How much should you actually spend on Meta ads in India
A practical budget guide for Indian service businesses, with the learning phase maths that decides whether your campaign ever stabilises.
Every week somebody asks what the minimum Meta ads budget is. The honest answer depends on one number: how many conversions your ad set can produce in a week.
The fifty conversion rule
Meta needs roughly fifty conversions per ad set per week to exit the learning phase reliably. Work backwards from that. If your cost per lead is Rs 100, you need Rs 5,000 a week, or about Rs 21,000 a month, per ad set. If your cost per lead is Rs 400, you need Rs 80,000 a month for the same stability.
This is why very small budgets feel so random. At Rs 300 a day with a Rs 250 cost per lead you get about eight conversions a week. The system never learns, so the cost swings wildly from week to week and you conclude that ads do not work.
What to do with a small budget
If you cannot reach fifty conversions a week on your main conversion event, optimise for a cheaper event higher up the funnel. Conversations instead of purchases. Landing page views instead of qualified leads. You lose some precision but you gain stability, and stability is what lets you read the data at all.
Give it two weeks before judging
The first ten to fourteen days on a new account are noisy. Judge creative on video retention during that period, not on cost per lead. Retention tells you whether the creative is holding attention, and it stabilises much faster than conversion cost does.
A simple starting point
For most Indian service businesses: Rs 800 to Rs 1,500 a day, one campaign, one ad set, six creatives. Review at day eight on retention. Review at day thirty on cost per qualified conversation. Scale only when both look repeatable.