How To Make Meta Ads Work

by Brennan Murphey

In today's digital marketing landscape, Meta ads (formerly Facebook Ads) have become a cornerstone for businesses looking to reach their target audiences, generate leads, and drive sales. With Meta's vast user base across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, the platform offers unparalleled opportunities to connect with potential customers. However, making Meta ads work in your marketing strategy requires more than just setting up an ad and hoping for results.

In this article I will walk you through the essential steps and best practices to ensure that your Meta ad campaigns are successful and aligned with your overall marketing goals.

1. Understand Your Audience

To create effective Meta ads, you need a deep understanding of your target audience. You can't fake this or come to this understanding in a couple of hours. You need to actually listen to the people who comprise your audience. You have to do extensive market research to understand how they think and what language they use to describe their problems, their pain, the things they like and the things they don't like. You need to know what they think, how they feel and why they would be interested in what you're offering.

You also have to be clear about why you are different and better than the competition if you are in a competitive, sophisticated market with a lot of different companies and products.

Because if you can't articulate that to your target audience and put it into your marketing materials, then you will lose your business to the competiton. The ability to effectively communiate what makes you the best choice in your niche is critical to your company's success.

Meta's advertising platform offers powerful audience-targeting capabilities, but without a clear picture of your ideal customer, even the best tools won’t yield great results.

Steps to Understand Your Audience:

• Define Your Buyer Personas: Identify your audience's demographics (age, gender, location), interests, and behaviors. Knowing this information allows you to tailor your ads more effectively.
• Use Meta’s Audience Insights Tool: Meta provides an audience insights tool that can help you learn more about how many people on the platform are interested in different brands. This tool can give you critical insights into the size of the market you're dealing with and what other brands they're also interested in.
• Analyze Existing Customer Data: Use data from your CRM, email list, or website analytics to understand customer behaviors and preferences. Look at patterns like purchase history, website activity, and social engagement. If you don't have any customers yet, then you can run ads and drive traffic to start gathering this data.

Once you understand who your ideal customers are, you can create highly targeted ads that are more likely to capture their attention.

2. Set Clear Objectives

Before launching any Meta ad campaign, it’s essential to set clear, measurable objectives. Meta’s ad platform allows you to choose from a range of campaign objectives, each designed to support specific business goals.

Here are the primary categories of campaign objectives:

• Awareness: To increase your brand’s visibility (e.g., reach, brand awareness).
• Consideration: To encourage engagement or traffic to your website (e.g., traffic, engagement, app installs, video views).
• Conversion: To drive actions that lead to sales or leads (e.g., lead generation, conversions, catalog sales).

Steps for Setting Objectives:

• Choose an objective that aligns with your overall marketing goals. For example, if you’re launching a new product, you might want to run an awareness campaign first to build an audience, see what marketing messages get the best engagement, and build social proof.
• Use the SMART goal-setting framework: Ensure your objectives are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
• Set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track your campaign’s success, such as cost-per-click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), or return on ad spend (ROAS).

3. Choose the Right Ad Format

Meta offers a variety of ad formats, each suited to different types of campaigns and business objectives. Choosing the right ad format is crucial for getting your message across effectively.

Here are some popular ad formats to consider:

• Image Ads: Simple and effective for driving clicks and engagement. Best for promoting single products or services.
• Video Ads: Great for storytelling, showcasing products in action, or delivering a more dynamic message.
• Carousel Ads: Allow users to scroll through multiple images or videos. Ideal for showcasing a range of products or features.
• Collection Ads: Combine images or videos in a way that encourages users to explore more about your products within a visually engaging layout.
• Lead Ads: Perfect for collecting user information, such as emails, directly within Meta’s platform without requiring users to leave the app.
• Story Ads: Vertical full-screen ads that appear between users’ stories on Instagram or Facebook.

Tips for Choosing Ad Formats:

• Consider your target audience and how they interact with content. For instance, younger audiences may engage more with video or story ads, while older audiences will be more likely to read long-form text ads.
• Match the ad format to your objective. For example, use lead ads for generating leads and video ads to build brand awareness.

4. Design High-Quality, Engaging Creatives

Your ad creative—whether it's an image, video, or text—is by far the most important part of attracting users and prompting them to take action. On a platform as competitive as Meta, where users scroll through content quickly, your ads need to stand out.

Best Practices for Ad Creatives:

• Start With Text-Only Ads: While they may look boring, the most important element of your ad is the headline and you need to find the right one before you test anything else. Since you don't want an image or video to skew your results, I strongly recommend testing text-only ads at first to eliminate all other variables until you find language and words that really get great engagement. Build your entire copywriting strategy around what your market respons to best. Sometimes these ads vastly outperform fancier image-based and video ads simply because they're so easy for users to understand so they get more clicks.
• Use Captivating Imagery: After the headline, the image or video is the next most important element. Make sure you have something that stands out.
• Include a Strong Call-to-Action (CTA): Whether it’s "Shop Now," "Learn More," or "Sign Up," your CTA should be direct, action-oriented, and specific.
• Test Different Creatives: Don’t rely on one ad. I strongly recommend testing least 10 ads at once to find one that works. Make sure you're isolating variables when you test. Always avoid testing more than one thing at a time inside a campaign or ad set.

5. Leverage Meta’s Advanced Targeting Options

One of Meta’s most powerful features is its robust audience-targeting options. You can target users based on demographics, interests, behaviors, location, and more.

While the Meta AI targeting algorithm has gotten so powerful lately in finding people to click and buy beased on your ad text and engagement patterns that you can often see the best success with broad targeting, you can at least avoid wasting your ad spend by excluding people you know for a fact aren't going to buy what you're offering.

Here are the three main types of targeting to use:

• Core Audiences: This is the basic targeting option where you can define your audience based on factors like age, gender, location, interests, and behaviors. Unforunately interest-based targeting, once the holy grail of Facebook ads, is no longer nearly as effective as it once was due to the change in the algorithm Meta uses to the "interest graph" model. But split-testing tdifferent audiences based on age, gender, location and behaviors is definitely still worth doing, especailly if your business is new or you've never done serious marketing and you really don't know who your ideal audience is.
• Custom Audiences: Custom audiences allow you to target people who have already interacted with your business. You can upload your customer list or retarget website visitors using the Meta Pixel. These are often the most profitable audiences with the highest return on ad spend, but they're also typically the smallest audiences and the hardest to scale as well.
• Lookalike Audiences: Meta’s Lookalike Audiences feature allows you to reach new people who are similar to your existing customers. This is a great way to expand your audience and find potential new customers who are more likely to convert, but you can't build them in the beginning of your marketing efforts because you need existing custom audience data to build these from.

Tips for Targeting:

• Test Broad vs. Narrow: While audiences are important, broad targeting is far more effective in 2024 than it was in 2020 because of the increased power of AI. Don't assume that specific audiences will convert best. Sometimes no targeting at all performs better than any targeting. Sometimes you need to go broad at first just to learn what kind of person actually engages with your ad. It's therefore a good idea to consider early advertising efforts to be an investment in market research for the purpose of learning about your market. You probably shouldn't expect a return on your first $500 of ad spend for a brand new business idea. Instead, aim to get data and figure out who is responding that way you can refine your messaging for the segment of the market that signals the most interest.
• Retarget website visitors: Use the Meta Pixel to track website visitors and serve them tailored ads based on their browsing behavior.
• Use Lookalike Audiences: This is a highly effective way to reach new prospects who resemble your best existing customers.

6. Optimize Your Landing Pages

Driving traffic to your website is just the first step. To maximize conversions, you need to ensure that the landing pages Meta users land on are optimized for both user experience and conversion.

What to Do:

• Build For Mobile Primarily: Most Meta users (about 80%) will be on mobile devices, so your landing pages need to load quickly and look great on mobile. This fact is often overlooked by novice website and funnel builders, which usually only work on desktop.
• Consistency: Make sure that the messaging and design of your ad match the landing page users are sent to. This consistency builds trust and improves conversion rates. Things like brand colors and logos matter at lot here. If you haven't defined your brand or you don't have a logo or design scheme, you should create one before you do any advertising or marketing.
• Simplify Forms: If you’re using lead ads or sending traffic to a form, make sure it’s easy to complete. Avoid asking for unnecessary information.

7. Test and Optimize Your Campaigns

One of the most important steps in making Meta ads work for your marketing strategy is continuous testing and optimization.

Key Elements to Test:

• Ad Creative: Split test different headlines, body copy, images, videos, and CTAs in that order to identify what resonates best with your audience. The text is by far the most important element in your ads. It should be tested in isolation first before adding anything else. Don't get carried away adding fancy images, graphics or videos to your ads until you know the language that actually gets people to click. The only way to figure this out reliably is to test text-based ads in isolation. It will save you a world of grief in the long run to know the language that works with certainty before you embellish it with design or video.
• Audience Targeting: Experiment with different audience segments to see which one yields the highest conversions. While interest-based targeting may become a thing of the past, you will likely always be able to test different demographics and geographics. And you should. Especailly in the beginning of your marketing efforts, you need to figure out who to exclude from your targeting so that you waste less money showing ads to people who aren't remotely interested.
• Ad Placements: Meta offers automatic placements, but you can also test manual placements (e.g., Facebook News Feed vs. Instagram Stories) to see which generates better results. Keep in mind that the format of your creative will impact its effectiveness on different placements. Some ad formats shouldn't use certain placements because they will get cropped and the viewers of the ads won't be able to understand what they're about.

Use Meta’s reporting and analytics tools to track your ad performance and make data-driven decisions to refine your campaigns over time.

8. Set a Realistic Budget and Bidding Strategy

Meta ads operate on an auction system, meaning that how much you bid affects the visibility of your ads. While you don’t have to have a massive budget to run successful campaigns, it’s important to allocate enough funds to be competitive.

Budget and Bidding Tips:

• Start Small: Begin with a modest budget to test different campaigns, and once you identify which ad sets perform well, you can scale them up. The idea here is to budget for minimum viable tests so you can find the right messaging and audience to base your efforts around. Don't get ahead of yourself and expect ROI when you have no idea who is even going to be interested yet. You need to learn about your market and start getting leads and buyers before you go spending thousands of dollars a day, or even hundreds. In some markets for some objectives you can get meaningful results for as little as $1 per day.
• Choose the Right Bidding Strategy: Meta offers different bidding strategies such as lowest cost, cost cap, and bid cap. Choose one that aligns with your business goals.
• Monitor Your ROI and Scale Up If Positive: If you're making back more than you're spending and you're profitable with all your other costs including taxes taken into consideration, you should try to spend more so you can make back more. This may require some detailed accounting work so you really know your numbers as you go so you don't overspend. If you're profitable, you want to spend as much as you can even if your ROAS goes down so that your absolute profit continues to increase. But if you increase your budget too fast, it can break your campaign. I don't recommend increasing your ad spend by more than 20% per day and if an ad set stops producing a positive ROI for more than 1 day, decrease the budget by 20% per day until it starts working again or until 3 days go by and it still doesn't produce positive ROI with reduced spend. You can set up automated rules per campaign to track ROAS and adjust your budget automatically. Of course to make this work, you need accurate tracking which will involve setting up the conversions API or using a third party tracking tool like Click magic or Hyros. If an ad stops getting purchases for more than 3 days in a row and scaling down the ad spend doesn't fix it, kill the ad. Depending on the size of your audience you might hit a cieling of how much you can spend profitably. You may have to launch new campaigns to scale instead of spending more on the same campaign.

9. Track and Analyze Your Results

Data is your best friend when it comes to optimizing your Meta ads. The platform offers in-depth analytics that allow you to track metrics like reach, engagement, CTR, conversions, and ROAS.

Important Metrics to Track:

• Cost Per Click (CPC): The amount you’re paying for each click on your ad.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of people who click on your ad after seeing it.
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who complete your desired action (e.g., making a purchase or filling out a form).
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): The revenue you’re generating from your ads compared to how much you’re spending.

Keep in mind that your data will not be accurate unless you are using the conversions API tool or a third part tracking tool like Click Magic or Hyros. This is because a large number of users are viewing on iOS devices that allow their users to block the basic Meta pixel set up.

10. Stay Up-to-Date with Platform Changes

Meta’s advertising platform is constantly evolving. New ad formats, algorithms, targeting options, and policies are regularly introduced. To ensure your campaigns stay effective, it’s important to stay informed about platform updates and make efforts to keep your business in the clear. Investing in courses, certifications or verifications is sometimes necessary to remain in the game.

Conclusion

Making Meta ads work in your marketing strategy requires thoughtful planning, testing, and optimization. By understanding your audience, setting clear objectives, creating high-quality creatives, and leveraging Meta’s advanced targeting tools, you can run successful ad campaigns that drive traffic, generate leads, and boost conversions.