So you’ve jumped on a discovery call. You’ve had a great conversation with a client, and you go, “Yes, you’ve got a great product. I’d love to help you with your Facebook ads. How much is your ad spend?” Maybe you figured that out beforehand with a pre-qualifying form, but nonetheless, let’s say you’re on the call, and they say, “Well, I’ve got $300 a month per ad spend.” Hmm. All right. What do you do? Do you take them on board?

$300 a month for ad spend equals just $10 a day. There is not much at all you can do with $10 a day as an ad manager. Sure, you can load up maybe one campaign that would be a conversion campaign to see if you can get people opting in, or you set up a system that I call the Client Attraction Code, where you can bring in a top-of-funnel audience, bring them in and start nurturing the campaign. It’s not list-building, it’s building up brand awareness. Building up awareness, affinity, and authority with the audience.

If the client’s goal is to get people on their list, then they need to be looking at conversion campaigns. At $10 a day, that’s going to be just one ad set. Maybe two ads in there because you don’t want many ads in there because they’re not going to feed out with $10 a day. Having four or five or six ads in it, as I see ad managers do, is just overwhelming for Facebook. And, you know, it’ll find a favorite to go out, but it’s not going to work very well for you. So just a couple of ads in there. You can see at $10 a day with one ad set and two ads in there that it’s going to take a long, long time to get data through.

In the business to business space, you can certainly expect to be spending $20, $30, $40 for the CPMs, which is the cost to reach a thousand people. So say the CPM is $20. It costs you $20 to reach 1,000 people. So if you’re spending $10 a day, you’re only going to reach maybe 500 people and if you have a 1% click through rate on 500, which would be great because you’ve just started and you’ve got two ads. If you were to get a 1% click-through rate, with the 500 people that it would reach, five people would be likely to click on it. So if we look at the mass with that $10 a day, five people have clicked. That’s $2 a click. This means you can get five people to click to go over to your website.

If your CPM was $40, then your cost per click is going to double. However, instead of just being $2 cost per click, you’re getting five people to click. So it’s going to be $4 cost per click, which means you’ll only have about 2.5 people who will be able to click.

Now those clicks aren’t all going to make it over to your website. We generally allow up to 30% to drop off. If it’s any more than that, then you’ve got to look at your loading page times.

So of those five that click and come through, there might be three to four people who might actually make it to the page. Then if you have a conversion rate of, say 25%, that’s a quarter of the people who get there will actually opt in. So of the four that click and get over there, then it’s going just to be one person that opts in.

When you look at those numbers, it’s like, wow. So if they want to do their list building with $300 a month, if you got the numbers all working well, if their page converts at 25%, then that’s one person a day, 30 people a month that would just be opting in. It’s quite expensive talking to your clients about that, helping them or potential clients at this stage. Helping them to set their expectations and their realizations and go, “Oh, wow. Okay, $10 a day, it’s doable.” You can certainly do it. Great. Get in there and start testing.

But for you as an ad manager, managing $300 a month and the time it will take you is probably not the best for you and not the best for your client. Suppose you are just starting out, sure. That’s great. You know, that’s where you may feel comfortable. Okay.

Now, when you are spending $10 a day, you really wouldn’t need to be putting in that much time and effort because Facebook needs to go off and get the data.
So you would launch an ad, and then you would need to sit and watch it for five days or so for the data to come in and see if things are starting to convert. You really shouldn’t be putting that much time into it. You would just have a look, make sure everything’s okay. If things aren’t, like you’ve only got a 0.5% click through rate, then you’ll be getting ready for whenever you’ve had about five days of ad spend go through $50, then you’d be ready with some new creative, and load in some new copy.

Chances are, you’ll be stressing about it, right? You will be checking in. You will be wanting to tweak. So for you and your time, it’s not the best use of your time. Also, if your client only has $300 to spend on ad spend, what are they paying you in your management fee? They’re not likely going to have $2,000 that they will be spending on your management fee.

So when you have a client with a small ad spend like that, the best use of their budgets is to roll up their sleeves and learn how to run the ads themselves. That is where you can come in there as well. Just because they may have a low budget and don’t qualify to work with you, you don’t have to dismiss them completely. They still need your help. They still need support running Facebook ads. So this is where you could offer them some coaching instead.

Rather than spending hours and hours in ads manager for the $300 a month ad spend, and them paying you to manage their ads. They’d be much better off paying you to coach them how to run Facebook ads, so that they may have a bit more budget to put towards their ads so they could get results quicker.

It doesn’t always have to be done for you, and this is something that I think a lot of ad managers at the moment are starting to realize. All too often, they are talking with clients and especially when you are starting out, you may want to do a few clients like this because your confidence levels may not be up there yet. Working with $10 a day might just be enough for you to start experimenting and starting to get the feel of Facebook ads. That’s great. That’s a low budget. However, that is still a significant budget for your client, and they may be a bit stressed about it.

So make sure you are communicating with your clients with all of that. If you are working with a budget like that, and if you are starting out, that they know, and you’re all on board. It’s a matter of you learning to run the Facebook ads rather than them learning.

However, there is such great value in your potential client learning how to run their Facebook ads. If they don’t qualify for done for you, you do not need to lower your rates to accommodate them. You can offer them coaching as a service. So instead of you spending 10 hours a week or 5 hours a week on these campaigns, you can get together with them once a week, review the campaigns, tell them, “okay, we’ve got a low click-through rate here, so we need to improve the ad. Let’s change out some copy and creative. This headline may not be strong enough. Let’s change it. We could be saying yes, we’ve got a 1% click through rate on your ad here. The conversion rate on the sales page is converting at 15%. It should be higher than that or not on the sales page. That would just be an opt-in page. An opt-in page converting at 15% is a bit low. We want to work on that. So let’s look at the headline on that.”

So with lower ad spends, that doesn’t really allow you to optimize and work on the campaigns. It’s really not the best use of your time. Offer the potential client coaching. The minimum ad spend for you as an ad manager that you would want your ideal client to have would be about $3,000 a month. At $3,000 a month, that’s $100 a day in ad spend. $1500 would be the absolute minimum. That’s $50 a day. With $50 a day, you could do a couple of conversion campaigns, retargeting strategies, nurturing strategies, and you could have two ad sets. So that could be okay, but at $3,000 a month, then you’ve got a great budget to be able to test a couple of different ad sets at $20 each.

Have some retargeting and nurturing campaigns, as well as have a bit of a testing budget as well, where you can be testing things to warm audiences, new copy, new creative, and always be looking for that next ad that may work, that you can slip into the current campaigns.

So $100 a day is a great ad spend for an ad manager. The minimum, I’d say, would be $50 a day, which would be $1500 a month. For anything under that, offering your potential client coaching would be the best use of your time and their budget resources.

I hope you found this valuable today. If you would like to get more tips, strategies, and information about being an ad manager, then head over and join my free group Ad Manager Adventures over there on Facebook.