Which Facebook ad objective should I pick and how much budget do I need?

Votel recommends choosing Leads or Sales. Ignore Traffic, Awareness, Reach and Engagement, and never use Boost post or Boost page. Facebook (Meta) is very good at giving you what you ask for: it knows who only clicks links, who likes posts, who fills out forms and who pulls out a credit card, and it shows your ad to the kind of person that matches your objective. Traffic is cheaper per click precisely because those people do not buy, so you get clicks and no form fills or sales. Awareness only makes sense for a huge brand that just wants as many people as possible to see the ad.

Use Leads when you want someone to fill out a form and give contact details. Use Sales when people pay something, even a small amount such as a $1 guide or a $1 trial. This also applies when you promote someone else's affiliate offer: if people pull out a credit card on that page, choose Sales.

Your objective is tied directly to your budget. Meta's AI needs about 50 conversion events per week to lock onto the right audience. With fewer, the campaign stays in learning mode (flagged as learning limited): the audience keeps changing, Facebook keeps experimenting and results swing from good to bad. Fifty a week is not required, but it makes results more predictable and efficient. So work out what it costs to reach 50 conversions a week:

1. As a rule, an offer priced at $500 a month costs at least about $500 to acquire a customer. Fifty sales a week at $1,000 each would mean $50,000 a week, a tough place to start.
2. A lead is the easiest conversion, often $5 to $15 or more depending on the niche. Fifty leads at about $10 each is about $500 a week, a much better place to start.
3. Optimize for the lowest ticket, lowest resistance event that gets you over 50 a week as cheaply as possible: a lead magnet such as a free PDF or guide, a low ticket product, a $1 trial, a webinar or an appointment. Even if your real price is high, lead with one of these.
4. A Facebook lead form ad is one of the cheapest ways to get leads, because the person never leaves Facebook, and Facebook charges a premium to send people to another website.

Pick a budget you are comfortable losing in the first week and that you think will produce 50 conversion events per week.

Because Facebook finds more of whoever takes your chosen action, qualify leads in the form, for example by asking how many employees the business has or whether they currently own that kind of business, and tell people who are not a fit that you are not the right match.