When planning online advertising, entrepreneurs most often ask one question: how much will it cost? The answer is ambiguous, as the final figure depends on many variables.
In this article, we present specific price ranges and explain what determines the cost of Google Ads campaigns and social media ads.
What does the cost of a campaign consist of?
The total online advertising spend includes two components.
- The first is the advertising budget, i.e. funds transferred directly to the platform – Google, Meta or other advertising network.
- The second element is the cost of managing the campaign by an agency or freelancer., which is responsible for configuration, optimization and reporting of results.
Advertising budget for a small business – how much should you allocate to a campaign?
There's no clear price list for running advertising campaigns, but certain standards can be established. For Google Ads, companies operating in competitive industries or on the national market should budget 2000–4000 PLN per month for their campaign.
(The rest of the article can be found below the form)
Local entrepreneurs with narrow specializations (e.g., craftsmen, services in small towns) can achieve satisfactory results with a budget of PLN 500–1000. However, the system requires data for learning and optimization, so too low a budget prolongs the testing period.
How much does advertising on Facebook cost? The entry threshold is often lower than on Google – local campaigns can be run for as little as 500–1000 PLN per month, although online stores aiming for a nationwide reach should expect to spend around 3000–5000 PLN.
The average cost-per-click (CPC) in Poland ranges from PLN 0,50 to PLN 2,50, while the cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) vary significantly depending on the industry: from a dozen or so zlotys in less competitive sectors to PLN 50–100 or more in industries such as finance, insurance, and e-commerce. During peak seasons (Black Friday, holidays), rates increase even more.
How much does it cost to run a campaign?
The campaign's pricing model depends on the contractor. Two common approaches are common: a flat fee for ad management or a budget-based agency commission.
Beginner freelancers offer Facebook Ads campaigns from PLN 600 to PLN 1200 net per month, and Google Ads from PLN 500 to PLN 1500.
Professional agencies with experienced teams and access to paid analytics tools rarely charge less than PLN 1500–2500 net for a single channel. In addition, there's a one-time fee for account setup and campaign preparation, typically ranging from PLN 1200–2400.
In a commission-based model, agencies charge 10–20% of the advertising budget spent. The higher the budget, the lower the percentage—for large campaigns, the rate often drops below 10%.
What influences the price of advertising?
The final cost depends on several factors. The industry and level of competition are crucial – in the legal and financial sectors, cost-per-click rates can reach several dozen zlotys.
- Quality Score and cost per click are closely linked.: the better the quality of the ad and landing page, the lower the rates the platform charges.
The campaign objective also plays a significant role, although not in an obvious way. Reach and conversion campaigns may have identical budgets, but they differ in the unit cost per result.
When targeting conversions, the algorithm bids in higher-priced auctions for users more likely to purchase. This translates to fewer interactions, but higher quality, for the same budget. Seasonality also impacts pricing – during periods of increased advertiser activity, competition increases, and with it, bids.
How to measure spending efficiency?
Just launching your ads is just the beginning. To assess whether your campaign is paying off, you should track your ROAS (return on ad spend) and customer acquisition cost (CAC).
ROAS shows the ratio of revenue to advertising expenses – if it is 5, it means that every zloty spent on advertising generated 5 zlotys of revenue.
However, it's important to remember that ROAS is not the same as profit. This metric doesn't take into account product margins, operating costs, or campaign expenses.
With a low margin, even a high ROAS can mean a loss – therefore, to fully assess profitability, it is necessary to analyze the ROI (return on investment) indicator, which takes into account all costs.
From Expense to Return – When Does a Campaign Start Making Money?
Online advertising requires patience. The first few weeks are spent collecting data and testing various creative variants, audiences, and keywords. Only after this stage is effective optimization possible, reducing costs and increasing conversions.
Companies that treat campaigns as one-time expenses are often disappointed by the lack of immediate results. However, well-executed advertising activities build brand recognition over time, expand their customer base, and generate sales that far exceed the costs incurred.
The real question is not how much the campaign costs, but how much it can bring – provided we treat it as a process and not a one-time action.
Frequently asked questions about the costs of running Google Ads
The budget you need to prepare is always divided into two independent parts:
- Media (advertising) budget: Funds that go 100% directly to Google. They are debited from your card for each ad click (PPC model) or display.
- Agency (or freelancer) fee: Payment for the knowledge and time of a specialist who configures the campaign, takes care of analytics, writes advertising texts and optimizes the account daily to avoid burning through the budget.
There are three dominant approaches to billing on the Polish marketing services market:
- Fixed Fee Model: A fixed, pre-determined subscription fee for running a campaign, regardless of how much you spend on Google ads themselves.
- Percentage-Based Model: The agency charges a commission based on a percentage of your media budget (e.g., 10–15%). Regressive thresholds are often used here—the larger the budget, the smaller the commission percentage.
- Hybrid model: A combination of a fixed base (lump sum) with an additional bonus for achieving a specific business effect (so-called Success Fee – e.g. for generating a specific number of leads or ROAS level).
Google Ads works like a live auction, and the cost per click isn't fixed. It depends on the level of competition in your industry (the more companies vying for the same keywords, the more expensive it is) and the Quality Score of your ad and landing page. In niche industries, you'll pay a few dozen groszy per click, while in highly sought-after industries (finance, insurance, law, construction), rates can reach several or even several dozen złoty per click.
Although Google doesn't impose strict financial barriers, investing 200–300 PLN per month is pointless. For machine learning algorithms to gather data and effectively optimize conversions, they adopt performance thresholds:
- For local businesses: Minimum PLN 1000–1500 net per month for clicks alone.
- For e-commerce and nationwide campaigns: Minimum PLN 3000–5000 net per month.
It might seem like entering a larger amount into the Google dashboard is effortless. In reality, managing large budgets (in the range of tens or hundreds of thousands of zlotys) is a huge responsibility and significantly more work. It requires creating complex campaign structures (e.g., Performance Max), testing hundreds of graphic and video creatives, advanced audience segmentation, and constant monitoring, as a mistake on such a large scale can cost a company thousands of zlotys in just a few hours.
Generally, no. The standard subscription fee covers the work of an SEM specialist (settings, optimization, reporting). Preparing advanced graphic materials for advertising networks, editing videos for YouTube campaigns, or auditing and redesigning a landing page (UX/UI) for improved conversions are usually additional services or performed by dedicated creative and programming departments within the agency.
Summary
The above article covers the following topics:
- The cost of an online campaign depends on many factors and consists of the budget transferred to the platform and the specialist's service fee.
- The cost of advertising depends on the scale and industry, ranging from PLN 500 for local companies to over PLN 5000 for nationwide online stores.
- Campaign management costs from PLN 500 for freelancers to over PLN 2500 for agencies, with settlement based on a fixed subscription or budget commission.
- The price of advertising depends on the industry, seasonality and quality of the campaign, with sales goals associated with a higher unit cost of customer acquisition.
- Advertising effectiveness is measured by ROAS and CAC indicators, but the full profitability of a campaign is only shown by the ROI indicator, which takes into account the margin and all operating costs.
- The campaign only starts earning money after the testing and optimization stage, so it should be treated as a long-term process of building returns, not a one-time expense.
