Facebook and Instagram ads

Facebook and Instagram ads are bought through the same Meta ad account, so one budget, one set of tracking and one report can cover both platforms. This page explains where these ads earn their place for a UK business, which service fits which problem and how I run an account.

Where Facebook and Instagram ads earn their place

Meta’s ads reach people while they scroll, not while they search. That makes them good at creating demand: showing a product to people who resemble your best customers before they started looking, putting a local offer in front of residents within a few miles of you, or collecting enquiries from people who would not have typed your service into Google that week.

They are weaker when the purchase begins with a search. Someone whose boiler fails in January searches Google and rings the first credible result, and an Instagram ad is unlikely to reach them at that moment. If most of your customers find you that way, Google Ads built around what people search for will usually do more with the same budget, and I will tell you so rather than sell you the wrong channel.

The businesses that tend to do well here have something people can grasp from a picture or a few seconds of video, a margin that can carry the cost of reaching people who were not yet looking, and an offer simple enough to act on from a phone. Online shops, clinics and salons, gyms, restaurants, property, courses and events often fit that description. A specialist B2B service with a long sales cycle can still use Meta ads, but usually in support of search rather than as the main source of enquiries.

Which Meta Ads service you need

Most people arrive with a problem rather than a service name, so start from the row closest to your situation.

Retargeting, video and Reels, Instagram-only campaigns, catalogue ads, Advantage+ and click-to-WhatsApp ads each have their own page in the list below. In practice they are usually parts of one managed account rather than separate projects. If you are unsure where you fit, tell me what you sell and who buys it, and I will point you to the right page.

What working with me changes

How I run a Facebook and Instagram ad account

1. Check the tracking first. I confirm that the Meta Pixel and the Conversions API record real enquiries or purchases, once each, and only after consent where consent is needed. Optimising campaigns towards broken data wastes every pound spent afterwards.
2. Agree what a result is worth. We settle what a lead or a sale is worth to you and the most you can afford to pay for one. That number decides budgets and tells us when a campaign should stop.
3. Keep the structure simple. A few campaigns with a few ad sets, each with enough budget to collect results. Meta’s delivery system learns from conversions, and splitting a modest budget across many small ad sets starves all of them.
4. Plan the creative as carefully as the audience. On Meta the ad itself does much of the targeting, because the system shows each ad to the people who respond to it. I plan several distinct angles, write the copy and brief images and video for each placement, from the feed to full-screen Reels and Stories.
5. Launch, then give it time to learn. Changing budgets and ads every day resets the learning. I watch early delivery for faults but judge performance only once there is enough data to judge.
6. Improve on a steady rhythm. Regular checks on spend and cost per result, fresh creative before the old ads wear out, and budget moved towards what produces customers rather than merely cheap leads.
7. Report in plain English. What was spent, what it produced, what I changed and why, and what comes next.

Tracking and consent under UK rules

The Meta Pixel sets cookies and passes what visitors do on your site back to Meta. Under PECR and UK GDPR it needs the visitor’s consent before it fires, and advertising cookies do not fall under the exemption for strictly necessary ones. A site that loads the pixel the moment someone arrives, with no cookie banner or with a banner that changes nothing, is breaking the rules and sending Meta data it should not have.

Consent has a cost in measurement. Everyone who declines is invisible to the pixel, and Apple’s tracking prompt on iPhones hides more. The Conversions API sends events from your server, booking system or shop platform instead of the visitor’s browser, so ad blockers and browser restrictions lose fewer of them. It is not a way round consent. It makes the events you are entitled to send more complete, and that matters because Meta optimises towards whatever it is told converted. If your Meta figures have never matched your sales, the gap usually starts here.

Problems I check for first

Whoever set up an account, the same few faults tend to cost the most money.

• Optimising for the wrong event. A campaign told to find link clicks or landing page views finds people who click, not people who buy. It should optimise for the action you are paying for.
• Boosted posts doing the job of campaigns. The Boost button is quick, but it offers far fewer controls than a campaign built in Ads Manager and tends to buy engagement rather than enquiries.
• The same three ads for months. Costs creep up as the same people see the same images, and it looks as if Facebook has stopped working when the creative has simply worn out.
• Traffic sent to the homepage. An ad about one offer should land on a page about that offer, quick to load on a phone, with the form or button visible straight away.
• Leads nobody calls. People who fill in a form inside the app often forget they did. Without a prompt follow-up the cost per lead looks fine and the cost per customer does not.
• Claims the ASA would not accept. Ads on Facebook and Instagram are covered by the CAP Code like any other UK advertising, and health, beauty, finance and weight-loss claims are where the rules bite hardest. Ads for housing, jobs and financial products can also fall under Meta’s own restricted categories, which limit how they may be targeted, so I check which rules apply before building any audience.

What Facebook and Instagram advertising costs

There are two separate costs. The first is the ad spend, which you pay to Meta from your own ad account; you set the budget and can change or pause it whenever you like. The second is my fee for planning, building and managing the campaigns, which I quote once I have seen your account, your goals and how much creative and tracking work is involved.

The right budget comes from arithmetic rather than a standard figure. Work out what a customer is worth to you, what you could afford to pay to win one, and how many results a campaign needs each week to learn. A budget that can only buy a handful of conversions a month will struggle whoever runs it. In that case I would rather suggest a narrower test on a single offer, or a different channel, than take a fee for an account that cannot work.