Paid social cost
The platforms do this better than we do. The layer is for everything around it.
You cannot fund a paid socialcampaign here today. No buying rail has reached spend-tested or report-verified on the platform’s own evidence ledger, so live spend runs inside a design-partner engagement rather than from a self-serve top-up. Everything on this page is what a plan would carry, and the whole loop runs in a sandbox that needs no credentials. All 25 rails, graded.
What we enforce, and what the market asks
They measure different things and both apply. One stops a pointless line surviving into a plan; the other stops a pointless campaign reaching air.
Enforced when the plan is built. A line that cannot clear this is dropped and its budget redistributed across the lines that can, with a note saying so. Manual plans are validated against the same number.
No meaningful media minimum on either platform. Agency management from £500 to £1,000 a month minimum, or 10% to 30% of spend.
What other sellers ask for. Not a commitment by anyone, dated because these move, and sourced at the foot of this page.
How this channel is actually priced
CPM or cost per action at auction. The dominant variable is creative: on social, a good creative can cost a fraction per outcome of a poor one against the same audience, which is not equally true of the other six channels.
The smallest buy worth making
Enough for the platform's optimisation to leave its learning phase, which usually means a few hundred pounds a week per ad set rather than a token daily budget spread across many. Under-funding many ad sets is the most common way a small social budget is wasted.
What else leaves your account
Everyone quotes a headline rate. Almost nobody publishes the data uplift, the production spec and the clearance lead time that sit beside it, which is where a budget actually goes wrong.
Creative volume
Social consumes creative faster than any other channel. Generating variants here costs 50p an image and £6 for ten seconds of standard video, charged separately from media.
AI provenance on TikTok
AI-generated video must carry a self-disclosure declaration. That is a compliance requirement rather than a cost, and missing it blocks the upload.
That buying social through a layer usually costs more than buying it directly and is still sometimes right — because the thing you are paying for is the deduplication against the other six channels, not the social buying itself.
Below about £10,000 a month in total media, this is the wrong product. A 10% fee on £2,000 is £200 against the buyer who needs the most support from us, and a multi-channel plan at that budget is too thin to pace on any line and far too thin to power a causal test. Buy search and social directly, and come back when there is a second channel worth funding.
What the rest of the plan costs
- CTV£140 per week
- Addressable TV£1,000 per line
- Audio£250 per line
- DOOH£100 per line
- Cinema£500 per week
- Paid search£100 per line
Where the market figures come from
Desk research dated 3 August 2026. Rates move.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. Bring a real budget and watch it split across seven channels against these floors — including the lines it cannot carry, which get dropped in front of you.
Talk it throughBring a budget. We will tell you if it is too small.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live.
Book a working session45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live.
Questions about paid social cost
Why would I buy social through AdBuyMCP rather than Ads Manager?
For most buyers, on its own, you would not, and this page says so. Ads Manager is free and Meta optimises its own inventory better than any third party can. The reason social sits in a seven-channel product is measurement: without the channel carrying most of your budget, a cross-channel frequency number is wrong and an incremental-reach claim is unsupportable.