There's no single right answer here, and anyone who gives you a flat dollar figure without asking about your business first is guessing. The right budget depends on your average order value, your typical conversion rate, and how much data the algorithm needs to optimize effectively.
Start With Your Numbers, Not a Rule of Thumb
A useful starting calculation: figure out roughly what you can afford to pay to acquire one customer, then make sure your daily budget allows for several of those acquisitions per week. If your target cost per acquisition is $50 and your daily budget is only $20, you're not giving the algorithm enough room to find converters.
Budget for the Learning Phase
Meta's ad delivery system needs a meaningful number of conversion events — commonly cited as somewhere around 50 per week per ad set — to exit the learning phase and optimize efficiently. If your budget can't realistically generate that volume, performance will likely stay inconsistent regardless of how good the creative is. This is one of the more counterintuitive parts of the platform: sometimes the fix for inconsistent performance isn't better creative or tighter targeting, it's simply more budget concentrated in fewer ad sets so each one can actually reach that threshold.
A Practical Starting Range
Many small businesses start testing with a modest daily budget, then scale up gradually once a campaign shows it can convert profitably. Scaling too fast, before you've confirmed a campaign actually works, is a more common mistake than starting too small — and it's a far more expensive one.
The Bottom Line
Don't pick a budget out of thin air. Work backward from your acquisition cost target and the data volume the algorithm needs, then adjust based on actual results rather than a generic industry benchmark. If you want help running that calculation against your real numbers, that's a quick conversation — Project Five Digital offers a free strategy session to walk through it together.