Solved: Are Very Low Budget Facebook Ads Campaigns Worth It?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out with your question about low-budget Facebook campaigns and whether they're worth it. It’s a common thing to hear, especially from the YouTube crowd, that you need to be spending at least $50 a day or it's a waste of time. Glad you asked about it, because frankly, it’s a load of rubbish.

First off, a 3x ROAS is a great result, especially when you're just starting out. It means for every £1 you put in, you're getting £3 back. That's a profitable machine. Most businesses would kill for that kind of return. So, whatever you’re doing, it's clearly working on some level. You should feel good about that and ignore the noise from 'gurus' who often have their own reasons for pushing high budgets, like selling expensive courses or justifying their agency fees. The truth is, the platform doesn't have a magical "you must spend this much" switch.

So, I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and guidance on this. The real question isn't about hitting an arbitrary daily spend figure. It's about understanding the fundamental numbers of your business so you can decide how to scale intelligently, and what a "low budget" or "high budget" even means for you. It's all about moving from guessing to knowing.

We'll need to look at why that '$50/day' rule is rubbish...

Let's dismantle this myth properly. The idea that a campaign "won't work" below a certain daily spend is fundamentally flawed because it ignores the single most important metric for any business spending money on ads: profitability. As I said, your 3x ROAS proves this. You are profitable. End of story.

So where does this idea come from? A few places.

Firstly, it often comes from agencies or freelancers who work with larger clients. For them, a $50/day budget is tiny. If their fee is £3,000 a month, they can't justify that on a client spending only £500 a month on ads. The numbers just don't work for their business model. So they create a minimum ad spend requirement, and this gets repeated until it sounds like a universal law of physics. It's not. It's a business requirement for them, not a technical requirement of the platform.

Secondly, there's the 'exit the learning phase' argument. Yes, Meta's algorithm needs a certain number of conversions (typically 50 per week) within a conversion window to properly optimise an ad set. If your cost per purchase is £20, you'd theoretically need to spend £1,000 a week (£142/day) on that one ad set to feed the algorithm enough data. This is technically true, but it's not the whole picture. Campaigns can and do work perfectly fine without ever exiting the learning phase. 'Learning Limited' isn't a sign of failure; it's just a status. If it's delivering a 3x ROAS while 'Learning Limited', who cares? You're making money. Don't let a status message from Facebook bully you into spending more than you're comfortable with.

The other reason youtubers preach this is because big numbers get big views. "How I spent $100,000 on Facebook Ads" is a more clickable title than "How I got a steady 3x ROAS on £15 a day." They are playing their own game, which is selling a dream of massive, rapid scale. For a real business, especially a new one, steady, profitable growth is a much better goal than burning cash chasing vanity metrics.

Your situation is a perfect example. You have found a combination of creative, audience, and product that works. That is the hardest part. Now, the goal isn't to just throw money at it because someone on YouTube told you to. The goal is to understand why it works and how to protect that profitability as you grow. It's about being methodical, not reckless.

I'd say you need to figure out your LTV, not your daily spend...

This brings me to the most valuable piece of advice I can give you. Forget what you "should" be spending per day. The only question you need to answer is: "How much can I afford to spend to acquire a customer?" Once you know that number, all your advertising decisions become infinitely clearer. The key to unlocking this is calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Right now you're focused on ROAS, which is great for immediate, transactional health. But LTV tells you the true, long-term worth of each customer you bring in. It's the metric that lets you outspend your competitors intelligently. They might be panicking over a £20 Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), while you know you can comfortably spend £80 and still be massively profitable in the long run.

So, how do you work it out? It's simpler than it sounds. You just need three bits of information about your business.

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer spends with you per month? If you're not a subscription, you can calculate this by taking your total revenue over a period (say, 12 months) and dividing it by the number of unique customers in that period, then dividing by 12. For a simple e-commerce store, a slightly different calculation based on repeat purchases is better. Let's say your average order value (AOV) is £40 and a typical customer buys from you 3 times a year. Your annual value is £120.

2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit on that revenue after accounting for the cost of the goods you sell? If you sell a product for £40 and it costs you £12 to produce and ship, your gross profit is £28. Your gross margin is (£28 / £40) = 70%.

3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month? For a subscription, this is easy to track. For a non-subscription eCom business, it's a bit trickier. A simple way is to define an 'active customer' as someone who has purchased in the last 12 months. Then you can calculate what percentage of that group doesn't return in the following year. Let's say you lose 5% of your customers per month (or 60% a year, which is high but useful for an example).

The calculation is:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's plug in some numbers for a hypothetical e-commerce business.

So, in this example, every new customer you acquire is worth £140 in gross margin to your business over their entire 'lifetime'.

Now, what do you do with this number? You use it to set your target Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). A healthy, sustainable ratio of LTV to CAC for a growing business is typically 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to a third of your LTV to acquire a customer.

Max Affordable CAC = LTV / 3

Max Affordable CAC = £140 / 3 = ~£46

Suddenly, your entire perspective shifts. You're not just trying to get the cheapest possible purchase. You now know that you can spend up to £46 to get a new customer and you will be building a very healthy, profitable business. A 3x ROAS on a £40 product means your CAC is about £13.33. That's fantastic! But it also tells you that you have a lot of room to spend more to acquire more customers before you even approach being unprofitable.

This is the math that frees you from the tyranny of cheap leads and low daily budgets. It gives you the confidence to invest in growth.

You probably should focus on scaling methodically, not just increasing the budget...

Knowing you can afford to spend up to £46 per customer is powerful. But it doesn't mean you should immediately crank your daily budget up to £200 and hope for the best. That's the fastest way to kill a winning campaign. The Meta algorithm hates sudden, drastic changes. It throws its optimisation into chaos and your performance will almost certainly tank.

Scaling needs to be deliberate and methodical. There are two main ways to do it: vertically and horizontally.

Vertical Scaling: This is the simplest form. You take your existing, winning campaign or ad set and you gradually increase the budget. The key word is gradually. A good rule of thumb is to increase the budget by no more than 20% every 2-3 days. So if you're spending £15/day now, you could increase it to £18. Wait a couple of days, check the ROAS is still stable, then increase it to £21 or £22. It's slow, it feels like watching paint dry, but it protects your performance and lets the algorithm adjust gracefully. If at any point your ROAS drops below your target (say, below 2.5x), you can just pull the budget back to the last level where it was stable.

Horizontal Scaling: This is where things get more interesting and where real, significant growth comes from. Instead of just putting more money into the one thing that's working, you try to find more things that work. You have a winning ad and a winning audience. Horizontal scaling is about taking that winning ad and showing it to new, different audiences.

This could mean:

• -> Duplicating the ad set: Take your winning ad set, duplicate it, and just change one thing – the targeting. If you're targeting an interest like "Handmade Jewellery", you could create new ad sets targeting "Etsy", "Artisan Crafts", or "Statement Necklaces".
• -> Building Lookalike Audiences: This is one of the most powerful tools on Meta. Once you have enough data (at least 100 purchases, but more is better), you can ask Facebook to build an audience of people who 'look like' your existing customers. A 1% Lookalike of your purchasers is often the highest-performing cold audience you can build. We often see fantastic results with this. One of our clients, a subscription box company, scaled to a 1000% ROAS almost entirely by expanding from interest targeting into a series of Lookalike audiences built from their best customers.

The key here is testing. You run these new ad sets with a small budget initially, just like your first campaign. You're searching for more pockets of profitable performance. When you find another one that hits your 3x ROAS target, you can start to scale it vertically. This is how you go from spending £15/day to £150/day without your ROAS falling off a cliff. You're not just pouring more water into one bucket; you're setting up ten buckets to catch the rain.

You'll need an offer that people can't ignore...

Budget and targeting are just mechanics. None of it matters if what you're actually showing people isn't compelling. Your 3x ROAS tells me your offer and ad are already pretty good. But "good" can always be better. A small improvement in your ad's conversion rate can have a massive impact on your profitability, which in turn gives you more budget to scale.

Most ads from small businesses are boring. They just describe the product. "Handmade Silver Necklace - £40". It's factual, but it's not persuasive. Great ads don't sell products; they sell transformations. They speak directly to a customer's pain or desire. The best framework for this is Problem-Agitate-Solve.

1. Problem: State a problem your ideal customer has. "Tired of mass-produced jewellery that everyone else is wearing?"
2. Agitate: Poke the bruise. Make the problem feel more real and urgent. "You want to express your unique style, but you end up with the same generic accessories from the high street that fall apart after a few wears."
3. Solve: Introduce your product as the perfect solution. "Discover our collection of handcrafted silver pieces, each one designed and made in our UK studio. Jewellery with a story, as unique as you are. Shop now for a piece you'll treasure for life."

See the difference? The first ad sells an object. The second sells individuality, quality, and a feeling. This is what you need to be testing.

You should never rely on a single ad. Always be split testing. Create 2 or 3 different versions of your ad copy using different angles. Test them against 2 or 3 different images or videos. A simple test structure could look like this:

You can run all of these inside one ad set using Facebook's Dynamic Creative feature and let the algorithm figure out the best combination. I remember one client in women's apparel where we tested dozens of creative combinations like this. We found that one specific image paired with one specific headline outperformed everything else by a huge margin, leading to a 691% return. If we'd just stuck with the first "good" ad, we'd have left a huge amount of money on the table.

I'd say you need to get your audience targeting right...

This ties back into horizontal scaling. Your current success is probably because you've found one audience that resonates with your product. The key to growth is a structured approach to finding more of them. Many people just throw a random list of interests into an ad set and hope for the best. A more professional approach is to structure your campaigns around the marketing funnel.

Think of it in three stages:

Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Prospecting: These are people who have never heard of you. Your goal is to introduce your brand and products to them. This is where you use your interest targeting (like "Etsy") and your Lookalike audiences.

Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Consideration: These people have shown some interest. They've visited your website, watched one of your videos, or engaged with your Instagram page, but they haven't bought anything. You need to remind them you exist and give them a reason to come back.

Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Conversion: These are your hottest prospects. They've added a product to their cart or even started the checkout process but got distracted. They are on the verge of buying and just need a final nudge.

You should have separate campaigns for these different stages, because they require different messages. You wouldn't speak to a total stranger the same way you'd speak to someone who is about to hand you their credit card.

A simple, effective structure to start with would be:

1. Campaign 1: Prospecting (ToFu). Objective: Conversions (Purchases). This campaign would contain your ad sets for interest targeting and Lookalike audiences.
2. Campaign 2: Retargeting (MoFu/BoFu). Objective: Conversions (Purchases). This campaign contains ad sets that retarget your website visitors, people who've added to cart, etc. You can offer a small discount here ("Complete your order and get 10% off") to get them over the line.

This structure ensures you're not just constantly shouting at cold audiences. It builds a system that captures interest and methodically turns it into revenue. It's how you turn a simple, single campaign into a sophisticated advertising machine. For one of our eCommerce clients selling maps, this simple separation of prospecting and retargeting was key to generating over $71k in revenue at an 8x return.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To summarise, the "$50/day" rule is a myth. Your 3x ROAS is proof that you're on the right track. The way to grow isn't by blindly increasing your budget, but by adopting a more strategic and professional approach to your advertising. It's about building a predictable, scalable system.

As you can probably tell, there's a fair bit to it once you get past the basics. While you can absolutely implement all of this yourself, it takes a lot of time, a dedicated process for testing, and a budget to fund those tests. It's a skill in itself, and it's what we do day-in, day-out for our clients.

Working with a specialist can significantly speed up this process. We've already made the mistakes, run thousands of tests, and learned what works across dozens of industries. We can often analyse an account, identify the key opportunities for growth, and build out a robust system like the one I've described much faster than someone learning as you go.

If you'd like a second pair of expert eyes on your actual campaign to see how these principles might apply specifically to you, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can look over your account together on a call, and I can give you some straight-forward, actionable advice you can take away and implement immediately. No hard sell, just help.

Let me know if that's something you'd be interested in.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh