What Instagram ads cost a Perth business, what actually works on the platform, and when we would tell you to spend the money on another channel.
Instagram is where a lot of Perth spends its idle minutes, on the train, in a queue, on the couch after dinner. That makes it a strong place to put an offer in front of people who were not looking for you yet. It also makes it an easy place to burn money, because nobody on Instagram typed anything that tells you what they want. This is how we think about Instagram ads for Perth businesses: what they actually cost, what tends to work, and when we would tell you to spend the money somewhere else.
There is no separate Instagram advertising platform. Instagram ads are built and run in Meta Ads Manager, the same account, pixel and audience data as Facebook. You choose where the ads appear: the Instagram feed, Stories, Reels and Explore, Facebook, or both apps at once.
That matters for two reasons. First, the targeting, tracking and budget all live in one place, so running Instagram and Facebook together rarely means twice the work. Second, the question is not really whether to advertise on Instagram. It is which placements your audience uses and which creative formats you can keep producing. A business that can make short vertical video has far more room on Instagram than one with a folder of product photos.
This is also why we run Instagram and Facebook under one service rather than selling them separately. You can see how we run Instagram ads in Perth on our Meta Ads page.
There is no price list. Meta sells ad space through an auction, so you set a budget and the price of each impression or click moves with how many other advertisers want the same people, how narrow your audience is, and how well your ad holds attention. Weak creative costs more, because the auction favours ads people engage with.
So the useful way to think about cost is in three parts.
If you already have someone capable running the account, you may not need management at all. Our Meta ads consulting in Perth starts at $200 including GST, billed every 4 weeks, for a call with Kobi on your account and a written action list afterwards. You keep the ad account and the pixel either way.
Most Instagram campaigns that fail do not fail on targeting. They fail on one of four things.
People scroll Instagram quickly, and an ad has a second or two to stop them. Vertical video and images that look like they belong on the platform tend to outperform a resized print ad or a logo on a coloured background. Show the product, the result or the person in the first frame.
Five versions of the same ad are one idea. We want a few genuinely different concepts live, so Meta can find which one carries the account and we can see why. When a concept tires, it gets replaced, not tweaked.
Instagram traffic is interruption, not intent. Someone who tapped your ad was not searching for you a minute ago, so the landing page has to match the ad exactly: same offer, same image, same promise, and a form short enough to finish on a phone. Sending that traffic to a homepage is the most common reason an Instagram campaign looks broken when the targeting is fine.
Meta optimises towards the results it can see. If the pixel and the Conversions API are not both reporting purchases or leads, the system is guessing. We check tracking before a campaign launches, not after the budget is spent.
If lead follow-up is the weak point, the fix is usually email automation that replies within minutes.
The clearest Meta result we can publish is Zealous Productions, a Perth theatre company. We ran the Meta advertising for Throbbin' Wood, eight performances at the Regal Theatre in Subiaco, and built the landing page the newer ads sent people to.
Two things made it work, and both apply to any Perth business advertising on Instagram. We optimised for completed ticket purchases and judged every ad on the value of the tickets it sold, not on how cheap its clicks were. And we kept the creative moving while the season ran, adding seven new concepts three weeks in as the launch ad started to tire. Average frequency finished at 5.2, which in one city over 38 days is close to the ceiling, and link click-through held between 1.8% and 2.1% every week because people kept seeing something new.
Perth is a smaller market than Sydney or Melbourne, so this happens sooner than many businesses expect: you run out of new people and the same audience sees the same ad too often. Fresh creative is how you stay in front of them without wearing them out. The full numbers and the method are in the Zealous Productions case study.
We would rather tell you this before you spend on it.
Where Instagram does suit is a product or offer people did not know they wanted until they saw it: events, hospitality, retail, ecommerce, fitness, home services with a strong visual result, and local businesses with something worth showing.
Enough for Meta to learn which ads and audiences produce results, which depends on what a lead or sale is worth to you and how many you need. A budget spread across too many ad sets gives the system too little to learn from. We would rather start with fewer, well funded campaigns and scale what works than spread a small budget thinly.
Boosting is quick, but it offers far fewer options for objectives, placements, testing and tracking. For anything where you care about leads or sales, running campaigns in Ads Manager gives you control over what the budget is actually optimising towards.
They can, when the work has something worth showing and the targeting stays on the suburbs you actually serve. Before and after results, a finished job, a team people can put a face to: that is the kind of creative that earns a second look. If your customers only think about you when something breaks, search will usually do more for the same budget.
