This is the question we get most often from local business owners. And most of the answers online are written by agencies trying to upsell you.

Here’s what we actually tell our clients.

Start with $10–$20 per day

That’s $300–$600/month. It’s enough to generate real data (impressions, clicks, leads) without risking a significant amount of money on an untested campaign.

At this budget, you’re not going to scale a business overnight. But you’re going to learn fast: what creative gets attention, what audience responds, what offer converts. That information is worth more than the leads themselves.

Don’t scale until you have proof

A lot of businesses make the mistake of dumping $2,000 into Facebook ads in month one. Without a proven audience, proven creative, and a proven offer, that money mostly teaches you what doesn’t work, expensively.

The smarter move: start lean, find what’s working, then scale it. A $10/day campaign that converts is the blueprint for a $100/day campaign that scales.

More budget doesn’t fix bad strategy

This is the one people don’t want to hear. If your targeting is wrong, your creative is weak, or your landing page doesn’t convert, spending more money will just surface those problems faster.

Meta ads are not a tap you turn on for results. They’re a system you build: audience, creative, offer, landing page. Each piece has to work. When it does, the math is simple. When it doesn’t, no amount of budget fixes it.

What you actually need to budget for

Beyond ad spend, there’s the management side. Running Meta ads properly (A/B testing, weekly optimization, audience refinement, creative refresh) takes time. If you’re doing it yourself, it’s time away from your business. If someone else is doing it, that’s a management fee on top of ad spend.

At Blitz, we manage Meta campaigns alongside your ad spend. Contact us and we’ll tell you what a realistic budget looks like for your specific business and goals.

The honest number

For most Edmonton small businesses testing Meta for the first time: $10–$20/day in ad spend, for at least 60 days. That gives the algorithm time to optimize, gives you real data to work with, and keeps your downside limited while you figure out what works.