A Facebook ads consultant gives advice to the people who run the account, rather than running it for them. Your team keeps building the campaigns, writing the ads and pressing the buttons in Ads Manager. I look at what you are doing, explain what Meta is responding to, and help you decide what to change next. It suits UK businesses that want the skill to stay in-house and need a second pair of experienced eyes, not another supplier with logins.
What changes when your team has someone to ask
In-house teams running Meta ads are rarely short of effort. What they lack is a reference point. Meta’s interface changes every few months, the official help pages describe what a setting does but not when to use it, and the numbers in Ads Manager rarely agree with the website or the CRM. Without someone to check decisions against, teams either change too much too often or leave a weak campaign running because nobody is sure it is weak.
Consulting gives those decisions a sounding board. Before you restructure the account, launch a new offer or double the budget, we talk it through against your own data. The aim is that your team makes fewer expensive guesses and, over time, needs me less.
Who consulting suits, and who should hire a manager
Consulting works best when:
- someone in your business already runs the ads and has the time to act on advice;
- you want to keep control of the account, the creative and the budget day to day;
- you have a specific decision or problem in front of you, such as falling results, a tracking gap or a planned change of structure;
- you would rather build the knowledge inside the company than rent it.
It is the wrong choice when nobody internally has the hours to carry out the changes. Advice that sits in a document does not move results. If that is your position, monthly Facebook ads management is the more honest option, because then I do the work as well as the thinking.
What I can help with
Account and campaign structure
Many accounts run by in-house teams have grown by addition: a new campaign for every promotion, ad sets split by age or interest, and budgets spread so thinly that nothing gets past the learning phase. I help you consolidate into a structure Meta’s delivery system can work with, and decide where Advantage+ campaigns are worth testing and where more manual control still earns its place.
Tracking and measurement
Under UK GDPR and PECR, the Meta Pixel should only fire once a visitor has agreed to marketing cookies, so a share of conversions will never reach the browser pixel. Setting up the Conversions API alongside it, sending consented server-side events and deduplicating them properly, is often the change that matters most. I check what you are sending, what Meta is matching and whether the event you optimise for is the one that makes you money.
Creative and testing
On Meta, the ad itself does much of the targeting work, so creative is where most in-house teams have the most room to improve. I help you plan tests that answer one question at a time, read when results are genuinely different, and spot creative fatigue before cost per result starts climbing.
Budget, bidding and scaling
Raising a budget sharply can reset delivery, and cost caps set too tight can stop spend altogether. We agree what a lead or sale may cost, how to judge a campaign against that figure, and how fast to scale one that is working.
Reading the numbers
Meta reports conversions with its own attribution window, so it will rarely match GA4 or your sales records. I explain why GA4 and Facebook conversion numbers differ and help you choose one set of figures the business can trust and report on.
Policy, compliance and restrictions
UK advertisers offering financial products and services (including credit), jobs or housing must declare a special ad category, which removes several targeting options. Health, beauty and financial claims also fall under the ASA’s CAP Code and, for some firms, FCA rules on financial promotions. I help you plan campaigns that stay within those limits and decide what to do first if an ad is rejected or an account is restricted.
How a consulting engagement runs
- Short brief. You tell me what you sell, what an enquiry or sale is worth, and the question or problem you want help with.
- Access. You give me read-only access through partner access in your business portfolio, so I can see the account without being able to change it, and nothing passes through personal logins.
- Review before we speak. I look at the structure, tracking, creative and recent results ahead of time, so the call is spent on decisions rather than on describing the account.
- The session. We work through your questions with the account on screen. The length and format of each session are agreed before work starts.
- Written follow-up. You receive a short note of what we agreed, in priority order, so the team can act on it without needing to remember the conversation.
- Further sessions, if you want them. Some teams need a single session; others want more while they rebuild the account or bring a new person up to speed. Any further sessions are agreed with you before they are booked.
Questions teams bring most often
- Our cost per lead has doubled in two months. Is it the ads, the audience, the tracking or the market?
- Should we move everything into Advantage+, or keep some campaigns manual?
- How many ad sets should we really be running at our budget?
- Why does Meta say we made 40 sales when Shopify says 25?
- Which creative should we make next, and how do we know whether it worked?
- What should we spend, given what a customer is worth to us?
- Our new marketing hire is starting next month. What do they need to understand about this account first?
Before a first session, it helps to work through the Facebook and Instagram ads checklist. Anything you cannot tick off becomes a useful item for the agenda.
What consulting does not include
I do not build campaigns, upload ads or change budgets during a consulting engagement; your team does that, and that is the point of it. If you need the work done for you, that is management. It is also not a classroom course, and I would rather answer your real account than walk through a generic syllabus.
Some problems sit outside the ad account. If the ads bring the right people but the page they land on does not convert, the fix is usually a landing page built for paid traffic, not another round of targeting changes. I will say so when that is the case.
What you receive
- a review of the account carried out before the session, not during it;
- direct answers to the questions your team brought, with the reasoning, so they can apply it next time;
- a written list of agreed changes in priority order, with who owns each one;
- notes on anything in tracking or consent that is distorting the figures you report.
Fees and next step
Each consulting quote is written after a free first call, in GBP, and agreed in writing before any work starts. Your ad spend stays in your own ad account, billed by Meta, and is separate from the fee.
If your team runs its own Facebook and Instagram ads and wants an outside adviser to check its thinking, get in touch to book a consulting session. Tell me what you are trying to decide, and I will tell you whether a session is the right way to help or whether something else would serve you better.