Instagram and Facebook ads let you show your product or service to people chosen by location, interests and behaviour. But boosting a post and building a planned campaign are very different things. This guide covers the basic steps, from Meta Ads Manager to measurement, along with common mistakes.
Ads Manager and the campaign objective
Accounts and Ads Manager
Before you start running Facebook ads, you will usually need a Facebook Page and an Instagram professional account. Linking them through Meta Business Suite lets you manage ads and messages in one place, and your payment method and billing details are set up here too.
Boosting a post is the quickest route, but its targeting, measurement and testing options are limited. For planned Instagram and Facebook ads, we recommend Meta Ads Manager. It has three layers: the campaign sets the objective; the ad set defines the audience, the budget and where the ad appears; and the ad itself is the image and text people see.
Choose the right campaign objective
Meta decides who sees your ad based on your campaign objective, so this step is critical. Objectives are grouped under awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion and sales.
- Awareness: suitable for introducing a new restaurant or beauty salon to people nearby.
- Traffic: brings visitors to a blog post or campaign page. Clicks may be cheap, but not everyone who clicks buys.
- Engagement: collects messages, comments or video views. A good start for businesses that take bookings by Instagram or WhatsApp message.
- Leads: gets forms filled in. A machinery manufacturer can collect quote requests through Meta's instant forms or the form on its own website.
- Sales: aims for purchases in e-commerce and needs purchases on your site to be measured accurately.
A common mistake is choosing traffic when the goal is sales: the system then finds people likely to click, not necessarily to buy.
Define your audience: core, custom and lookalike audiences
The right audience decides where your Facebook ads budget goes. Core targeting by location, age, language, interests and behaviour is a good start when you have no data yet. Meta's automated options, such as Advantage+, may treat your inputs as suggestions and widen the audience themselves.
Custom audiences
A custom audience is made up of people who have already interacted with your brand: website visitors, people who engaged with your Instagram profile or watched your video, or contacts on your customer list. Because they know you, they are usually a warmer audience. Reminding a visitor of a product left in their basket is a typical use.
If you upload a customer list, make sure you have a lawful basis for using that data in advertising. If you have any doubts under the data protection law that applies to you (such as GDPR in the EU or KVKK in Turkey), consult a legal adviser.
Lookalike audiences
A lookalike audience finds new people who resemble a source audience you choose. The better the source, the more useful the result: using customers who have bought from you, rather than all site visitors, often produces a more meaningful audience.
Creative: catch the eye at first glance
Even with the right audience, the budget is wasted if the ad does not catch attention. People scroll fast, so the success of your Facebook ads and Instagram ads depends largely on what they see at first glance.
- Show the product or service in the first frame: a dog eating from its bowl for a pet products brand, a dish arriving at the table for a restaurant.
- Use vertical, full-screen visuals for Reels and stories; in the feed, square or vertical formats take up more space.
- Many people watch without sound, so carry the main message with subtitles or a short line of text.
- Keep text on the image to a minimum and leave the detail for the ad copy.
- Ask for one action and choose the matching call-to-action button, such as sending a message, shopping or learning more.
- An ad shown to the same people for too long loses its impact, so watch frequency and refresh your visuals regularly.
Professional product photos and short videos make a real difference here; you will find more in our product photography guide.
Set up measurement: Meta Pixel and the Conversions API
Running Facebook ads without measurement means reading results by guesswork. To know whether an ad brought in a sale or a form, Meta needs to know what happens on your site. The Meta Pixel is a snippet of code on your website that records events such as page views, adding to basket, form submissions or purchases through the browser.
Because of browser restrictions and ad blockers, the Pixel can miss some events. The Conversions API sends the same events from your server and makes measurement more robust. If you use both, match events with a shared ID so that nothing is counted twice.
Also check that the Pixel and similar tracking codes respect your site's cookie consent set-up. Visitor consent and data transfer are legal matters, so keep the set-up consistent with your privacy and cookie policy and with the data protection rules that apply to you.
Test, plan your budget, measure the results
Testing
If you are new to Instagram and Facebook ads, do not expect to find the best ad on your first try. The A/B test feature in Ads Manager, or several creatives in the same ad set, shows which image, text or audience works better. Change only one thing per test; otherwise you cannot tell where the difference came from.
Budget
You can set a daily budget or a lifetime budget for the whole campaign. A new ad set goes through a learning phase in which results may look uneven, and major changes can restart it. Concentrating spend in a few ad sets helps each one gather enough data. Our article on setting a Google Ads budget explains how to work a budget backwards from your goal, and the same approach applies here.
Measurement
In Ads Manager, track cost per result, click-through rate, reach and frequency; if you are aiming for sales, look at return on ad spend (ROAS). UTM parameters on your ad links let you see the same traffic in GA4. The two will not match exactly, as attribution rules differ; read the trend alongside your own sales and enquiry records.
Ad policies and rejected ads
Meta reviews ads against its advertising standards before they go live. Knowing the common reasons for rejection before you launch Facebook ads saves time:
- Wording that points directly at personal attributes. A line such as "Unhappy with your weight?" often causes problems in beauty and health ads.
- Exaggerated or misleading claims, and unrealistic before and after images.
- Prohibited or restricted products. Alcohol advertising is limited by platform rules and local law, so a tavern might put its food and atmosphere at the centre of its ads instead.
- A landing page that does not work or does not match the promise in the ad.
- Ads about social issues and politics, and in some countries credit, employment and housing. These carry extra rules and may require you to declare a special ad category.
If your ad is rejected, read the reason in the notification and fix the ad; if you think the decision is wrong, you can request a review. When in doubt, check Meta's current advertising standards.
Start with a plan, improve steadily
Instagram and Facebook ads are not something you set up once and leave. Start with the right objective, a clear audience, eye-catching creative and solid measurement, and every campaign leaves data for the next. To plan your ads alongside your organic posts, see our article on social media content planning.
If you would like to plan your campaigns together or have your current ad account reviewed, take a look at our Meta ads service or get in touch with us.