy. Use Meta's Dynamic Creative feature to let the algorithm help you find winning combinations.
• Monitor Performance: Keep an eye on the CTR and Cost Per Result for each individual ad, not just the campaign as a whole.
• Set a Rotation Trigger: When you see an ad's CTR consistently drop for a few days, or its frequency starts to get significantly higher than the others, it's time to switch it off.
• Introduce Fresh Creative: Have a new ad ready to go to replace the fatigued one. This keeps your campaign fresh and your performance stable, allowing you to maintain a higher budget for longer.

This proactive approach means you're controlling for ad fatigue at the source, which gives you much more freedom with your budget.

You'll need a better campaign structure...

One final point. How you structure your campaigns matters, especially with a limited (though 1M is a decent size!) audience. A common mistake is to slice a 1M audience into ten tiny 100k ad sets, each with different interests. This is a bad idea. It fragments your budget, prevents the algorithm from properly learning, and often drives up costs because you're forcing ad sets to compete against each other for the same people.

I remember one client, an outdoor equipment brand, where a consolidated campaign structure was the key to their success on Meta Ads. By moving away from dozens of tiny ad sets and focusing their budget, we were able to efficiently drive over 18,000 website visitors. It's a great example of how letting the algorithm work in a larger audience pool can be more effective than trying to micromanage it with hyper-segmentation.

For a local brand, I'd recomend a much more consolidated structure:

• One Top-of-Funnel Campaign: Use the 'Sales' or 'Leads' objective (always optimise for the final action you want). Inside this campaign, have one, maybe two, ad sets.
• Consolidate Interests: In your main ad set, group related interests together. Let the algorithm find the pockets of customers within the larger 1M pool. This gives it more data to work with and typically delivers better, more stable results.
• Separate Retargeting: Have a separate, smaller budget campaign for retargeting website visitors. As we discussed, you can afford a much higher frequency here.

This simpler structure is more efficient and gives you a clearer view of performance without getting lost in dozens of ad sets. It works with the algorithm, not against it.

This is the main advice I have for you:

As you can see, managing this stuff properly involves a bit more than just setting a daily budget. It's a constant process of monitoring, analysing, and making strategic adjustments based on the data. It requires a deep understanding of how the auction and audience behaviour interact.

This is often where bringing in an expert can make a huge difference. We spend all day inside accounts, diagnosing these exact kinds of issues and building systems to manage them at scale. It's not just about pushing buttons; it's about building a sustainable advertising engine that respects the audience's attention while still driving results.

If you'd like to go over one of your brand's accounts together on a call, we offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy session where we can look at your specific numbers and build a more tailored plan for you. It's often the quickest way to get clarity on how to scale effectivly.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh