How much should I spend per day on Meta ads for a local newsletter?

Go slower than you want to. My default is $20 to $40 a day, with $50 a day as the ceiling, because slower pacing lets the cost per subscriber settle lower.

This budget is the real cost of the model. Every new local newsletter probably needs $20 to $50 a day on Facebook to grow. My first 300 subscribers came free from local Facebook groups. Pretty much everything after that was paid.

What budget do you start a new market with?

• Main campaign: $20 to $25 a day, running the ad I know works.
• Test campaign: $5 to $10 a day for new or random ideas.
• Total: about $25 to $30 a day, which works out to roughly $1,000 a month.

When I talk partners through it, I usually say $25 to $40 a day, which is $1,000 to $1,500 a month. Most publishers in one cohort I worked with spent $25 to $35 a day. For a smaller or rural region I'd start at $20 main plus $5 test and creep up from there.

How did you run your very first test?

Tiny. On my first newsletter I put up one ad at $10 a day for about two days, targeting moms. I skipped A/B testing completely. The only goal was to learn the signup rate and hopefully get some signups.

1. Run one ad for a couple of days to get a real conversion number.
2. Try a couple of different things over the next week or two.
3. As soon as something works, triple the budget toward about $30 a day, or $1,000 a month.
4. Go up to $2,000 a month only if the numbers are great.

What happens if you spend more?

"If you spend more than about $50 a day, Facebook is going to start showing your ads all over the place. The more you spend, the worse it gets."

Every local newsletter has a capped audience because of location. Nobody outside your city is going to read it. Spend too much and Meta saturates the local audience, then starts showing your ad to people in the next city over who will never be your reader. The difference between $5 and $20 a day shouldn't really matter. Try $100 a day in a local market and you'll run into problems quicker.

Cost does scale with spend, though not always brutally. I know someone who was spending $300 a day in one city and still getting subscribers under a dollar. After scaling back and trying new creative, that market is under 50 cents. One of my own locations at about $100 a day ran a little over 50 cents.

My monthly cap per newsletter is about two grand. Realistically, $1,000 to $2,000 a month is what you should spend on Meta. Past that your cost goes so high it doesn't make sense.

Should I spend faster if I have the money?

Probably not. A couple of my partners have said they want to put $100 or $150 a day into it. I tell them to slow down. Faster spend raises the cost per subscriber and tends to buy a worse list.

I get the urge. I used to be that guy: I've got money, why wait? Going slower is what gets the cost really low. In California I got subscribers for eight cents for a couple of days. On launches only a week or two old I've still been getting leads for about 15 cents, in areas where the average home is worth around $900,000.

The trade-off is real: speed to revenue matters if an advertiser is waiting on list size. Name that trade-off out loud before you double the budget.

Can you spend too little?

Yes, in two ways. The obvious one is going so low the ad never learns. My rule is at least $10 a day, ideally $20. From what I've heard from other people, $5 is just too low to learn fast enough.

The sneaky one: if you start tiny and it works, you'll want to spend a lot more, and big jumps mess up the system. Start at a budget you'd be happy to hold, then raise it in small steps. I explain the step-up method in how to raise a Meta budget without resetting it.

Once a market is proven and small, a low cap can work fine. Some of my small markets run on a hard $5 a day cap. One small-market brand pulled about 30 subscribers a day on $5, roughly 15 cents each, according to my media buyer.

With a tiny budget, shrink the map too. On a $10 a day test for a national newsletter, I'd skip targeting a whole state and pick a few of the highest-value areas, because $10 doesn't go far across a big area. If the cost comes out about the same, target the wealthier area.

How often should I check the budget, and when do I shut it off?

I don't set end dates on newsletter ads. I let them run and check them every single day, looking at yesterday's numbers.

My cutoff is price. My subscribers were running around 50 cents. When one town's campaign climbed to 60 or 70 cents and I hadn't sold any ads there yet, I turned it off. At that price, without revenue in that market, I didn't want to spend any more.

What growth can a budget like this buy?

In one publisher cohort run by a partner organization, publishers spent about $25 to $35 a day and added roughly 1.5% of their local population in about 10 weeks. One added about 8,000 subscribers in that time.

For a partner spending in that $25 to $40 range, I'd be shocked if they didn't have 5,000 subscribers within four months, and I'd expect closer to 5,000 to 10,000. A small niche test can move fast too: a seniors newsletter I launched hit 468 subscribers, growing around 30 a day. Your market will differ, but these are sane planning anchors.