If you’ve ever scrolled through Facebook or Instagram and thought, “Why am I seeing this ad?” The answer is probably because of Meta’s advertising platform.
Meta itself owns a large portfolio of social media channels, messaging services, gaming and ai brands. Meta Ads allow businesses to reach highly targeted audiences across the social platforms of Facebook and Instagram, using metrics from demographics and interests to location and previous interactions with a brand.
But with so many campaign tracking, targeting options and creative formats available, it can easily feel overwhelming. Whether you’re completely new to paid social or looking to understand how your Meta advertising could be improved for your business, here are the key things you need to know.
What Are Meta Ads?
Meta Ads are paid advertisements that appear across Meta-owned platforms, primarily Facebook and Instagram.
Unlike traditional advertising, where you might pay to reach an audience through key search terms, Meta allows advertisers to define who they want to reach and exactly what they want those people to do.
Depending on your campaign, that objective could be:
- Visiting your website
- Making a purchase
- Filling in a form
- Watching a video
- Following your social media account
- Sending a message
- Engaging with your content
The platform then uses its data and algorithms to help deliver your ads to people who are most likely to take action on it.
Why Use Meta Ads?
With millions of people using Meta’s platforms globally, Facebook and Instagram can offer businesses access to huge potential audiences, but reach isn’t the only benefit.
Precise audience targeting
Meta provides a range of targeting options, allowing businesses to build audiences based on factors such as:
- Age
- Location
- Interests
- Behaviours
- Previous interactions with your business
- Social media activity
You can also create Custom Audiences from people who have already interacted with your business and Lookalike Audiences to reach new people with characteristics similar to your existing customers.
Visual advertising
Facebook and Instagram are highly visual platforms, making Meta particularly useful for brands that can communicate their value best through images and videos.
With short-form videos, carousels and static images, there are plenty of ways to capture attention from the right audience.
Flexible budgets
You don’t necessarily need a huge advertising budget to get started. Meta allows advertisers to set daily or full campaign lifetime budgets, giving businesses better control over how much they spend.
The important thing isn’t simply how much you spend, but how effectively that budget is being used and how consistent you can be with its monitoring.
How Do Meta Ads Work?
As a beginners concept, Meta Ads operate through an auction system. When there is an opportunity to show an ad to someone, Meta considers the available advertisers competing for that spot and chooses one based on a variety of factors.
It looks at factors such as:
- Your bid as a whole
- The estimated likelihood that the person will take your desired action
- The quality and relevance of your ad to the person
The winning ad isn’t necessarily the one with the biggest budget. This means that the optimum targeting, creative and relevant ad concepts, and strong user experiences will all have an impact on the campaign performance.
Choosing Your Campaign Objectives
One of the very first decisions you’ll make when creating a Meta campaign is the objective. This should reflect what you actually want your advertisement to achieve.
For example:
Want more website visitors?
A traffic-focused campaign may be best.
Want more leads?
A lead generation campaign could help you collect enquiries.
Want more sales?
A sales campaign can be designed around conversions and purchases.
Want more people to view your content?
An engagement or video-focused approach would be more suitable.
The key is to avoid choosing an objective just because it sounds widely appealing. If your ultimate goal is sales, optimising purely for clicks could result in lots of visitors but very few customers.
Meta Ads Targeting
One of the biggest advantages of Meta advertising is its targeting capabilities. However, this scope doesn’t always mean better reach and can be overcomplicated.
Cold audiences
These are the people who haven’t interacted with your business before.
You might target them using:
- Location
- Interests
- Behaviours
- Broad targeting
- Lookalike audiences
The goal is to introduce your brand to potential new customers.
Warm audiences
These are the people who already know something about your business.
They might have:
- Visited your website
- Watched one of your videos
- Engaged with one of your account
- Added something to their basket
These audiences can be particularly valuable because they have already demonstrated some level of interest.
Retargeting
Retargeting allows you to advertise to people who have previously interacted with your business. For example, someone might visit your website, look at a product and leave without purchasing.
A retargeting campaign could then show that product again on Instagram or Facebook. This can be particularly effective for e-commerce businesses where customers don’t always convert on their first visit.
What Is Meta Pixel?
Now this is where things can get a little more complicated. Meta Pixel is a type of code that can be added to your website to help track further activity after they’ve interacted with your Meta ads.
It can help businesses understand things such as:
- Which ads generate more website visits
- Which users make purchases
- Which campaigns generate more leads
- What people really do after clicking on your advert
This data can then be used to measure performance and help Meta optimise the campaigns. As we know very well as a digital agency, tracking and optimising are two of the most important parts of paid advertising. After all, if you don’t know what is generating real results, how do you know what to plan for your next campaign?
Common Meta Ads Mistakes
Before we onboard a new client, we always take a close look at any existing Meta Ads activity. And while every account is different, we often see the same mistakes coming up time and time again, regardless of whether an account has been managed by an in-house team or another agency. Here are some of the most common Meta Ads mistakes we see during our audits:
1. Targeting everyone
Broad audiences can work well in the right circumstances but for most businesses, a targeted approach works best in generating a better return on ad spend (ROAS).
2. Focusing on clicks rather than results
A campaign generating hundreds of clicks might look impressive at first glance but if those clicks don’t turn into leads, sales or enquiries, they’re not necessarily that valuable.
3. Using the same creative for too long
People can experience ad fatigue quickly when they’re repeatedly shown the same advert. If performance begins to decline, your image and video assets might be in need of a refresh.
4. Sending people to a poor landing page
Getting someone to click your advert is only half the job. If your website is slow, confusing or doesn’t match the information stated in the advert, you can risk losing the conversion.
5. No testing
There is rarely one perfect Meta advert to use each time. Testing ads allows you to replace your targeting theories with real evidence, to continually improve upon campaign performance.
How Much Should You Spend on Meta Ads?
Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits all answer. The right ad budget depends on factors such as:
- Your industry
- Your audience size
- Your objectives
- Your average customer value
- Your conversion rate
- Competition
- Your existing brand awareness
But rather than asking “How little can we spend?”, you should consider what you need to spend to generate enough data and conversions from campaigns to make more meaningful advertising decisions.
Starting with a controlled budget and then scaling-up on what works best is often a more sensible approach than committing to a budget immediately and spreading it fast and thin.
Meta Ads vs Google Ads
Meta and Google Ads can both be incredibly effective in targeting audiences to your business, but they do work differently.
Google Ads generally captures existing demand. Someone searches for something they need, and your advert can appear as they’re actively looking for it.
Meta Ads can create or influence demand by putting your brand, product or service in front of the relevant audiences while they’re browsing social media.
For many businesses we come across, the strongest strategy isn’t about choosing one over the other, it’s understanding where each platform fits within the customer journey and how best you can utilise it.
Ready To Get More From Meta Ads?
Meta Ads aren’t just about putting an advert in front of as many people as possible, and they most certainly aren’t an easy “set it and forget it” strategy. However, Meta can be an incredibly powerful advertising platform for your business and knowing where to start is really just the beginning.
At Starlight Digital, we combine data, creative content and ongoing optimisation to help businesses make their paid media budgets work smarter, and we have the case studies to prove it! No matter if you’re launching your first Meta campaign or looking to improve the performance of an existing account, our team of paid social experts can help make these processes go a lot smoother.
Get in touch with us to find out how we can best support your paid social strategy with a free audit.
