Facebook advertising: Your budget? Your experience?

[just "JR"]

Advertising to large networks is, of course, not free of charge.
But, should you visit any of these sites, you will have to go through the WHOLE process BEFORE you get some idea of costs... :-)
I.E.1: Google Ads.
- Go through the process of creating an ad, then pay the minimu allowed ($/€/£100).
- Your ad will "appear" somewhere, sometimes.
I experimented it, and, to get the SMALLEST result (SOME orders, but less value than the expense!), it cost me €500 per month. Anything below led to nothing. Lesson: if not $1000/month, useless...
I.E.2: a banner on a well visited "similar" site. (for a client of mine)
- Cost: $900/month
- Good results, with over $5000 orders every month. Much better than Google ads...

FB has a lot of "success stories" but they ALL relate to multinational companies who have invested hundreds of thousand in their campaign! Nothing to compare with you and I... Hence, these are NOT "success stories"...
I am looking for someone who has spent less than a $1000 and GOT some return...

My questions:
Have you experimented FB advertising?
How much did you spend?
How "profitable" was the advert? ("Profitable": the advert expense, at least, covers the profit made on the product! If you spend $1000 and make $2000 orders, but your profit margin is 20%, you have "made" $400 for your $1000 expense. That is NOT "profitable"!)
What is the "threshold" from which an ad/promotion becomes profitable? (from what level of expense did your campaign brought "Profits" ? Google ads, for example, will NOT bring any profit, [unless you sell wind], or spend more than $1000/month on adverts with them...)
Please, REAL stories, REAL values!

[desertcities]

I agree with your assessment with many PPC advertising programs. I've been involved with both Adwords and FB running various marketing campaigns for some time. Some with huge budgets, some with smaller daily budgets.

With FB I've found that you can really narrow down your demographics based on the product or service you are trying to advertise. However, if your product or service is general appealing to a general demographic, then your daily FB advertising cost will be dried up fast.

There are many different types of advertising campaigns, and not all of them based on a specific profit margin, but rather a positive click-through ratio that brings traffic to your site and then converts the traffic to clicks and analyzing it.

For example, I had a couple of clients who wrote books. One was a hard copy vegan recipe book, the other an E-Book. Our goal was to jump-start the announcement of the publications, so we took a loss, but it did generate a steady flow of web traffic. The E-Book weathered better as it's price point was very cheap compared to the hard copy, plus the shipping of that book verses downloading a virtual E-Book.

On other occasions I've sold boat parts using Adwords and FB. There I had to carefully define my market by adjusting on certain states and cities, time zones, ages, and other categories. Each day I was making subtle changes and monitoring the traffic using Google Analytics that is a free feature to each webmaster having a Google Gmail account.

With FB I do short runs and again, I narrow in on my market. If you do a little research you will learn the shopping and online usage patterns of customers from like New York verses Los Angeles, and so on. You might be clicking a lot adjust your FB settings turning ads on/off and also having multiple versions of your ad to see which add does better overall by comparison. The same is true in Adwords.

Both sites offer a lot of great online help.

Today I'm a bit cautious in using Adwords as there is just a lot of fraud and click-throughs done by your competitors. You can find many places around the world where they hire hundreds of people just to click ads. Often those ads they are clicking are yours to push you advertisement out for the day and let others remain.

Good Luck!