For Newcastle businesses pricing up social ads
The fee and the ad spend are two different numbers, and the third one is on neither quote.
A report on what is running now, showing which of your ads have stopped earning their spend.
By Reece Rainer
spareday, Newcastle NSW
Last updated
13 September 2026
Read time
2 minutes
Since it went live my phone hasn’t stopped ringing.
He created a stunning website for us that captures and nurtures leads with an automated email marketing system, which has filled a huge gap in the business and saved a lot of time (and money!).
Reece has been generous, reliable and knowledgeable in creating an online presence for our sporting club. He is good to work with and has good technical abilities.
Facebook ads management cost splits the same way Google Ads does. The ad spend goes to Meta, and the fee goes to whoever runs it. Australian agencies publish fees between five hundred and two thousand dollars a month.
What is different is the third cost, and it is the one that surprises people: the pictures and the wording wear out, and replacing them is not a one-off.
Enough for Meta to learn who responds. Published Australian figures start around fifteen hundred to two thousand a month for a test that tells you anything.
Social ads reach people who were not looking for you. The system has to find the ones who react before it can find more of them, and that takes volume.
Search ads work the other way round. Somebody typing plumber Newcastle has already decided. Somebody scrolling has not, so the spend buys attention first and enquiries second.
The pictures and the opening lines. The same audience sees them repeatedly, responses fall away, and new ones have to be made every few weeks.
A search ad runs for a year on the same words, because each person sees it once at the moment they searched. A social ad is shown to the same people again and again until they stop noticing it.
So ask what the fee includes here. A fee covering the account but not the pictures leaves you making them yourself, or paying again every month for the part that decides whether the ads work.
One number: what an enquiry costs. Everything else on a social ads report moves without the phone ringing any more than it did.
Reach, impressions and engagement all rise when the spend rises, which is why they fill a report. None of them says whether the month produced work.
Ask for cost per enquiry from the start, and ask how it is counted. A form filled in and a phone call are not the same thing.
Social ads are priced as a monthly fee and run as a production line. A business that budgets for the fee and not for the pictures runs out of ads in about six weeks.
Related reading from us: a marketing agency in Newcastle.
Published Australian fees run from about five hundred to two thousand dollars a month, or a percentage of the ad spend. The spend itself is separate.
Published Australian figures start around fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a month for a test that tells you anything. Below that it never finds who responds.
Sometimes, and it is the first thing to ask. They have to be replaced every few weeks, so a fee that excludes them is a smaller fee and a bigger job for you.
The management fees sit in the same band. They reach people at different moments, so the question worth asking is which one suits what you sell.
One monthly fee covering everything, month to month, with no lock-in contract. What it comes to depends on the business, so the number gets given on the call.