Instagram and Facebook ads have no price list. Meta sells every impression in an auction, and the business owner decides how much to spend per day or for the whole period. According to combined data from the ad tool AdKit, a thousand impressions in Serbia cost about €2.30 in September 2026, and a single click about 11 cents. How big a budget is really needed still depends on what one result costs, whether that is a message, a website visit or a purchase. It also depends on costs that are not part of the budget.
Among the suggestions Google offers while people type in Serbian are “koliko kosta reklama na instagramu”, “sponzorisane objave na instagramu cena” and “placanje reklama na instagramu”. They ask how much an Instagram ad costs, what sponsored posts cost and how ads are paid for. The question makes sense, because Meta does not publish prices by country. In Meta’s Ad Library anyone can see other advertisers’ active ads, but not how much was paid for them. The audience is large at the same time. According to Meta’s advertising tools, as reported by DataReportal, an ad on Facebook and an ad on Instagram can each reach more than three million people in Serbia. That is Meta’s estimate of ad reach, not a count of users.
How does Meta charge for an ad?
Every time an ad can be shown to someone, Meta holds an auction and picks one. The highest bid does not always win. Meta adds up three things, how much the advertiser is willing to pay, how likely that particular person is to respond and how good the ad is. That is why an ad that suits people better can beat a higher bid.
Most often the charge is per impression, unless something else is chosen when the ad is created. For some goals the charge can be per link click, and then there is no charge if nobody clicks. Which options exist depends on the campaign goal.
What Meta counts as a result is not always what it charges for. When the goal is sales, Meta counts purchases in the report, but still charges for the ad per impression. So money is spent even when nobody buys, and the idea of paying only for sales does not hold.
Can Meta spend more than the daily budget?
It can, but only on a single day. At Meta the daily budget is an average over seven days, from Sunday to Saturday. When opportunities are better, Meta spends more, and on another day less. Over the whole week, however, it does not go over seven daily budgets, so with €10 a day a week costs no more than €70.
A pause stops spending at any moment, but the bill for what has already been spent can arrive after the pause. For a similar reason the bill can be larger than the budget of one ad, because it covers all ads and fees in that period.
A budget for the whole period works differently. It is a hard limit and Meta does not go over it. A spending limit can also be set for the whole account, after which all ads stop.
“Daily budgets are not a hard cap.”
What budget does an ad need to start working?
Meta today does not give one minimum amount for everyone. The minimum depends on the country, the goal and the account currency, and Ads Manager, Meta’s tool for creating ads, warns on its own when the budget is too small. The old advice of one dollar a day is no longer on Meta’s page.
More important than the minimum is the learning phase. When an ad starts, the system first learns whom to show it to, and that usually lasts until it collects about 50 results in one week. While learning lasts, results are unstable and one result usually costs more, so the first week is not a fair measure.
This gives a rough calculation. The weekly budget should be about fifty times the price of one result. According to the same tool, AdKit, a visit to the page an ad leads to cost about 36 cents in Serbia in September. For fifty visits that is about €18 a week, or about €2.60 a day. For purchases, Meta itself says more money is needed than for visits.
If the budget cannot bring that many results, Ads Manager shows the label Learning limited. That is not a penalty, but a sign that the setup is not working well. A bigger budget helps, as does a broader audience or a goal that happens more often, for example adding to cart instead of a purchase. Big changes to the audience, the ad itself or the budget send learning back to the start, while small ones do not. So an ad should not be reworked every day.
What does the price of an impression and a click depend on?
The price is set not only by the budget but also by the ad itself. Meta writes that ads that suit people better win at a lower price. A lower quality ad costs more and is shown less often, and if an account keeps running such ads, Meta may rate all of its ads lower. Clickbait does not help, because Meta counts it among the signs of a poor ad.
The audience matters too. A broader audience usually gives a lower price, because the system has more people among whom to find those most likely to respond. The price rises when the cheapest opportunities run out and when more businesses want the same people at the same time. In its report to the American Securities and Exchange Commission, Meta states that advertisers traditionally spend the most in the last quarter of the year. The end of the year should therefore be expected to be more crowded.
Instagram and Facebook should not be judged each on its own. When both networks are included, the system looks for the cheapest opportunities first. That is why Meta writes that a more expensive placement is not necessarily worse. It also advises against switching a network off just because it has cost more so far.
Meta does not publish prices for Serbia, which leaves data from tools such as AdKit, which also publishes its method. For half of the advertisers, a thousand impressions in Serbia cost between €1.50 and €4 in September. For the whole world the middle value is about three and a half times higher. The sample for Serbia is small, and Facebook and Instagram are not separated, so this is a guide, not a price list.
“Ads that are more relevant cost less and see more results.”
What is paid on top of the ad budget?
Ads for Serbia are sold by Meta’s company in Ireland, so it is a purchase from a foreign company. Under the Serbian VAT Act, when a foreign company is not registered for VAT in Serbia, the 20 percent tax is owed by the buyer. A business in the VAT system issues an internal invoice and deducts the same amount, so the ad costs it nothing more.
A business or sole trader outside the VAT system, for example one taxed at a flat rate, also owes that tax. It files a return within ten days after the end of the month and pays 20 percent with no right to deduct it. For that business the ad costs a fifth more than the budget. On its tax page Meta does not list Serbia, and official sources do not show that it is registered for VAT in Serbia. That is why each case is worth confirming with an accountant.
When an ad is shown to people in Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Türkiye or the United Kingdom, Meta adds a location fee of two to five percent. What matters is where the audience is, not where the business is, so this also affects ads aimed at the diaspora. The fee is not part of the budget and does not show in Ads Manager, only on the bill.
Meta’s list of currencies does not include the dinar, so the account runs in another currency, for example euros or dollars. Meta charges nothing for currency exchange. A bank, however, may charge a fee when the account currency differs from the card currency or when the payment goes to a foreign company. Finally there is the work on the ad itself. Someone has to make the images, the short video and the text, and if an agency runs the campaign, that is a separate cost too.
Is boosting a post enough?
Boosting a post turns an existing post into an ad. Meta lists it as an ad on the bill as well, and it goes into the same auction. The difference is in the choices. The audience is picked by interests, age and gender, and the goal can be website visits, engagement with the Page or a local business promotion. When boosting from the Instagram app, the audience and placements are chosen by the system.
Meta nowhere writes that boosting costs more than a campaign, but there is one catch on the iPhone. When a post is boosted from the Facebook or Instagram app on an iPhone, Apple may take a fee of 30 percent of the total payment. Boosting through the instagram.com website, Meta Business Suite or Ads Manager avoids that fee.
Ads Manager offers more. There, goals such as sales and collecting contact details can be chosen, and audiences similar to existing customers can be built. Only there are all budget settings and detailed reports available. Meta itself recommends boosting when the goal is more visibility for the Page and a growing audience, and Ads Manager for more demanding goals. For one good post boosting can be enough, while for a steady flow of inquiries or sales on a website a campaign works better.
“Boosted posts are still considered ads because they require a budget to be shared with a wider audience.”
How to tell whether an ad paid off?
The most important number is the cost per result, that is, the money spent divided by the number of messages, visits or purchases. For sales on a website Meta also calculates the return on ad spend, called ROAS in reports. It is the value of purchases divided by the money spent, so an ad that brings €110 in sales for €100 has a return of 1.1. An ad pays off only when one customer through it costs less than the business earns on that customer’s purchase.
For Meta to see purchases on a website, the Meta Pixel is needed, a short piece of code placed on the website. Alongside it there is the Conversions API, which sends the same data from the website’s server and is less affected by ad blockers. With an existing Pixel it is switched on in one click and at no charge. Poorly set up measurement means fewer recorded purchases and a higher cost per result.
Measurement also has limits. Meta credits a purchase to an ad if it happens within seven days of a click or within one day of an impression. When data is incomplete, it estimates part of the results by calculation. The Pixel only sees what happens on the website, so with cash on delivery it sees the order, but not whether the courier collected the payment. For ads that lead to messages, Meta counts a started conversation only when the person has not written for at least seven days. Regular customers are therefore not in that number.
That is why results are worth looking at over at least a week and for the whole campaign, not day by day. Orders in the report are worth comparing now and then with the ones actually delivered.
The price of Instagram and Facebook ads is not read from a price list, it is calculated. It starts from the price of one result, the learning phase gives the weekly budget, and tax, fees and making the ad are added on top. Once learning is over, it becomes clear what one inquiry or purchase really cost. What running Facebook and Instagram ads includes, from campaign setup to the monthly report, is described on the Meta Ads campaigns page.