How much do Facebook and Instagram ads cost in Portugal?
There's no fixed price. On Facebook and Instagram you decide how much to spend: you set a daily budget or a total for the campaign, and Meta works within that limit. You can start with a few euros a day. What doesn't exist is a fixed price per enquiry, because every ad goes into an auction and the cost changes depending on who you want to reach, the time of year and the quality of the ad itself. This guide explains how the budget works, what minimum makes sense, what you control and how to start small without throwing money away.
How does the budget work: daily or total?
When you create a campaign with Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, you pick one of two ways to spend.
- Daily budget: you say how much you want to spend on average per day, and the campaign runs until you stop it. Meta may spend a little more one day and a little less the next, depending on opportunities, but over each week it never goes above seven times the daily amount.
- Lifetime budget: you say how much you want to spend on the whole campaign and when it ends. Meta spreads that amount across the days and never goes over the total.
A daily budget suits businesses that want to be visible all the time, like a restaurant advertising lunch every week. A lifetime budget suits a campaign with a start and an end, like Christmas dinners or a month-long promotion.
Either way, the limit is yours. The maximum is whatever you choose before publishing, and you can pause the campaign at any time.
What's the minimum you can spend?
Meta lets you start with very small amounts. But the minimum the platform accepts isn't the minimum that makes sense.
Below about €5 a day, the platform struggles to show the ad consistently. It shows it in fits and starts, learns very little and keeps starting over. The money still gets spent, but it doesn't go far.
For a local business, a sensible starting point is around €8 to €12 a day: €8 to €10 for a restaurant, €8 to €12 for a service like plumbing or renovation. Nobody makes you spend that much; it's simply the level at which the platform usually has room to learn something.
If your budget is tight, it's better to advertise for fewer days at a sensible daily amount than for many days at an amount that's too small to do anything.
Why is there no fixed price per enquiry?
Every time someone opens Facebook or Instagram, several advertisers want to reach them. Meta runs an auction, in a fraction of a second, to decide which ad to show. So the cost of each enquiry isn't a list price: it's the result of several things at once.
- Who you want to reach. Some audiences are more in demand than others. Reaching women aged 25 to 34 on Instagram is among the most expensive; reaching older people on Facebook is among the cheapest.
- The time of year. In the weeks before Christmas many more businesses advertise, and the auction gets more expensive.
- The ad itself. An ad people stop to look at gets shown more and costs less. One nobody looks at costs more per result.
- The type of business. Someone who has already decided they need you, like a person with a burst pipe, responds much faster than someone just browsing.
Be wary of anyone who promises you a cost per enquiry before you start. The tables doing the rounds online are almost always from other countries, in dollars, from markets that have little in common with Portugal. A figure like that makes a guess nobody can actually make look precise.
So how do I know whether it's worth it?
With a question only you can answer: what is a new customer worth to your business?
Without that figure, no cost per enquiry is good or bad. Picture a restaurant that makes €25 on every table: if a booking costs it a few euros in ads, it's making money. A clinic where every new patient is worth several hundred euros can pay a lot more per appointment and still come out ahead. The whole difference lies in what each customer is worth.
A simple way to read the numbers: if each enquiry costs you less than a third of what a customer is worth, it's going well and you can raise the budget slowly. If it costs more than the customer is worth, you're losing money and it's time to stop and rethink.
And there's a second question almost nobody asks: of the enquiries you received, how many did you reply to? An ad that brings in requests nobody calls back looks like it isn't working, when the problem is on your side.
What does the business owner control?
More than you might think. You control:
- The budget, daily or total, and when the campaign starts and ends.
- The area where the ad appears, and so who can see it.
- The age of the people it's shown to, except in sectors with special rules, such as real estate.
- What the ad says and shows: the copy, the photo, the video, the offer.
- What you ask people to do: book, message, call or fill in a form.
- When you pause or stop.
What you don't control is the price of each result, or exactly who sees the ad within the audience you chose. The auction decides that. But what you do control matters far more than it seems, especially the ad itself.
And on Google, how does the cost work?
With Google Ads the principle is similar: you also set a daily budget and there's also an auction. The difference is who sees the ad and what you pay for. On Google, the ad shows up for people searching right then, say "plumber in Gaia", and you usually only pay when someone clicks on it.
So the cost depends mostly on how many businesses want to appear for the same search. Highly competitive searches cost more per click; searches specific to your service and your area tend to cost less and bring in people who have already made up their minds.
For a local business, Google serves people who are already looking; Facebook and Instagram reach people nearby who hadn't thought about it yet. Often it isn't one or the other: it's both.
How can you start small without wasting money?
- Pick one objective: enquiries, messages, bookings or calls. The platform delivers what you ask for; ask for likes and you'll get likes.
- Match the area to reality. Show the ad where you can actually serve people, not to the whole country.
- Prepare three to six pieces, photos or short phone videos. With only one, the platform has nothing to choose from.
- Don't touch it for the first two weeks. The campaign is learning, and every big budget change, above about a fifth, restarts that learning.
- Scale up slowly. When the numbers work, raise the budget by around 20% at a time.
- Get ahead of key dates. Start 10 to 14 days before Christmas or Mother's Day, while people are still deciding.
- Reply quickly. An enquiry left waiting for two days goes cold.
Where RL Ads comes in
This is exactly the work RL Ads, by RL Agency, is being built to do with you. You say what you want to promote and send a photo; the AI writes the ad in three versions, suggests the area, age range and budget, and shows you the total before you spend a cent. It only publishes on Facebook, Instagram or Google once you tap Approve, and there's always a person from RL keeping an eye on it.
It's still in development, being tested on real campaigns in our own ad account.