Between August 2023 and September 2026 I spent $1,064 running Facebook and Instagram ads for my silver jewelry shop. Seventy-eight percent of that went to one campaign that bought page follows. It worked. I got 76,294 of them, and they were real people in my actual market. It still wasn’t enough, and this post is the arithmetic of why.
The number I didn’t want to look at
I opened Ads Manager, set the date range to Maximum, and looked at three years of my own money in one table for the first time. Nineteen campaigns. $1,064 total.
Then I sorted by amount spent, and one row explained almost everything.
| Campaign | Spend | Share of budget |
|---|---|---|
| Page follows campaign | $824 | 78% |
| Sales campaign (Reels → add to cart) | $15 | 1.4% |
| 17 other campaigns | $224 | 21% |
| Total, 19 campaigns | $1,064 | 100% |
Seventy-eight percent of three years of advertising went to buying followers. One point four percent went to the campaign built to make someone buy something.
I did not plan that. Nobody plans that. It happens one $1.63 day at a time.
What a follower actually cost me
The follows campaign delivered 76,298 follows or likes at 1.1 US cents each. Across the campaign that is $824 of my own money.
76,298 follows · 1.1 cents each · $824 total · 78% of my lifetime ad budget
When an American seller hears “one cent a follower” the reflex is immediate: bots. So I pulled the country breakdown, because that is the only honest way to answer it.
| Where the follows landed | Follows | Spend |
|---|---|---|
| One country — my own | 76,294 | $824 |
| Unknown | 4 | $0.01 |
Not bots. Not click farms in a country I don’t sell to. 76,294 real people inside my actual delivery area — the same people who can order a bracelet from me tomorrow and pay the courier cash at their door.
A follower costs about a cent here because that is what attention costs in this market, the same way a follower costs 30 to 80 cents in the United States because that is what attention costs there. Different price, identical mistake.
And that is the uncomfortable part. I cannot blame fake followers. I got exactly what I paid for, from exactly the right people, and it still did not do what I wanted.
The thing I got wrong, in one sentence
Following a page and buying from it are two different actions, and I spent three years funding the first one.
When I started, my reasoning felt obvious: a bigger page means more people see every post, more people see the products, more people buy. Every platform’s marketing says something close to that. It reads like a growth ladder where each rung leads to the next.
It isn’t a ladder. A follow costs someone half a second and no money. A purchase costs them a decision, a delivery address and their cash. There is no mechanism inside Facebook that turns one into the other. The only thing that converts a follower into a customer is a reason to buy, delivered to them again and again — and that is a different campaign, a different creative, and a different budget line.
Did any sales come from those followers? Yes, some did. I can’t cleanly attribute how many, and I’m not going to invent a number to make this post tidier. What I can say precisely is what the split was: 78% of my money bought the cheap action, 1.4% bought the expensive one.
The campaign that was switched on for three years and delivered nothing
While I was in there, I found something worse than a bad strategy. A campaign called “Promoting Swarnanjali FB page”, created in October 2023, still switched to Active. Status: Not delivering — Ad errors. Amount spent: $0.00.
It cost me nothing in money. It cost me almost three years of believing something was running when it wasn’t.
This is the least glamorous lesson in this post and probably the most useful one: a toggle set to “on” is not evidence that anything is happening. If you have ever set up an ad and moved on, open Ads Manager right now, add the “Delivery” column, and sort by it. Look for anything that says “Not delivering” while you thought it was working. That check takes ninety seconds.
What the sales campaign actually tells us
The one campaign built to drive purchases spent $15.11 and produced 22 website adds-to-cart at 69 cents each. Also 100% in my home market.
Sixty-nine cents for an add-to-cart against 1.1 cents for a follow. The action that actually sits next to money costs 63 times more. That ratio is the whole post in one line, and it is not unique to my market — the gap looks the same in dollars in the US, just with bigger numbers on both sides.
Fifteen dollars is also far too little to learn anything from. I don’t know whether that campaign was good, because I never gave it enough budget to find out. I gave that budget to the metric that made the page look busy.
If I could spend that $1,064 again
I asked myself the question directly, and my honest answer surprised me: I would still buy some followers. Just not 76,000 of them.
Somewhere around 20,000–30,000 is enough for a small shop to stop looking abandoned. New visitors do check. An empty page reads as a closed shop. That is a real job, and page likes do it cheaply.
Here’s the split I’d use now, and it’s what I’m actually moving to:
| What it’s for | Share of budget | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Enough followers to look real | ~15% | Social proof has a ceiling. Past it, you’re paying for a number. |
| Sales and add-to-cart campaigns | ~50% | The only line that touches revenue. It needs enough budget to produce data. |
| Retargeting people who already visited | ~25% | Cheapest real buyers you will ever reach. I barely used this. |
| Testing new creative | ~10% | A fixed, deliberately small amount, so it doesn’t eat the rest. |
The same mistake, in dollars
If you sell handmade jewelry in the US, you almost certainly haven’t run a page-likes campaign. You have done the identical thing in a different costume:
- Paying for Instagram follower growth, or trading engagement in a “pod”
- Boosting the post that got the most comments, rather than the one that got sales
- Judging a month by follower count because it’s the number the app shows you first
- Optimizing an Etsy or Meta campaign for clicks or views because those numbers look good and cost little
Every one of those buys the cheap action. Platforms surface cheap actions because cheap actions make the dashboard feel good, and a dashboard that feels good keeps you spending.
What to do this week
- Open your ad account and set the date range to lifetime. Not last month. All of it. Sort by amount spent.
- Write down what your top campaign optimized for — follows, likes, clicks, views, add-to-cart, purchase. That word is what you actually bought.
- Add the Delivery column and look for anything not delivering. Mine sat there for three years.
- Work out your split. What percentage of your lifetime spend went to actions that touch money, and what percentage went to actions that don’t? If the second number is bigger, you are where I was.
- Move one campaign’s budget from the cheap action to the expensive one, and give it enough to produce real data — not $15.
Why I published this
Nobody in this niche shows their ad account. Every “Facebook ads for handmade sellers” article I read while making this mistake was written by someone who had never spent their own money, and not one of them said the thing that would have saved me: the metric you optimize for is the only thing you’re buying, and cheap metrics are cheap for a reason.
$1,064 is not a large budget by American standards. It was three years of mine. If publishing the split saves you a year of yours, it was worth more as a blog post than it was as advertising.
I’ll post the results of the new allocation, whichever way they go.
Questions people ask about this
Are Facebook page likes worth paying for?
Only if you can name the step between the like and the sale. I spent $824 buying 76,294 follows at 1.1 cents each. They were real people, correctly targeted, in my actual market. Following a page and buying from it are still two different actions, and only one of them was being paid for.
A like is the cheapest thing you can buy on the platform, which is exactly why it is the easiest number to grow and the least connected to revenue.
How much of an ad budget should go to audience building?
Less than I gave it. 78% of three years of budget went to follows; 1.4% went to the campaign built to drive sales. Asked what he would do with the same money again, the answer was to cap the likes at around 20,000 to 30,000 and put the rest behind selling.
A reasonable starting split is most of the budget on the action you actually want, and a small, capped amount on awareness.
How do I know if a campaign is doing nothing?
Look at what each campaign bought, not what it spent. In this account one campaign sat switched on for nearly three years showing an error and delivering nothing at all — it never spent a cent, and it never got looked at either.
Check every active campaign against a result, not a status light.
What is a realistic cost per action for a small shop?
In this account a website add-to-cart cost 69 cents, against 1.1 cents for a follow. That gap is the whole lesson: the closer an action is to money, the more it costs, and the more it is worth.
Before scaling anything, work out what one real customer is worth to you. If a cost per action is above that, no amount of budget fixes it.
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