Where are we wasting budget?

What should we fix first?

These are three questions marketers and CEOs often ask me. The fastest way to answer them is to open the ad account and take a proper look.

After 12 years as a growth and paid ads consultant, I’ve noticed that one of the key areas where companies need help is auditing and improving their online ad accounts. (The others are growth strategy and measurement.)

Many of the Facebook ad audits I’ve done have happened during a one-hour consulting call.

We would discuss all sorts of other marketing questions and still find time for a quick account review.

With smaller accounts, the biggest issues can appear almost at a glance. But allow about one hour to work through the account properly, check the evidence and leave with a prioritised list of fixes.

So… where do you start?

How do you audit a Meta advertising account? What should you check? And how will you know what is actually worth improving?

And most importantly: how to keep your audit structured and readable by the rest of your team?

That is exactly what this guide will help you do.

We will go through ten areas, mark each one red, amber or green, and finish with a short list of actions.

The checklist covers both Facebook and Instagram ads because they are managed through the same Meta ad account and campaign system.

Meta ads = Facebook and Instagram ads.

AI-assisted audits

Can you use AI to audit and optimise your Meta ads?

Yes and no.

AI is useful for organising campaign exports, analysing spreadsheet data, spotting unusual changes, summarising creative results and suggesting hypotheses. Meta itself uses AI across targeting, bidding, placements, delivery and creative production.

But writing a full-scale audit is not the same as checking weekly KPIs.

AI only sees the data and instructions it receives. It can’t assess the overall account history, structure, and judge whether the ad creatives are optimal (value prop + ad type + graphic design).

Moreover, before AI can analyse an account properly, it needs access to the right data. That means setting up integrations, checking permissions, connecting reporting sources and deciding what business context to provide.

The setup alone can take a day. A focused manual audit of a smaller account takes about one hour.

That is why I still audit Meta ad accounts manually.

Past experience matters a lot, especially when several problems overlap and you need to decide what not to change.

This guide will help you through some complex issues and advise you on what works.

So… Let’s get to it!

Facebook ads audit checklist

Here’s a quick overview of the ten questions that I always ask, check and review when auditing a Facebook advertising account.

They’re based on 12 years of working with paid ads and seeing what works, what does not, and what only looks good in an Ads Manager report.

I’ve grouped them by what you’re looking at, although in practice many of the problems overlap.

For the best audit flow, go through all points in the suggested order.

Business and measurement level:

1. Do we know what a good business result looks like?
2. Is the conversion tracking set up correctly?
3. Can we trust and explain the results Meta is attributing?

Campaign level:

4. Are the campaigns optimised for the right goal?
5. Is the campaign structure helping or hurting delivery?
6. Do the budgets and bid controls give Meta enough room to learn?

Audience level:

7. Are we using the right audiences, signals and exclusions?

Ad design and landing page experience:

8. Does the account have enough strong and varied creative?
9. Do the ads work across the placements receiving spend?
10. Is the post-click experience actually converting?

Open Meta Ads Manager and work through the questions in order.

If you cannot see the company’s ad account, check that you are using the correct Business Portfolio and ask the in-house marketer or agency to grant the right access (Editor or Admin).

Here’s how to navigate to the Business Manager from a Facebook Ads account. It’s sort of hidden at the bottom of the left-hand menu.

1. Business goal

Is the business goal clear for your Meta ad campaigns?

Before you inspect campaign settings, define what good paid advertising results mean for the business.

Here are some examples of the top-level growth and marketing KPIs I track for the brands I work with. Note how they’re all linked to revenue.

A campaign can look efficient inside Ads Manager while failing commercially.

For example, a lead campaign may produce a low cost per lead. But if the leads never answer the phone, fit the ideal customer profile or become customers, the campaign is not working.

Do not begin with Meta’s dashboard. Begin with the business model.

These are the most common mistakes I look for:

• The campaigns support no clear business goal.
• The optimisation goals are not tied to revenue, qualified leads, subscriptions, app activity or another valuable outcome.
• The team has not defined the maximum acceptable cost per result, or can’t even track it.
• The campaign performance is judged by easy platform metrics like clicks and impressions, not ROAS (return on ad spend).

Mark this audit step red if: The marketing team cannot agree on the primary business result or the acceptable acquisition cost.

What to do next: Define one primary success metric and the budget limit around it before running campaigns.

2. Conversion tracking

Is your Meta conversion tracking correctly set up?

If the measurement is wrong, every optimisation decision after it is also questionable.

These are the most common mistakes I look for:

• The Meta Pixel is not receiving the expected browser events.
• Conversions API is missing where it would improve the signal.
• Browser and server events are not deduplicated correctly.
• Purchase value or currency is missing or inconsistent.
• The selected conversion event fires on the wrong action.
• Events Manager shows unresolved critical diagnostics.
• Meta-reported leads or purchases are not compared with CRM or backend outcomes.

For example, in the screenshot below, the Meta Pixel is firing properly, but the event match score needs improvement.

Compare Meta with your analytics, ecommerce platform, CRM or revenue records. The totals do not need to match perfectly because attribution methods differ. But you should understand why they differ.

Mark this red if: Important events are missing, duplicated, assigned the wrong value or materially disconnected from real outcomes.

What to do next: Fix measurement before making large budget, audience or creative decisions.

3. Meta-reported results

Can you explain what Meta is attributing?

Check the attribution setting used by 2-3 ad sets (they’re usually all the same).

An attribution window is the amount of time between someone interacting with an ad and completing an action that Meta can credit to that ad. Changing the window changes which conversions appear in your Ads Manager reports and can also affect how Meta optimises delivery.

Meta can credit conversions through several types of interaction:

• Click-through attribution: A person clicks the ad and converts within the selected window.
• View-through attribution: A person sees the ad, does not click it, but converts within the selected window.
• Engage-through attribution: In eligible campaigns, a person interacts with an ad or watches enough of a video, then converts within the supported window.

I use 1-day view and 7-day click for all my managed Meta ad campaigns.

These are the most common mistakes I look for:

• The attribution setting is not reviewed at ad-set level.
• Click-through and view-through results are not checked separately.

If Meta says a campaign generated 100 purchases and your store recorded 100 purchases in total, that does not mean Meta caused all of them.

Use platform reporting to understand delivery and optimise campaigns. Use broader business data to judge commercial impact.

Mark this amber if: The team knows that totals differ but has not documented the reasons.

Mark this red if: Decisions depend entirely on one attributed number that nobody has compared with real business results.

What to do next: Agree on a reporting view, document attribution assumptions and compare Meta with independent outcome data.

Moomin break

Congrats, you’re through the most technical part.

4. Campaign setup

Is your current campaign structure optimal?

Meta’s current campaign setup separates several decisions:

• Objective: The broad outcome of the campaign, such as sales or leads.
• Conversion location: Where the desired action happens, such as a website, app or messaging destination.
• Performance goal: The result Meta’s delivery system tries to get as efficiently as possible.

These choices should support the business goal you defined in step one.

ALWAYS optimise your prospecting-level Facebook ad campaigns on conversions.

If your campaign goal is conversions, don’t optimise on clicks. You’ll get bot clicks instead of real people.

Brand campaigns can be optimised on reach or clicks. I optimise remarketing on clicks or leads.

These are the most common mistakes I look for:

• The campaigns are not optimised for actions linked to revenue.
• Conversion campaigns are optimised for clicks instead of conversions.
• The optimisation event does not happen often enough for Meta to learn from it.

The idea is to have at least 50 conversions per week across the ad account. They do not all need to come from a single campaign. The point is to give Meta enough overall conversion data to optimise and give you enough results to spot meaningful patterns.

Expert tips:

1. Even if your goal is to collect signups, i.e. leads, you should use the Sales campaign objective and optimise on Sign Up event conversions.
2. I’ve tested optimising Meta campaigns on Purchase events when there were only 10 per week in total. It still brought better results than optimising on landing page views.

Mark this red if: Your campaigns are optimised for low-value actions.

What to do next: Optimise your campaigns on a conversion that fires at least 50 times a week.

5. Campaign structure

Is your Facebook ad campaign structure helping or fragmenting delivery?

The right structure depends on budget, markets, products, objectives, legal constraints, reporting needs and the amount of conversion data available.

These are the most common mistakes I look for:

• Too many small campaigns or ad sets competing for a small budget.
• Separate campaigns that have no meaningful difference in objective, market, offer or measurement.
• Frequent launching of new campaigns and ad sets that resets learning and makes comparisons difficult.
• Several small audience segments that could be combined.

Here are some suggestions from my own experience:

Three must-have campaign types. Launch Prospecting, Remarketing, and Re-engagement campaigns.

Separate all campaigns by countries. Different countries may have different economics, purchasing power or language requirements. Different products may require distinct offers and landing pages. Regulated markets may require tighter controls.

Recycle the existing campaigns. Also, many companies make the mistake of launching a new ad campaign every time they change their ad creatives or launch a new marketing campaign.

If your campaigns’ objective, audience logic, market and conversion event remain the same, it is better to keep the existing campaign and ad set, then change the ads inside them.

This preserves accumulated learning and makes performance easier to compare.

For example, here’s a sneak peek into one of the ad sets I’ve set up for Roleo. I launch new ad experiments every week, but instead of creating a new ad set every time, I pause the old ads and upload new creatives into the same ad set. It already knows my target audience.

The verdict: Launch new campaigns only when there is a real structural reason, not simply because there is a new visual or campaign name in the marketing calendar.

Mark this amber if: Several campaigns or ad sets target similar audiences, use the same objective or split a limited budget, but the account still collects enough results to evaluate performance.

Mark this red if: Spend and conversions are spread across so many campaigns or ad sets that none receives enough data to optimise, or overlapping setups make it impossible to identify what is driving results.

What to do next: Keep campaigns separate only when there is a meaningful difference in objective, country, economics, product, offer or conversion event. Put new creatives inside existing campaigns whenever the core setup remains the same, and consolidate duplicate or underfunded structures.

6. Budget and delivery

Is your Meta ad budget split correctly between campaign types?

Most of your Meta ads spend should go to the main conversion (prospecting) campaigns.

Remarketing and re-engagement should run in separate campaigns and receive 5–10% of the total Meta ad spend. These audiences are smaller, so they do not need the same budgets as prospecting campaigns.

How I imagine Meta ad algorithms react to a budget increase…

These are the most common mistakes I look for:

• Too little of the budget goes to the main conversion campaigns.
• Remarketing and re-engagement do not have their own campaigns.
• Remarketing and re-engagement receive far more than 5–10% of total spend without a clear reason.
• The remaining budget is spread across too many campaigns or ad sets.
• Bid caps or cost-per-result goals prevent delivery.
• Important creative tests do not receive enough spend to produce a useful result.

If demand changes significantly through the year, use a seasonal marketing budget plan rather than treating every month as identical.

What is a good Meta ads budget? My starting formula is simple:

Expected cost per conversion × the number of conversions you want = required ad budget.

For example, if you expect one conversion to cost €50 and want 50 conversions per week:

€50 × 50 conversions = €2,500 per week, or approximately €10,000 over four weeks.

This is a starting estimate. The actual budget may need to change as the conversion cost, volume and campaign performance change.

Mark this amber if: The overall split is sensible, but one important campaign or creative test does not receive enough budget to produce a useful result.

Mark this red if: Warm audiences consume too much of the budget, or spend is fragmented so widely that the main conversion campaigns cannot collect enough data.

What to do next: Rebalance spend towards the main conversion campaigns and consolidate low-priority campaigns that dilute delivery.

7. Audiences and exclusions

Are your prospecting campaigns targeting broad enough audiences?

In most Meta ad accounts I manage, broad targeting works better. I do not try to manually build the perfect prospecting audience from interests and small segments.

For prospecting campaigns, I target people in the right locations and within the typical customer age group.

Then I let Meta optimise the audience based on who converts. As the campaign collects conversion data, Meta learns what those customers have in common and finds more people with similar characteristics.

This is why correct conversion tracking and enough weekly conversions matter so much. If Meta receives the wrong signal, it will optimise towards the wrong people.

These are the most common mistakes I look for:

• Targeting very narrow audiences of fewer than 50,000 people. A good prospecting audience size is 500k+ people.
• Adding too many interests and restrictions instead of letting Meta optimise.
• Targeting several countries with very different purchasing power or languages in the same ad set.
• Targeting the same audience in several campaigns and creating unnecessary overlap.
• Continuing to target people who already converted.

Exclude recent purchasers, qualified leads and active subscribers from acquisition campaigns when showing them the same offer no longer makes sense.

Check whether remarketing reaches all the relevant groups: recent website visitors, basket abandoners and other high-intent users. Re-engagement should focus on past customers who have not purchased or used the product for a while.

Mark this red if: Prospecting audiences are unnecessarily narrow, the campaigns target the wrong locations or age groups, converted users are not excluded, or Meta is optimising from incorrect conversion data.

What to do next: Keep prospecting broad, use only the necessary age and location controls, exclude converted users, and let Meta optimise based on the people who convert.

8. Ad creatives & testing

Are your Facebook campaigns using the best-performing ad creative types?

Sub-optimal ad creatives is the most expensive Facebook ad mistake.

In the accounts I have audited, weak creative has been a bigger problem than the targeting settings.

Common issues include generic stock imagery, outdated-looking design, weak product visibility, no clear message hierarchy and ads that could belong to almost any brand.

As people see the same ads repeatedly, ad fatigue sets in, response rates fall, and CPC and CAC can rise quickly. Testing fresh creative gives Meta new options before performance deteriorates.

“Do the ads look attractive?” is subjective, which is why I base my decision on what I’ve seen working.

Video should be part of the review too. It is not always the best-performing format, but most advertisers should test it.

Check whether the product and benefit appear quickly, whether the opening works without sound, whether captions are readable and whether a long TV-style video has simply been dropped into Feed or Reels without adapting it. Simple motion, product footage and animated text can work perfectly well.

If you need a reference point, use the Meta Ad Library to review active competitor ads. Compare the clarity, variety, product demonstration and strength of the offer with your own account.

These are the most common mistakes I look for:

• Too few genuinely different creative concepts are tested.
• Too many or too few active creatives per ad set. A good number is 6–8.
• New ad creatives are not tested every week.
• New ads repeat the same hooks, customer problems, outcomes and proof points.
• The account relies on one format instead of testing static, video, carousel, creator or testimonial ads where relevant.

What about AI-generated ad creatives?

Can AI replace experienced graphic designers?

Meta now offers AI-assisted text, image, background, audio and video generation. There are also external tools that can produce ad variations quickly.

My view on this: Meta’s AI-generated creatives are absolutely awful and there’s no way to cut corners here. You need a human designer.

Compare this original ad with Meta AI production.

The AI-generated four ads below are noisy and scream stock footage and AI. I’d be insulted by a brand targeting me with any of these.

Treat AI output as drafting material (or slop to ignore), not as a finished ad.

AI can make more ads. Producing more mediocre work, faster, is not much of a win.

Weekly creative testing

Are you testing meaningful variety?

If you run Meta ads consistently, aim to test new creatives every week.

Creative development should be a weekly operating habit, not an occasional rescue project.

After I had been managing Arbonics’ Meta ad account for six weeks, the Facebook Media Library contained a wide range of layouts, messages and visual styles.

I had introduced that variety deliberately so we could learn what different audiences responded to.

Creative variety does not mean uploading fifty AI variations of the same ad.

Test meaningful differences:

• A different customer problem or USP.
• A new opening hook, offer or objection.
• A product showcase.
• A customer quote, creator review or other proof point.
• A different visual style or level of product detail.

There are three practical ways to produce new creative every week:

1. Learn to design and edit some ads yourself.
2. Hire a freelance designer or specialist agency.
3. Buy high-quality templates and adapt them to your brand.

Make sure the person creating the ads understands what converts on Meta ads, not just what looks pretty.

In my experience, relying only on an internal design team rarely works. They have higher-priority projects most of the time.

A dedicated marketing designer can help, but many traditional graphic designers are not experienced in producing engaging, fast-paced social video.

Smaller accounts may need to batch experiments less frequently so each variation receives enough delivery. The principle is still the same: keep learning and document what happened.

I use a spreadsheet to record the hypothesis, concept, launch date, spend, primary metric, result and takeaway for every meaningful experiment.

Use multiple ad formats

Are you giving Meta enough formats to work with?

Your creative mix can include static Feed and Story ads, short and long-form video, Reels, carousels, collections and shopping ads where relevant.

Different people respond to different formats, and not every format can serve in every placement.

A static ad, for example, will not give you the same Reels coverage as a portrait video.

Static ads are cheaper to produce and run, but video expands the placements and ways you can demonstrate the product.

Starbucks has 540 active Facebook ads running in the US. Note how the formats, layouts, and styles differ.

Pro tip: One tactic I use is placing static and video ads in separate ad sets when I want clearer control over delivery.

This can prevent Meta from spending almost everything on the cheaper static ads while barely testing video. It also makes the format-level results easier to compare. Do not split them automatically if the account lacks enough budget or conversions to support the extra structure.

Message and visual alignment

Does the visual communicate the value proposition?

The copy and visual should work together.

Your most important message or USP should appear in the visual.

Do not leave it only in the primary text. The whole ad should make the value proposition obvious within seconds.

Meta removed its old 20% text rule years ago. Text-heavy creative can work when the message is useful, readable and designed for mobile. The issue is not the amount of text by itself. It is whether the ad communicates one strong idea clearly.

Creative approaches worth testing:

• Discounts and special offers.
• Before-and-after storytelling.
• UGC-style videos built around a USP or entertaining story.
• Testimonials and creator reviews.
• Tutorial videos that demonstrate the product and its main benefit.

Start with these guides:

• Improve Your Meta Ad Creatives in 3 Steps
• Best Facebook Ad Examples

Mark this red if: The account has no testing cadence and relies on a few similar ads. The last creatives were updated more than 14 days ago.

What to do next: Plan the next four weeks of distinct concepts and give every test a hypothesis and primary business metric.

9. Placements

Do the ads work across the placements receiving spend?

You do not need to force every creative into one fixed set of dimensions. You do need to check how the ads actually render.

In my earlier audits, seven out of ten accounts were missing suitable creative for important placements. In every one of those cases, performance improved after the placement problem was fixed.

The most common issue is missing the extra ad format for Stories and Reels placements. Below’s an example of how a 1:1 ratio ad renders in stories: not nicely.

These are the most common mistakes I look for:

• There are no separate creatives for Feed and Stories placements for each ad.
• Feed, Stories and Reels versions do not feel intentionally designed.
• The main message is difficult to read on mobile.
• Video captions are missing, inaccurate or unreadable.
• The call to action does not match the destination.

Use the current Facebook and Meta ad sizes guide and Instagram ad sizes guide when preparing assets, then preview every important placement before launch.

Mark this red if: A high-spend placement shows cropped, unreadable, misleading or visibly broken creative.

What to do next: Fix the assets for the placements that matter before excluding placements solely to hide a creative problem.

10. Post-click journey

Does the post-click journey convert profitably?

Sometimes the ad account is not the main problem.

A strong ad can still send people to a slow page, unclear offer, broken form, confusing checkout or product page that does not match the promise.

The landing-page header does most of the work above the fold. It should immediately match the ad, show the product or offer, explain the value and make the next step obvious. If the header is vague, visitors start questioning whether they have landed in the right place.

For practical examples, see my six ideas to improve your website header.

These are the most common mistakes I look for:

• The ad and landing page communicate different messages or offers.
• The landing page is slow or difficult to use on mobile.
• The promoted product or next action is not immediately clear.

A low landing-page conversion rate can make every upstream metric look expensive.

Open the destination URL from the ad-level setup rather than assuming every ad leads to the intended page. Then look at the experience as a new visitor would:

• Is the page simple and focused on the offer?
• Is the next step obvious?
• Is the promoted product visible?
• Does the wording and visual style match the ad?
• Can someone complete the action easily on mobile?

If the ad promises a 50% discount, the landing page should immediately explain that discount. If the ad promotes one product, it should not lead to a generic page for something else.

Sometimes the ad and landing page are both weak or visibly disconnected.

In this case, it can be easier to redesign the website experience and ads together than to keep patching two experiences that were never built to match.

Mark this red if: The landing page is slow on mobile, does not match the ad, or fails to make the product, offer and next step immediately clear.

What to do next: Open the exact destination URL from each ad, fix the header and remove the biggest mobile conversion barrier before increasing spend.

Prioritising the fixes

What should you fix first?

Turn every red or amber finding into an action with three fields:

Start with the issue that makes the rest of the data least trustworthy.

Use a simple three-point priority system:

1. Fix now: The issue makes the data unreliable, blocks conversions or causes serious budget waste. Examples include broken tracking, the wrong optimisation event, the wrong market or a landing page that does not work.
2. Fix next: The account can still run, but the issue limits performance or learning. Examples include fragmented delivery, unclear attribution, weak creative variety or tests that never receive enough spend.
3. Improve later: The setup already works and the change is likely to be incremental. These are useful refinements, but they should not distract from more consequential problems.

When two fixes have the same priority, start with the one affecting more spend, more customers or more downstream decisions.

Record the date, reason and expected outcome. Give the campaign enough time and delivery to produce a useful signal before declaring victory.

Need expert help?

Some Meta ad accounts need more than a checklist to fix problems and start getting real results.

If you’d like to bring an experienced Meta Ads expert on board to manage your campaigns and run weekly creative testing, read how I collaborate with brands.

The post 60-Minute DIY Facebook Ads Audit appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

…

Today, we’re gonna talk about Meta ad creatives…

Every marketer and agency has their own approach to Meta ads. But sadly, most of the Meta ad accounts I’ve audited did not spark joy.

The most common mistakes include:

1. No proper naming conventions, the account is hard to navigate.
2. Campaigns are not reused but always launched as new, disturbing the algorithms’ learning.
3. Ad sets are not optimised on Sales but Clicks and Awareness.
4. Ad visuals do not follow the best practices, there’s bad copywriting and other visual-related mistakes.
5. Ad visuals are not tested on a regular basis.

It’s easy to point out some marketers’ and agencies’ bad work. It’s much harder to do it better yourself. 😓

That’s why I’ve chosen to write about one of the good Meta ad campaign management practices: continuous ad creative testing.

Managing Meta ad campaigns for my clients is one of my favourite things to work on. There are measurable results, lots of creative freedom, and I can spend time designing the visuals. 👩‍🎨

When I start managing a new Meta ads account, I design and launch new ad creatives every single week.

Below is the Meta Media Library of a brand whose ads I’ve been managing for the past 6 weeks. Note the number of different layouts and styles…

​

Want to have an ad creative library that looks just as diverse?

Read on as I’m going to share some advice for ideating + designing new Meta ad creatives faster and elevating your ad experiments game.

We’ll cover three key points:

1. Learn to design your own ad creatives
2. Collect ideas in a structured way
3. Report on every single ad creative experiment

Ok, let’ go!

1. Learn to design your own ad creatives

It takes me about 5h/week to research, ideate, copywrite and design a set of 6 new Meta ad creatives.

If this sounds like too little, there’s a reason for me being so fast:

1. I’ve managed Meta ad campaigns for 10+ years and know what kinds of headlines and visual layouts work best.
2. I’ve been designing Meta ads for 8+ years and have a personal template gallery in Figma.
3. I’ve learned the basics and shortcuts in Figma to give myself complete creative freedom (v.s. counting on a designer who’s always too busy)

(I even designed my own literary blog from zero. See it here.)

This is going to sound uncool and time-consuming and not a low-hanging fruit but…

In order to become a good Meta ad manager, you’ve got to become the creative director, copywriter, and designer.

When hiring a Meta Ads Specialist/Expert, I always expect them to be great at campaign management and at least two more things, e.g. creative director and copywriter. Alternatively, you can hire each one separately (but that’s just expensive.)

2. Collect ideas in a structured way

As you can probably tell, I’m all for organising marketing work. And I apply the same approach to my design work.

Tip 1: Whenever I run out of ideas, I scroll my favourite brands’ Meta Ad Libraries. My go-to brands include Squarespace, Canva, Grammarly, Revolut, Deliveroo, Vinted, Shopify, Spotify, and so on.

Tip 2: Create a Figma file where you design your ad creatives. Add all your ad example screenshots and other ideas into the file, so that you never run out of ideas.

For example, the ads below that I designed for Arbonics were inspired by the Meta ad creatives by other brands in completely different industries.

3. Report on every single ad creative experiment

While it would be so convenient to just launch new ad creatives, let them run for a while (if they deliver good results), and soon replace them with new ones, there’s also a benefit to proper reporting.

If you document your Meta ad creative experiments properly, you’ll get:

1. A long-term overview of everything you’ve ever tested.
2. A quick comparison of the experiments’ and creatives KPIs
3. A collection of takeaways that helps you become better and not repeat the same mistake twice

I like to use Google Docs or Notion to document the hypothesis, results, and takeaways of my Meta ad experiments.

I also maintain a Google Sheets doc where I add each experiment’s per-ad KPIs (example below).

Documenting each week’s experiment takes me about 50 minutes. It’s well worth the time as designing and launching ads takes 5-10x as much time. By having a better understanding of what works, I’ll save hours and hours.

Want more Meta ad creative tips?

Check out this article with 205+ Meta ad examples to get your brain started in ideation.

The post Improve Your Meta Ad Creatives in 3 Steps appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

In 2025, as Instagram Reels and Stories have finally taken the #1 spot in advertisers’ priority lists, you should put more effort into improving your IG campaigns.

Read more: 55+ Predictions for 2025 Marketing Trends

With more than 1 billion daily active Instagram users, it’s absolutely critical that you target only those who are potentially interested in your product.

In this chapter of our Instagram Advertising Guide, we’re going to discover all the different Instagram target audiences.

By reading this guide, you will learn:

• How does the Instagram ad targeting work?
• How to create Instagram and Facebook ad audiences?
• How to set up Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences?
• What are the best Instagram audience targeting options to use?

We recommend that you experiment with various Instagram audiences to find the perfect target group for your ad campaigns.

How Does Targeting on Instagram Work?

Instagram ad targeting works by allowing advertisers to select specific locations, demographics, interests, behaviors, and traits to specify the people to display their ads to.

As Instagram ads are managed the same way as Facebook ads, their audience targeting works in the exact same way.

Facebook and Instagram ads have 3 targeting options:

• Saved Audiences
• Custom Audiences
• Lookalike Audiences

To create and manage your Instagram target audiences, use the Facebook Business Manager. (Since 2022, the platform is called Meta Business Manager.)

Simply go to the Business Manager and by clicking on the top-right menu, select “Audiences.”

On the Audiences page, you can see all your saved Facebook audiences as well as create new ones. To understand the wide range of targeting options that come with Instagram ads, let’s start from the basics.

Instagram uses data from a user’s profile, such as their location, age, and interests, to determine which kinds of ads to show them. Advertisers can also use special ad audiences to target users based on specific behaviors or historical behavior, such as website visitors or email subscribers.

Let’s take a look at all three options.

Facebook Saved Audiences

If you’re just getting started with advertising on Instagram, you should start by creating a Saved Audience.

Saved Audiences are the audiences that you can define by choosing people’s interests location, age, gender, used devices, income level, etc.

You can create Saved Audiences both in the Instagram campaign setup phase or in the Business Manager’s Audiences section.

Here’s a quick overview of the Saved Audience parameters you can edit:

• Locations
• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Interests
• Behaviors
• Demographics
• Connections to pages

Location-based targeting

When setting up Instagram ads, you can target people in specific locations by selecting:

• Country
• State/Region
• Counties
• DMA (Designated Market Area)
• City
• Postal Code
• Specific Address Radius

Simply type in the regions you wish to target.

You also have another layer of location targeting, allowing to be even more specific:

• Everyone in this location (the default targeting option) – The last updated location of an actual Facebook user
• People who live in this location – Location is set by the location on a user’s Facebook profile and confirmed by their IP address.
• People recently in this location – Tracked by mobile device usage in the geographic area you intend to target.
• People traveling to this location – Users who had this geographic area as a recent location that’s at least 100 miles away from their home location.

Demographics-based targeting

You can also define the age, gender, and location of your Instagram Saved audiences.

1. Age – If you know the average age of your audience members, you can set some age restrictions to narrow down your audience.

2. Gender – If your product is targeting a gender-specific audience, you can let Facebook know about it.

Tip: Even if your offers target both genders, you could create gender-specific Instagram ad campaigns to see if women and men respond differently to ad creative that matches their own gender.

3. Language – If you’re advertising in a particular language, you might want to only target the people who can understand your ads.

Later, in the “Detailed targeting” section, you can get even more specific and target people based on their relationship status, political views, life events, job titles, ethnicity, etc.

Interest-based targeting

Interests are one of the best (and easiest) Instagram audience targeting options as they allow you to target people specifically interested in topics and brands related to your product.

For example, you can target people interested in your competitors or magazines and blogs covering your industry.

To find and select new interests, you can either type in some words or browse Facebook’s pre-defined menus.

People’s interests are based on Facebook users’ likes and interests, apps they use, Pages they’ve Liked, and more.

Add several interests to broaden your Instagram audience.

Behavior-based targeting

Unlike precise Interests, Behaviors allow you to target people by purchase history, events they like, devices they use, etc.

For example, a beauty brand could target users who have previously purchased skincare products from their store in order to promote their new skincare line.

Note that behavior-based targeting still falls under the Saved Audiences category.

Here are a couple of examples of the behaviors you can target:

• Mobile Device User – target Android or iOS users
• B2B – target users based on company size, their industry, and their seniority at their job
• Expats – target people who have left their home country to go live somewhere else
• Purchase Behavior – target users based on their purchase habits and expenditures

To master behavioral targeting and learn about all its possibilities, check this guide: Reach Your 100% Perfect Audience With Facebook Behavioral Targeting.

Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook Custom Audiences are your most high-value Instagram target audience.

This audience type allows you to retarget past website visitors and people who have engaged with your Instagram posts.

There are several ways to set up an Instagram remarketing audience, and we’re going to cover each of them briefly.

1. Create Custom Audiences from Customer Files

One way to create Facebook Custom Audiences is to upload your existing customer files – the lists of email accounts, phone numbers or app IDs.

The Customer File audience is a great way to target your newsletter subscribers, leads, or app users.

To create a Facebook Custom Audience for targeting on Instagram, follow these steps:

1. Create a Facebook Custom Audience
2. Select the “Customer File” option
3. Select whether you wish to add a customer file or import contacts from MailChimp.
4. Import your customer data to create a new Custom Audience
5. Select the identifiers
6. Upload a customer file
7. Give your Custom Audience a name

Your customer files can include 15 different identifiers, the most popular ones being:

• Email
• Phone number
• Mobile advertiser ID

If you need to clean up the data inside your customer files before the import, this Facebook’s guide can help you out.

2. Create Custom Audiences Based on Website Traffic

Website traffic-based Instagram target audiences allow you to create remarketing campaigns for people who have engaged with your website and specific landing pages.

Important! To create audiences based on your website traffic, you first need to install Facebook Pixel. See the Pixel setup instructions by Facebook.

Once you’ve installed the Facebook retargeting Pixel, Facebook will automatically track all the website visitors that you can later retarget with Instagram promotions.

When setting up Instagram remarketing audiences based on website visits, you have plenty of different options:

• Target everyone who visited your website
• Target people who visited specific web pages
• Target people who visited specific web pages but not others
• Target people who haven’t visited your website for a certain amount of time
• Other custom combinations

If you’re not using website traffic-based Custom Audiences yet, there’s such a huge Instagram advertising potential just waiting to be used.

3. Create Custom Audiences Based on App Activity

If you’re interested in reaching the people who have engaged with your iOS or Android app, you can set up an Instagram target audience to do just that.

To target people based on in-app activity, you first need to register your app and set up the App Events you want to track.

This can be especially relevant when promoting mobile apps or working with SaaS Facebook ads.

To create an Instagram retargeting Audience based on app activity, target people who have taken specific actions (events) in your app.

Tip: You can also select the time frame for targeted events to reach people who have taken actions in your selected timeframe. For example, you can select an in-app purchase event and specify “In The Last 30 days” to target the app users who have completed an in-app purchase in the past 30 days.

Facebook will be constantly updating your Custom Audiences to match your selected timeframe, meaning that the people in your audience will change every day.

Here’s the official guide by Facebook to help you create Custom Audiences based on app activity.

4. Create Custom Audiences Based on Engagement

Did you know that you can also target the users that have engaged with your content on Facebook, e.g. viewed your videos or liked a post?

Here’s a quick overview of all the available engagements based on which you can create retargeting audiences:

• Video: 3-second video views, 10-second video views, 30-second video views, video watches at 25%, video watches at 50%, video watches at 75%, video watches at 95%, video watches at 100%
• Lead ads: opened form, opened form but didn’t submit (otherwise known as a “drop-off”), opened and submitted form
• Canvas ads: opened, opened and clicked on link
• Facebook page: visited your page, engaged with any post or ad, clicked a call-to-action button, sent a message to the page, saved a page or any post

For example, you could retarget people who clicked on your Facebook Lead Ads, but didn’t complete the conversion. You could test advertising the same offer again, but using a slightly different ad image or different value proposition.

Or, for example, An even organizer could target people who have previously engaged with their Instagram account to promote an upcoming event and invite them to participate.

Targeting engagement-based audiences with Instagram ads is also a great way of engaging with your Facebook fans on multiple platforms.

Facebook/Instagram Lookalike Audiences

Facebook Lookalike Audiences let you reach the people who are similar to your existing customer database – making them highly likely to convert as well.

To create a Lookalike Audience and target it with your Instagram ads, you first need to create a Custom Audience to tell Facebook what type of users you want to reach.

Next, select the “Lookalike Audience” from the audience creation menu and select a target country and a percentage (1%-10%) of the targeted country’s Facebook users. The percentage signifies the people most similar to your selected Custom Audience.

Lookalike Audiences help you to extend your ad campaign’s reach so that you only target people who are likely to be interested in your offer.

Value-based Lookalike Audiences

As the latest addition to its audiences, Facebook added a new type of audiences in June 2017: Value-based Lookalike Audiences.

The new Facebook value-based Lookalike Audiences have a simple goal: to help you reach more people who resemble your current high-value customers.

As you add Custom Audience datapoints to give Facebook insight to each customer’s lifetime value, its algorithms can find new people likely to be interested in your offers.

Learn more about Value-based Lookalikes here.

How to Narrow Down Your Instagram Audiences

Sometimes, an Instagram target audience can include millions of users. This means that you may need to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to reach all of these people.

When creating a Facebook advertising audience, you can narrow your audience with the AND/OR targeting options.

The OR targeting means that when you add new targeting options under the same category of targeting, your audience will grow larger. The AND targeting means that a person who’s in your target audience must fall into multiple categories. This will help to decrease your audience size and create niche audiences.

Another way to limit your Instagram ads targeting is to use the EXCLUDE function.

You can exclude audiences in two ways:

1. By excluding some interests and demographics
2. By excluding specific Custom Audiences of past converters and the existing leads

Instagram Audience Targeting Best Practices

If you’re just starting out with Instagram advertising, having all the different audience targeting options may seem a bit daunting.

No worries, we’ve go you covered!

Up next, you’ll find five suggestions for successful Instagram audience management.

Instagram Ad Targeting Tip #1: Start Out With Saved Audiences

If you’re new to Instagram ads (and haven’t done much Facebook marketing either), it’s best to start out by targeting people based on their interests and demographics.

This way, you let Facebook’s auto-optimization algorithms work their magic and later use the Facebook Audience Insights tool to learn more about your target audience.

Over time, you will get a better sense of who your Instagram target audience is and what are these people interested in. You’ll also be able to retarget the people who have already clicked on one of your Instagram ads and been to your website.

Instagram Audience Tip #2: Create Retargeting Audiences

Not all Facebook audiences have the same ROI. In fact, the ROI of different audiences can be dramatically different.

According to Adobe, the average revenue per visit for repeat purchasers is 497% higher compared to regular shoppers.

Here are three simple ideas for getting started with retargeting on Instagram:

1. Your landing page visitors – You can retarget people who have been to your website and offer a small discount to incentivize them to return.
2. Past purchasers – You should also retarget the people who have already purchased from you in the past – maybe they’ll be interested in buying more.
3. Your blog readers – Share the latest blog posts on Instagram and lead more people to your bog.

Instagram Targeting Tip #3: Promote to Your Facebook and Instagram Followers

One of the highest-engagement Instagram audiences are the people who already like your brand.

Being your Instagram followers makes them also more likely to like all your posts and Instagram promotions.

When setting up a Saved Audience, you can select to target your Facebook Page fans or the friends of your fans. Use this feature to reach new highly engaged audiences.

Instagram Ad Tip #4: Exclude Custom Audiences

It doesn’t make sense to be showing your Instagram ads to people who have already converted on them.

Instead, you should exclude the past converters from an Instagram campaign’s audience and move them to another campaign with a different retargeting offer.

Another way to create niche audiences and keep your Facebook campaigns optimized is by excluding people with specific interests.

Instagram Ad Targeting Tip #5: Match Your Offers With Audiences

If you’ve created a highly specific Instagram ad offer that’s relevant only to a small niche audience, make sure to narrow down your target audience as much as possible.

Otherwise, your ads might leave people wondering “Why am I seeing this ad?”

Your Instagram ads need to match with the target audience, so that people will find your ads relevant, engage with them, and as a result you’ll get higher Facebook Relevance Scores and lower ad costs.

Now that you’ve mastered Instagram ad targeting down to the bones, it’s time to head on to the next chapters:

• Instagram Ad Size and Specs in 2025
• Instagram for Business – The Beginner’s Guide
• Instagram Ads Cost and Bidding in 2021– Everything You Need to Know

The post Instagram Ad Targeting – 84-point Guide [2025 UPDATE] appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

For organic posts, 1080 x 1350 pixels (4:5) is the best-performing feed
size in 2026. It takes up more of the mobile screen without cropping on
desktop. Square format (1:1, 1080 x 1080 pixels) still works everywhere and is the foolproof choice.

For Meta ads, the same two sizes apply: 1080 x 1350 for feed placements,
1080 x 1080 when one file has to work across every placement.

Facebook Stories and Reels — organic or paid — are 1080 x 1920 (9:16). 1080 x 1080 pixels. The size of a Facebook Story ad is 1080 x 1920 pixels.

However, there is more to know about Facebook ad specs and size. For example, how to design your Facebook ads to get more clicks? Or what Meta ad sizes to create for maximum success?

Running the same creative on Instagram? See the Instagram ad specs and sizes for 2026 → Instagram ad sizes in 2026.

Also, when advertising on Facebook, you’ll have the option to use more than one ad type.

In fact, there are currently ten different Facebook ad formats (not counting Instagram ads), each perfect for some kind of Facebook ad campaign structure. It is super helpful to know about all the seven ad layouts and when to use them.

In this guide, we’ll touch upon the following questions:

• What’s the right Facebook ad size?
• What’s the best Facebook feed post size?
• What are all the different Facebook ad types?
• What are all the Facebook ad specs?
• What are some of the best examples of Facebook ads?
• How and when to use particular ad types?

Let’s begin with the basics: the dimensions for Facebook feed posts and news feed ads. And then move on to more advanced Facebook banner sizes.

But first, a question that 90% of the articles listing the ad sizes do not cover: How to select the right ad types and sizes when creating your Facebook campaigns?

Read more: 35+ Best Marketing Newsletters to Follow in 2026

Facebook post sizes in 2026 (organic posts)

Facebook has quietly shifted toward vertical. 4:5 (1080 x 1350) is now the best-performing feed size because it takes up more of the mobile screen without getting cropped on desktop.

Square format still works, however, and is the safest single export if you only make one.

How to select the right Facebook size for each ad type?

If you’re just getting started with Facebook advertising, you’re likely to need some help with picking the correct ad dimensions.

After all, there are MANY possible placements…

After seeing such a wide variety of options, it is easy to get confused…

Also, back in 2018, the go-to Facebook ad size used to be 1200 x 628 pixels. Now, you can publish Facebook posts that 1080 x 1080 pixels wide or portrait: 1080 x 1350 pixels. This means a lot more real estate in the news feed.

For example, compare these two ads:

❗ 2025 UPDATE! All Facebook feed ad placements are now eligible for the 1:1 format ad sizes, so you don’t need to upload a landscape ad format anymore.

When creating a new Facebook ad campaign, we recommend using Automatic Placements for maximum reach.

Suggested article: 30min DYI Facebook Ad Audit for Non-marketers (and Marketers)

This means that you will need to create ads in at least 2 formats:

• 1080 x 1080 pixels for Facebook and Instagram news feeds
• 1080 x 1920 pixels for Facebook and Instagram Stories

You can upload images with different dimensions under a single ad by selecting “Select a placement to customize” when editing your Meta ads.

Below is an example of the static image ad types we use in a MeetFrank ad campaign. We used the three banner sizes listed above.

What happens if you do not upload some of the special Meta ad sizes?

If you don’t have time or resources to create custom image sizes for Instagram ads, you can also use the 1:1 format ads and Facebook will automatically adjust your creative for the Story placements.

Not adding a custom ad image for the Story placement can result in slightly less good-looking ads. But you can still run them and get ok results.

Here’s the difference:

To sum this up, you can follow these three best practices:

• Use as many Facebook ad placements as possible for maximum reach.
• Upload custom image and video sizes for all the placements you’d like to use.
• If you don’t have time to create all image sizes, just go with the 1080 xs 1080px ad size.

When publishing Facebook posts, you can also use images 1080 xs 1080 pixels wide.

Alright… Let’s now take a look at the Facebook ad specs for all the available ad types, so that you can create high-performance ad creatives.

Facebook ad sizes and formats in 2026

When creating Meta ads for my own managed ad accounts, I always export static image ads at PNG files. JPGs are ok as well, but may deliver slightly lower quality in the final result seen by your audience.

Design at 1080 x 1080 and 1080 x 1920 and you’re covered for roughly 90% of Meta ad delivery.

Here’s the full spec sheet, with the ones that matter marked.

Facebook News Feed ads

The most popular Facebook ad type is News Feed ads. These are the ads that you see when scrolling your Facebook news feed, both on desktop and mobile.

What is the ad size of the Facebook News Feed ad?

• Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Minimum width and height: 600 pixels.
• Recommended aspect ratio is between 9:16 to 16:9, crops to 1.91:1 with a link
• Recommended image formats: JPG, PNG (PNG has higher quality)
• Images with 20% or more text may get disapproved by Facebook

Feed ad text character limits:

• Text length: max 125 characters
• Headline length: max 25 characters
• Link description length: max 30 characters

Facebook News Feed video ad specs:

• Resolution: Upload the highest resolution video available that meets file size and ratio limits
• Video file size: 4GB Max
• Recommended video length: 15 – 30 seconds
• Video length minimum: 1 second
• Video length maximum: 240 Minutes
• Video ratio: 9:16 to 16:9
• Minimum dimensions 600 x 315 (1.9:1 landscape) or 600 x 600 (square)
• Recommended video formats: .MP4 and .MOV
• Video captions: Optional but recommended
• Video sound: Optional but recommended

Facebook Carousel ads

Compared to single-image ads, Facebook carousel ads provide a great opportunity to present more images and benefits inside a single ad.

This can mean higher ad engagement rates and, hopefully, also lower cost-per-click prices.

You can add up to 10 images into one Facebook carousel ad. And all of the carousel ad images should be in 1:1 format and 1080 x 1080 pixels wide. Your Meta carousel ads can also include videos instead of static images.

Facebook Carousel ad specs and size:

• Recommended ratio 1:1
• Image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Minimum width and height: 600 pixels (minimum 254 x 133 pixels for Messenger Home carousel ads)
• Minimum cards per ad: 2 images
• Maximum cars per ad: 10 images
• Max image size: 30MB
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Carousel ad character limits:

• Text length: max 125 characters
• Headline length: max 40 characters
• Link description length: max 30 characters

Tip: You can ensure that your banner images do not include too much text with the Facebook Text Overlay tool.

Facebook carousel video ad specs:

• Recommended resolution: minimum of 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Recommended ratio 1:1
• Minimum cards per ad: 2 images
• Maximum cars per ad: 10 images
• Maximum video file size. 4GB
• Video length: 1 second to 240 minutes
• Recommended video formats: .MP4 and .MOV
• Video captions: Optional but recommended
• Video sound: Optional but recommended

Facebook & Instagram Story ad specs

Instagram Stories placement is slightly overtaking the other Facebook ad placements, with an increasing number of users reacting to Story ads.

If you’re not yet using the Story placements in your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, you should: You will get much higher reach and scale the results at a lower cost.

Facebook and Instagram Story ads have the same dimensions and specs, so you can use the same creatives for both placements.

Facebook Story image ad specs:

• Text: no extra text, all text must be part of the image file
• Format: Full-screen vertical ad (9:16)
• Recommended size: 1080 x 1920 pixels
• Minimum resolution: 600 x 1067
• File types: .JPG, PNG
• Max. image size: 30MB
• Photo content: visible for 5 seconds

Facebook Story video ad specs:

• Media type: video
• Recommended video duration: 15 seconds
• Minimum length: 3 seconds
• Maximum length: 60 seconds
• Aspect Ratio: 1.9:1 (landscape)
• For videos under 9:16: Colored gradient bars are rendered above and below
• Video file size: 4GB max
• Video Captions: Not available
• Video Sound: Optional
• Frame rate: 30fps max
• File type: .mp4 container
• Video: H.264 video compression, high profile preferred, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan
• Audio: Stereo AAC audio compression, 128kbps + preferred

Read more about Stories ad dimensions in this guide by Facebook.

Facebook Right-hand Column ads

In addition to the main Facebook ad placements – news feed and stories – you can also upload the images in size 1200 x 628 pixels and have them visible in the right-hand column.

The Facebook right-hand column ads can bring you extra reach and clicks. And you can add them with very little extra effort.

Right column ad size and specs:

• Recommended image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
• Minimum width and height of 600 pixels
• Recommended aspect ratio is between 9:16 to 16:9, but crops to 1.91:1 with link
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Right column ad character limits:

• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Facebook Audience Network ad specs

The Facebook Audience Network allows you to extend your Facebook and Instagram campaigns across the internet – and to have your ads shown on thousands of high-quality websites and apps.

In a Facebook ad campaign study, the conversion rates and results were 8x higher among people who saw ads across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network than people who only saw the ads on Facebook.

So it usually makes sense to include the Audience Network placement in your ad campaigns. If possible, also add video creatives into your ad campaigns as many Audience Network placements only show video ads.

Facebook Audience Network ad size and specs:

• Recommended image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
• Minimum width and height of 600 pixels
• Recommended aspect ratio is between 9:16 to 16:9, but crops to 1.91:1 with link
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Audience Network ad character limits:

• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Audience Network video ad specs:

• Resolution: Upload the highest resolution video available that meets file size and ratio limits
• Video file size: 4GB Max
• Recommended video length: 15 – 30 seconds
• Video length minimum: 1 second
• Video length maximum: 240 Minutes
• Video ratio: 9:16 to 16:9
• Minimum dimensions 600 x 315 (1.9:1 landscape) or 600 x 600 (square)
• Recommended video formats: .MP4 and .MOV
• Video captions: Optional but recommended
• Video sound: Optional but recommended

Facebook Instant Article ad dimensions

Instant Articles is a mobile-optimized ad format that enables publishers to distribute fast-loading interactive articles to Facebook’s app.

The Instant Article placement will allow your Facebook ads to appear when people read these articles.

Instant article ad image specs:

• Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Image ratio: 1:1
• Minimum width and height of 600 pixels
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Instant article ad character limits:

• Text: 30 characters
• Headline: 25 characters

Instant article video ad specs:

• Recommended to publish the highest resolution video possible
• Recommended video length: 15-30 seconds
• Recommended aspect ratio: 9:16 to 16:9
• Recommended video formats: .MP4 and .MOV
• Max video file size: 4GB

Facebook Marketplace ad creatives

Facebook Marketplace is a place on Facebook’s platform where users can buy and sell items. As they browse around, they will also spot some ads in the feed.

We wouldn’t recommend using Marketplace as the only placement in your ad campaign as the potential reach would be fairly low.

However, if you already have ad images in 1:1 format for other placements (e..g for the Audience Network), you can also add the Marketplace placements for additional reach.

Facebook Marketplace ad image guidelines and dimensions:

• Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Minimum width and height: 600 pixels
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Marketplace ad character limits:

• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Facebook Marketplace video ad specs:

• Resolution: Upload the highest resolution video available that meets file size and ratio limits
• Video file size: 4GB Max
• Recommended video length: 15-30 seconds
• Video length minimum: 1 second
• Video length maximum: 240 Minutes
• Video ratio: 9:16 to 16:9
• Minimum dimensions 600 x 315 (1.9:1 landscape) or 600 x 600 (square)
• Recommended video formats: .MP4 and .MOV
• Video captions: Optional but recommended
• Video sound: Optional but recommended

Facebook Messenger ad specs

Facebook Messenger ads appear in between the messages in the Facebook Messenger app. People will see these ads in the Chats tab.

At first, users will see a collapsed version of your ad, like the example below:

If the viewer is interested in the offer, they can tap on it to expand the ad to find out more.

Learn more about Facebook Messenger ads in this guide by Facebook.

Facebook Messenger ad size and specs:

• Format: single-image ad
• Recommended image size for collapsed ad: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Recommended image size for expanded ad: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Image formats: JPG and PNG

Facebook Messenger ad character limits:

• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Facebook Sponsored Message ad specs

The Sponsored Message ads allow advertisers to have direct conversations with their audience on Messenger.

There’s a Facebook Messenger policy that businesses cannot send messages to contacts after 24 hours of a user’s last contact. Unless they are sent as sponsored messages.

That’s exactly when the Sponsored Messages come into play: you can re-engage with people with whom you had conversations in Messenger by using these paid ads.

Sponsored message ad image size:

• Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Image ratio: 1:1
• Minimum width and height of 600 pixels
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Sponsored message ad character limits:

• Text: 30 characters
• Headline: 25 characters

Quick recap

Although there seems to be an endless amount of different Facebook ad placements, specs, and dimensions, all the ads actually have similar requirements.

This means that you can already reach 100% of your Meta ad audience by uploading static image ads in three sizes:

• 1080 x 1080 pixels for Facebook and Instagram news feed
• 1080 x 1920 pixels for Facebook and Instagram Stories

Also, follow these character limits to make sure that your Facebook ads fit in all placements:

• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Not that difficult, is it? Learn more about creating highly converting Facebook ads in these articles:

215+ Best Facebook Ad Examples from TOP Brands
16 Copywriting Tips for Facebook Ads and Social Media Posts
28 Facebook Advertising Hacks for Complete Success

The post Facebook Post & Ad Sizes in 2026 – Foolproof Guide [Updated] appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Ok, getting to the article now…

—

How to get good results with your eCommerce Facebook ads?

Based on most blog articles on the topic, you’re supposed to mess around with complex ad formats and set up a Facebook ad campaign structure based on a five-level conversion funnel.

But in reality, the key to successful eCommerce Facebook campaigns is to keep them simple.

If you’ve ever looked at the Facebook and Instagram ad creatives used by big-name brands, you should already know that most of them run basic single-image ads. No Collection ads, no dynamic remarketing, no carousels.

In the past couple of years, I have audited many online stores’ Facebook ad accounts and helped them to scale the results while lowering Facebook ads cost.

What we’ve seen s that detailed customer segmentation and exotic campaign objectives only damage the performance.

So in order to succeed, how should you set up your eCommerce Facebook ads and how to create world-class Facebook ad visuals?

GIF source

🍩 Here are 12 suggestions to keep in mind:

1. Keep your marketing funnel simple
2. Use a minimal Facebook ad campaign structure
3. Avoid creating new ad sets for each new promotion
4. Keep your target audiences broad
5. Do not over-optimize your campaigns
6. Optimize on conversions, not clicks
7. Perfect your Facebook Pixel setup
8. Use the optimal number of ad creatives
9. Use a mix of static and video ads
10. Create ad visuals in two formats: feed + stories
11. Copywrite the perfect headlines + texts
12. Experiment strategically and document key learnings

We’re gonna expand on each of these suggestions in a moment. 

In case you’re rather interested in perfecting your eCommerce ads design, scroll ahead until you reach the 20 eCommerce Facebook ad examples that I personally consider to be smart and inspiring (and that I assume are bringing good results to the brands using them).

Rule #1: Keep your marketing funnel simple

One of the main mistakes I have seen eCommerce businesses make with their Facebook ads is that they tend to overcomplicate their marketing funnel and customer segmentation.

You don’t need to create an ad campaign for every one of your 5 marketing funnel stages:

• Awareness
• Consideration/lead
• New customer
• Existing customer
• Churned customer

You can’t have it all as it will spread your budget too thin and each campaign and ad set will collect too few conversions to perform optimally.

You can’t have it all – GIF source

Setting up Facebook ad campaigns for three different audiences is enough:

• Prospecting
• Remarketing
• Retention

Also, you should split your campaigns per country or per region, so that countries with similar behavioral patterns and cost of advertising are bundled together.

For more detailed suggestions, read more about my approach to Facebook ad campaign structure.

Rule #2: Use a minimal Facebook ad campaign structure

Another big mistake that many brands fall upon when setting up their Facebook campaigns is creating a separate ad set (or even a separate campaign, even worse) for each customer segment.

Sometimes, companies end up with 5-10 different target audiences, each having different ad sets with specific creatives and messaging.

While hyper-segmentation works well in some areas of marketing, it doesn’t perform well in the Facebook Ads Manager.

Always keep the number of your Facebook ad campaigns and ad sets minimal.

I usually suggest the following approach to my eCommerce clients:

🍪 One Prospecting campaign with up to 3 active ad sets:

• One value-based LAL (lookalike) audience of your past 60 days top purchasers (start with 2% LAL and expand up to 8% LAL)
• One broad audience of all people living in your target area, aged x-x
• One interest-based audience that signifies one of your more specific customer segments (you can switch these over time, but don’t have 5 different ones running at the same time)

🍪One Remarketing campaign with up to 2 active ad sets:

• Past 30 days website visitors
• People who added something to the shopping cart in the past 60 days

If you also run Awareness video ad campaigns (which I do not recommend), you could add a third remarketing ad set for video viewers.

🍪 One Retention campaign with up to 2 active ad sets:

• Past customers who haven’t bought anything for 30 days
• Past customers who haven’t bought anything for 90 days

Sometimes, a single retention ad set is also enough.

You can multiply the above campaign structure for each target country or region.

Rule #3: Avoid creating new ad sets for each new promotion

Continuing with eCommerce Facebook ad mistakes, here’s another one: creating a new ad campaign or ad set every time you want to promote a special offer or a new collection of products.

Facebook ad sets work in a way that the algorithms learn based on your conversion data. If you create new ad sets all the time, you will lose all your historical data (and will have higher CPA costs).

GIF source

It makes much more sense to collect all your Purchase conversions under one ad set so that Facebook’s algorithms can learn more about your target audience and deliver ads to increasingly relevant people in your audience.

Instead of creating new campaigns and ad sets, try to re-use the existing ones. 

You can even change an existing ad set’s audience and fully replace all the creatives inside it, should you want to advertise a different offer to another audience.

Rule #4: Keep your target audiences broad

Facebook Prospecting-level ads bring the best results when you keep your ad sets’ targeting broad. 

And by broad I mean at least 5% of a small country’s population and 2% of a large country’s population.

For example, when setting up Prospecting ad campaigns in the US, I like to keep the audience size 3M or broader.

Don’t forget to exclude the past 60 days’ purchasers

You can go a bit more narrow when using lookalike audiences and use a 2% LAL audience even if it means reaching fewer people.

When it comes to Remarketing campaigns, each ad set’s audience should have at least 1,000 people in it. Facebook won’t usually deliver good results for an audience smaller than that.

Rule #5: Do not over-optimize your campaigns

Facebook Ads Manager offers unlimited options for optimizing every single detail of your campaigns, from custom ad placements to hourly scheduling of your ad delivery.

But in fact, the fewer special optimization features you use, the better job Facebook algorithms will do.

This is especially important when creating Prospecting campaigns (which probably take up 60% or more of your budget).

• Use campaign-level budget optimization
• Use automated ad placements
• Do not use customized ad scheduling

And while it’s tempting, do not make changes to your ad sets more than once a week. Otherwise, your ads will remain in the Learning Phase forever and won’t deliver optimal results.

It’s a best practice to do all the changes to your ad campaigns at once. So if you want to update the budget, audience, and upload new ad creatives, do it simultaneously and not on separate days.

Less work = better results – GIF source

This doesn’t mean that you should leave your eCommerce Instagram and Facebook ad campaigns running for months without a single change.

Keep working on new ad creative ideas and experiment with new ad visuals at least twice a month.

Rule #6: Optimize on conversions, not clicks

Companies that do not have their Facebook Pixel set up often tend to optimize the campaigns on link clicks.

And I’ve also seen the Facebook ad accounts with perfect Pixel setup still running Traffic campaigns instead of Conversion campaigns.

Here’s the problem: if you tell Facebook that you want to get clicks from an ad campaign, the algorithms will deliver just that: clicks. 

But those clicks rarely turn into conversions.

That’s because Facebook doesn’t know that you also want Purchase conversions. It is bringing you cheap clicks from people who are in the habit of browsing the websites but not buying.

You reap what you sow, as they say – GIF source

If you optimize your ad campaigns on conversions (website Purchases), you are signalling to Facebook that you’re interested in reaching people who’d make a purchase. And that’s what you’ll get.

Which scenario would you rather prefer:

1. You spend $500 to get 2000 website clicks at $0,25 cost-per-click + 10 purchases at $50 cost-per-purchase
2. You spend $500 to get 500 website clicks at $1 cost-per-click + 50 purchases at $10 cost-per-purchase

Always optimize your eCommerce ad campaigns (Prospecting, Remarketing, and Retention campaigns each) on Purchase conversions.

Rule #7: Perfect your Facebook Pixel setup

Setting up the Facebook Pixel takes about 1 hour and there’s no excuse for skipping this.

Essentially, you can’t get proper results from Facebook advertising without passing important website events like Add-to-cart and Purchase to the ad platform.

To ensure that your Pixel is correctly set up, compare the event count in Facebook Events Manager with your other website data sources, e.g. Google Analytics.

There might be small discrepancies in the data, but it shouldn’t fluctuate more than 20%.

Review the most important event’s count on Facebook v.s. other reporting platforms on a weekly basis to ensure that your Pixel receives correct data.

Rule #8: Use the optimal number of ad creatives

Let’s move on to the fun part: the ad creatives.

The rule that ad visuals contribute hugely to your results doesn’t only apply to eCommerce brands but any other industry as well.

But there’s a limit to how many active ad creatives you should have per ad set. 

If you have too few, there won’t be enough variety. If you have too many, it’s going to hurdle your campaign performance due to a time-consuming learning curve.

💎 The optimal number of active ad creatives per ad set is 6-8 visuals.

Rule #9: Use a mix of static and video ads

When working on my clients’ ad campaigns, I like to set up a varied selection of creatives in each ad set:

• 2 single-image static ads in one style
• 2 single-image static ads in a different style
• 2 video ads with different lengths (15 sec and 30+ sec)
• 1 carousel ad

Based on the initial results, you can either create more static or video creatives and keep experimenting with new ideas.

The main reason for including a mix of static and video ads is that they often appear in different ad placements. If you only use single-image static ads, you will miss out on video-only placements.

People often complain that creating video ads is super difficult. That’s not necessarily true. You don’t need to film original content in order to have video creatives. Use stock videos or animate some static product images and mix it with animated typography.

You can slightly animate your static ads to get a video ad

For creative inspiration, see these collections of Facebook ad examples:

• 195 Best Facebook Ad Examples (2021 Edition)
• 84 TOP Instagram Ad Examples (2021 Update)
• 40 Instagram Story Examples – Static + Video 

🔥 P.S. When reading a couple of blog articles on eCommerce ads, I came across recommendations to use all of the following ad formats:

• Collection ads 
• Video ads 
• Domain ads
• Instant Experience ads
• Lead ads 
• Carousel ads
• Facebook Dynamic ads

In fact, I have never seen an eCommerce brand get good results with Collection ads, Instant Experience ads, Lead ads, and Dynamic ads. 

As far as I’m concerned, I do not recommend using them (or first testing as an experiment).

Rule #10: Create ad visuals in two formats: feed + stories

Quite often when auditing Facebook ad accounts, I see brands using only the 1:1 (square) format ad creatives.

This means that they’re missing out on good-looking visuals in the portrait-format placements: Facebook stories, Instagram stories, Messenger stories.

And a large share of Facebook ad views happens exactly in-between the stories.

Here’s a comparison of how an ad visual in 1:1 format v.s. Story format will appear in the Instagram stories placement:

That’s probably not the brand image you’d want to cultivate. Rather, you’d want to have something looking like this:

When creating and uploading creatives to your Facebook ad campaigns, always add a special format for the story placements.

Upload both 1:1 and Story format visuals

🍊 Pro tip: Make sure to leave the top and bottom 20% of your story-format ad designs empty of any content and Instagram will add automatic overlays on top of your ad visual.

Read more about Facebook specs and size.

Rule #11: Copywrite the perfect headlines + texts

While the ad visual is the make-or-break element of any Facebook ad creative, the texts you use still contribute to the overall performance.

The most important text of your Facebook ads is the in-image headline.

I almost never upload a Facebook ad creative that only includes an image without adding a short headline with the USP (unique value proposition) on top of it.

If people aren’t attracted by your ad visual, they will never read the ad text. That’s why, you should include the most important slogan in the image itself.

When it comes to eCommerce ads, there might be some use cases where you wouldn’t want to include an in-image text. For example, if you’re advertising an image from a photoshoot. But if possible, I’d still recommend testing both options: with and without a headline.

You can also mix a text, logo, and photo

Another important principle to keep in mind: do not expect people to know your product.

Avoid catchy slogans and ad texts that do not explain what your product and its main benefits are. Think of Facebook ads rather as your website, not on-street brand ads.

Here are a couple of additional tips for perfecting your Facebook ad copywriting:

1. Keep it short and simple
2. Talk about the most relevant product benefits and value props
3. Address the user instead of talking about your brand (“we did X”)
4. Use active language: do, get, make, create, be, etc.
5. Assume that most people only read the first 2 lines of your ad text (the one that appears above or under the image of in-feed ads)

Read more: 16 Copywriting Tips for Facebook Ads and Social Media Posts

Rule #12: Experiment strategically and document key learnings

Most brands that I’ve worked with do not have a well-documented ad experimentation strategy. The PPC Manager just runs various experiments and keeps the results in their head.

If a new person were to join your Marketing team, would you be able to point them towards a document that gives an overview of all the Facebook ad experiments and top-performing creatives?

Or what if the agency or team member managing Facebook ad campaigns leaves the company? You would lose a lot of valuable information…

Unless you’ve properly documented all the experiments.

Whenever I start working with a new client’s Facebook ad account, we establish a spreadsheet for documenting all ongoing and completed experiments.

How the experiment tracking sheet looks like

I also like to keep track of all the Facebook ad creatives that we’ve created and tested.

Creative reporting could either be done:

• On a Figma page where you design your ads
• On a dedicated page in Notion, Confluence, or other documentation platform
• On a spreadsheet together with the PPC experiments log

Personally, I use a mix of all three + sometimes also write quarterly reviews that look back into all past 3 months’ experiments and tested ad visuals.

If I’m setting up a specific Facebook ad campaign for testing new creatives each in a separate ad set, I like to later add the test results to a Google Sheet, so that it will be easy to catch a quick overview in the future.

Example creative test report (with dummy data)

I have written about Facebook ads A/B testing in this blog before. Check it out for some ideas for your next experiments.

Or if you’re looking for inspiration specifically for your eCommerce business, gather new ideas from the 20 brands below. 

🍋 20 eCommerce Facebook ad examples

When browsing the following ad creatives, notice the following best practices used by almost all of the showcased brands:

1. They use a mix of video and static ads
2. There’s almost always an in-image text in the ad visual
3. All ad creatives are brightly colored and eye-catching
4. All photos and images used are of the best possible quality
5. There’s a lot of variety between the ad creatives by the same brand
6. Many eCommerce Facebook ads feature a promo offer
7. Almost all ad creatives use the “Shop Now” call-to-action
8. The focus is on the visual, not the ad text

While I have included a wide mix of various ad formats like Collection ads, in general, single-image ads, carousel ads, and simple video ads tend to perform the best.

But you can never know, so test with a variety of creative ideas and ad formats.

#1 Made.com

See the full video ad on this link.

#2 Nike

#3 AirBaltic

As you can see, there’s a different ad visual for the story placements.

#4 COS

See the full video ad on this link.

#5 NARS Cosmetics

#6 NARS Cosmetics 

See the full video ad on this link.

#7 & Other Stories

#8 Finnish Design Shop

#9 The Sill

See the full video ad on this link.

#10 Starbucks

See the full video ad on this link.

#11 La Roche-Posay

#13 Teabox

#14 Vagabond Shoemakers

#15 Sandqvist

#16 Click & Grow

#17 Ferm Living

#18 Goli

#19 Pärla

#20 Mytheresa

Thx for reading, thx for watching!

If you’d like to be notified about upcoming blog articles, subscribe to my newsletter (max 2 emails per month.)

In case you’d like to work together on your Facebook ad campaigns, reach out at marketing@karolakarlson. I’m booked with ongoing projects until the end of 2021, but then again I’m bad at saying no to brands with cool products.

The post 12 Rules for eCommerce Facebook Ads + 20 Ad Examples appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Your Facebook ad campaign metrics also indicate whether you’re getting a positive ROI (return on investment). All in all, it is crucial that you measure your Facebook ad performance on a regular basis, ideally every week.

But how to know which numbers to track? Because there’s an almost endless choice of metrics available in the Facebook Ads Manager: Reach, Impressions, CPC, CPM, CTR, CPA, Relevance Score, Engagement Score, Landing Page View (All or Unique?) Video Views, Ad Recall Lift, Spend, Revenue, ROAS…  🤯

Which metrics to pick? – GIF source

You can easily get lost and derailed when evaluating your Facebook ad campaign results.

So what are the Facebook ad metrics that you absolutely should be checking? Personally, I always check three key metrics and then follow up with another ten that I use to better understand what’s affecting my top three. Also, the metrics that I review depend on the campaign objective.

By the end of this guide, you will know answers to all the following questions:

• How to see all important Facebook advertising metrics in the Ads Manager?
• Which campaign KPIs should you track and which ones can you ignore?
• How to evaluate and improve your Facebook ad performance?

Let’s start with a crash course in Facebook ad analytics and see how to navigate the Ads Manager and set up Custom Reports for faster performance evaluation.

How to review campaign KPIs in the Facebook Ads Manager?

All Facebook ad metrics can be seen in the Facebook Ads Manager. If you’ve set up the Facebook Pixel correctly, you won’t need any additional 3rd party tools for Facebook ad reporting.

(However, if you’re working with a mobile application, you may want to use an attribution tool for reporting, so that you don’t get your app results attributed to multiple advertising channels.)

For quick access to your Facebook Ads Manager, you can bookmark this link: Open your Facebook Ads Manager.

In the below screenshot, you can see the default Ads Manager report. However, you can click on the “Columns: Performance” menu to customize your advertising report.

You can see your Facebook ad metrics in the Ads Manager

Once you click on the “Columns: Performance” menu, you can see a selection of default ad reports. However, scroll past them and select “Customize columns” to access a wide selection of additional Facebook ad KPIs.

You can select all the metrics that you want to see and organize them in the most convenient order.

Create your own custom report

Once you’re happy with your custom report, you can save it as preset and access it faster the next time.

Save your custom reports for faster access

⭐ Tip: If you always use the same custom Facebook Ads Manager report, bookmark the URL of this view for a 1-click access to your campaign results.

Now that you’re aware of how to access, navigate, and customize your campaign metrics in the Facebook Ads Manager, let’s see which KPIs should you add to those custom reports.

I will also explain why some Facebook KPIs are best to ignore – they won’t reflect on your real campaign performance and tend to be shown as vanity metrics.

TOP 3 Facebook ad metrics to measure

While there are around 10 different metrics that I track, depending on the campaign setup and goals, there are always the TOP three KPIs that I check every single time:

1. CPA – cost per acquisition
2. ROAS – return on ad spend
3. Frequency – impressions/reach

These metrics give an immediate overview of the ad account’s overall performance + your conversion-optimized campaign’s results.

Let’s see how to evaluate these metrics.

Are you happy with your Facebook ROAS? – Image source

1. CPA – cost per acquisition

In all likelihood, you are running Facebook ad campaigns to collect results that can be measured by a conversion: either a new lead, 1st-time customer, app install, website purchase, etc.

If you’re not optimizing your Facebook advertising towards a conversion, you may want to reconsider your strategy. Read the guide to Facebook ad account audit to make sure you’re on the right track.

The CPA – cost per acquisition – shows how much it costs to achieve one conversion.

Essentially, CPA = total amount spent / number of customers acquired.

The reason why this metric is so important is that it allows you to immediately understand if the new customer’s or lead’s acquisition cost is sustainable in the long run: are you making more money from the customer than it takes to acquire her?

The CPA benchmark is completely different for every brand, depending on your industry, product type, and its net cost. You should aim to achieve a CPA that is lower than what you spend on creating and delivering your product.

2. ROAS – return on ad spend

The return on ad spend indicates whether your Facebook ads are paying off. If the ROAS is negative, it means you are losing money.

You can either see your ad campaign’s ROAS directly in the Facebook Ads Manager or use a spreadsheet / 3rd-party analytics tool to calculate it.

In order to see ROAS on your Facebook ad account, you will need to pass purchase values via the Facebook Pixel or Facebook app SDK.

Facebook advertising ROAS

What ROAS should you aim for?

I have seen companies achieving the ROAS of 12.0 with Facebook ads and others that are in the growth phase and happy with a ROAS of 0.50. 

Also, your return on ad spend will vary per campaign objective: 

• Remarketing campaigns usually have the highest ROAS, up to 20.0
• Awareness and Reach campaigns usually have a ROAS close to 0.0

You should calculate the overall ROAS of your acquisition, remarketing, and awareness campaigns combined to understand the total ROI of your Facebook ad campaigns.

If your total ROAS is under 1.0, ask yourself whether there’s really any point to running Facebook ads. In many cases, if the company’s still in growth phase and willing to invest at a negative net rate, it does make sense.

In addition to ROAS, many companies also calculate Facebook ad ROI by comparing the CPA to average customer lifetime value.

If the customer that you acquire via Facebook will keep making purchases (e.g. monthly subscriptions or small repeat purchases), you can calculate your average LTV to better understand the long-term ROI of your ads. Maybe your 14-day ROAS is low, but when you compare the CPA to a 6-month lifetime value, your advertising ROI will make more sense.

3. Frequency

Facebook ad frequency shows how many times a unique user has seen your ad during a set time period.

I usually check the frequency of past 7 days and 30 days. If the frequency is very high, it means that most people in your target audience have been reached times over. It’s time to either lower your ad budget or expand the target audience.

Frequency = Impressions / Reach

The frequency benchmarks also vary per campaign type.

• For Prospecting campaigns, I generally aim for a 7-day frequency of 3-5
• For Remarketing campaigns, the 7-day frequency can go up to 10-12 
• For Awareness campaigns that have a broad target audience, the 7-day frequency of 2-3 seems to be the golden ratio

TOP 3 Facebook ad metrics you should ignore

Before we get to the rest of the Facebook KPIs that help you understand campaign performance, let’s stop for a moment and see the ones that you should NOT be tracking.

Here are the 3 Facebook vanity metrics that I see companies reporting on:

• CPM – cost per 1000 people reached
• CPC – cost per click
• Ad click-through rate + relevance score

Ad agencies often like to show these metrics to their clients. “Look, there’s been an improvement in CPMs this week.” Or another one I’ve often heard: “The results got worse because the CPM is getting higher.”

Here’s the thing: it is not the CPM that you should be evaluating. Always measure the CPA.

You can bring your CPM and CPC down by 10x easily by targeting a broader target audience or optimizing your campaigns on Reach or Clicks. But getting cheaper top-of-the-funnel results is useless if at the same time your real acquisition costs increase.

Which campaign results would you prefer to have:

Campaign 1:

• Targeting a 1% LAL audience in the US and optimized on Conversions
• Total cost = $425
• CPM = $65
• CPC = $2.3
• You get 50 purchases at $8.5 CPA

Campaign 2:

• Targeting everyone aged 18-60 in the US, optimized on Link Clicks
• Total cost = $425
• CPM = $5.5
• CPC = $0.3
• You get 25 purchases at $17 CPA

Naturally, you’d prefer Campaign 1 that has a higher CPM and CPC Facebook ad cost, but because it is targeted at a more relevant audience, it brings more conversions and thereby has a lower CPA.

That’s a bold comparison, but I’ve seen broadly targeted click-optimized campaigns (in the US) bring website visits at $0.15, but none of the 5,000 visitors converted. While conversion-optimized campaigns help you reach a much more relevant yet smaller audience that costs 10x more to reach, but is 50x more likely to convert.

If your Facebook advertising goal is to drive sales or other conversions, track the acquisition metrics (CPA, ROAS, number of results), not vanity metrics (CPM, CPC, Click-through rate).

Hide the vanity metrics and look at the CPA – Image source

Let’s also talk about the CTR or Click-through rate.

Sometimes, advertisers look at the CTR to understand whether their ad creatives are attractive to the target audience. However, I consider this to be a vanity metric as well. As long as your ads deliver a CPA and ROAS that you’re happy with, looking at the CTR doesn’t help to improve anything.

The same story goes about various relevance score metrics. It is your ROAS and CPA that matter!

Instead of checking the vanity metrics, make sure to update your Facebook ad creatives every 2-3 weeks to avoid ad fatigue. Pause the 3-5 lower-performing creatives and add 3-5 new creatives into your existing ad sets.

Read more: Facebook Advertising Cost Benchmarks

9 more Facebook KPIs to better understand your campaigns

While the TOP 3 Facebook ad metrics – CPA, ROAS, and frequency – give a fast high-level understanding of your ad account performance, you may want to get additional clues for optimizing your campaigns towards an even better performance.

The additional numbers you can check in the Facebook analytics depend on what type of product you’re advertising. For example, the marketers running ads for mobile app, SaaS products or online stores all have slightly different metrics to check.

This said, here are the 9 additional Facebook metrics that I look at most frequently:

1. Total cost v.s. ad budget
2. Reach / target audience size
3. Number of mid-funnel conversions
4. Cost per mid-funnel conversions
5. Unique conversions + unique CPA
6. ROAS of 7 days + ROAS of 30 days
7. Results per ad creative
8. Marketing funnel conversion rates
9. Landing page conversion rate

Some of these metrics are not directly available in the Facebook Ads Manager. However, you can easily collect them on a spreadsheet or calculate them in your head while looking at your Facebook ads report.

Below, you will find a quick explanation about each.

7. Total cost v.s. ad budget

Sometimes, when your target audience is very small or there’s a problem with your ad campaign delivery, Facebook won’t use the total daily or lifetime budget that you have assigned.

To notice such problems, you can check the expected ad spend (calculated based on your set budgets) v.s. the real ad spend per campaign. 

If you notice that some campaigns are not using the full extent of the allocated budget, you may need to troubleshoot them.

8. Reach / target audience size

This metric will tell you what % of your ad set’s audience has been reached during a set time period.

I usually check the past 30 days Reach and compare it to the total audience size. You can either do this exercise on campaign or ad set level.

For example, if your total audience size is 2,00,000 people and your ad campaign reached 1,400,000 people in the past 30 days, it means that 70% of your target audience members have seen your ads.

Usually, if your Facebook ads have reached a high % of target audience, the performance will start dropping. 

There are no more new people to deliver your ads to.

In case I notice that more than 60% of my target audience has already been reached, I consider expanding the target audience. For example, I might create a new Lookalike audience of 5% and replace it with the previously used 3% Lookalike audience.

9. Number of mid-funnel conversions

All advertisers have a one north star conversion. This is usually a purchase from an online store or the first purchase inside the mobile application.

However, there’s a number of aiding conversions that a user will do before committing the final conversion.

Conversions of eCommerce Facebook ads:

• Online store visit
• Product landing page views
• Add to cart
• Add payment method
• Complete order

Conversions of SaaS Facebook ads:

• Website visit
• Registration
• Free trial signup
• Purchase

Conversions of mobile app Facebook ads:

• Click to App Store
• App install
• In-app registration
• In-app actions
• In-app purchase

Look at all of your conversion funnel steps and seeing how many conversions you had for each. Sometimes, this can help to identify the problematic step in your conversion funnel.

Study your mid-funnel conversions – Image source

10. Cost per mid-funnel conversions

When gathering data about your mid-funnel conversions, take a look at their cost-per-action.

How much does a mid-funnel conversion cost? If you multiply the cost with the conversion rate from this event to the final purchase, you get an indication of the total CPA.

Also, I like to keep track of some mid-funnel conversions’ cost on a week-on-week or month-on-month basis to understand if there’s any significant change.

Tip: To avoid getting lots of mid-funnel conversions that do not lead to the final purchase, optimize your Facebook campaigns always on the final purchase event. This way, you will indicate to Facebook algorithms that you’re interested in the final conversion, not mid-funnel events.

11. Marketing funnel conversion rates

Once you have collected your mid-funnel events’ numbers onto a spreadsheet, go ahead and create formulas to calculate the conversion rates from one conversion to the next.

E.g. if you know the number of website visits, add-to-cart events, and purchases, you can calculate the conversion rate between those events.

Looking at your marketing funnel conversion rates helps to identify any problematic stages.

For example, you might get 500 of Add-to-cart conversions, but only 90 visitors complete the purchase. This might indicate that there’s a problem with your online store checkout, there are not enough payment methods available or the shipping fees are too high.

Or maybe you get a lot of app installs, but none of those users will purchase. This can be a sign of poor in-app value proposition or a mismatch about what you promise in the ads v.s. what your product actually offers.

Another useful thing about reporting on full-funnel conversion rates on a week-on-week or month-on-month basis is that you will immediately notice if some conversion rate suddenly drops. And you can pinpoint + fix the issue faster.

12. Unique conversions + unique CPA

Depending on how your Facebook Pixel events are set up, Facebook may sometimes report on multiple conversions per user.

For example, if you optimize your campaigns on online store purchases and one user makes 3 purchases, Facebook will report this as 3 conversions.

If you want to see the results per unique user, check the unique conversions and their cost.

You can easily add the unique conversions to your Facebook ad reports by customizing the columns.

Check the unique results in the Facebook Ads Manager

Even better if you use a third-party reporting tool, e.g. Appsflyer for mobile apps or your in-house built reporting system to match Facebook conversions with actual purchases.

The picture you get from the Ads Manager doesn’t always match the real results, so review if there’s a difference from time to time.

13. ROAS of 7 days + ROAS of 30 days

The most common conversion window that Facebook advertisers use is 7-days click and 1-day view.

This means that Facebook will attribute to its campaigns all the conversions that happen either 7 days after a user clicks on your ad or 24h after they’ve seen your ad.

When looking at the ROAS (return on ad spend) metric in your Facebook analytics, you will see the ROAS of your selected time period. As I like to report on ad campaign results on a weekly basis, I check the past 7 days ROAS.

If there’s a free trial period or a chance for repeat purchases within a 30-day period, I prefer to report on my ad campaigns’ ROAS on a spreadsheet and not directly in the Ads Manager. And I like to look at both the 7 days ROAS as well as 30 days ROAS. That’s because the users that have been acquired within a specific week might keep bringing additional value to the company. 

Sometimes, the ROAS just keeps growing – Image source

14. Results per ad creative

As I believe that good Facebook ad creatives play a huge role in campaigns’ success, I wanted to dedicate one point purely to ad visual evaluation.

When reviewing my clients’ Facebook ad campaigns on a weekly basis, I like click onto the ad creative level and see which ads are performing the best.

This helps me understand what types of creatives to create for the next A/B tests (top-performers) and which ones to avoid in the future (low-performers).

I always evaluate ad creatives’ performance on the number of conversions that they bring (no vanity metrics like CPMs or CTRs!).

There’s one exception, however. Inside Awareness campaigns, I look at the Estimated Ad Recall Lift metric and consider the ads with the highest Reach and Ad Recall Lifts to be the top-performers. These are the ads that Facebook algorithms consider to work best, so they show them more frequently than other ads.

Evaluate Awareness ads by Estimated Ad Recall Lift

For an overview of good Facebook ad examples, check out these galleries.

15. Landing page conversion rate

Whatever your product, its sales funnel goes beyond Facebook and Instagram. And many Facebook advertisers tend to forget about it.

If you’re running an eCommerce brand, you take people to an online store. If you advertise a mobile app, your users will be directed to App Store to install your app.

Your Facebook ads’ post-click experience is a critical part of your campaign. That’s why, you should also keep an eye on the landing page conversion rate. 

There are two main reasons for low landing page conversion rates:

1. Your value proposition is not attractive, people are not interested in your product
2. There’s a big mismatch between what people see in your ad creatives v.s. on the landing page

Understanding the reasons behind low post-click conversion rates will help you to optimize your campaign performance even further.

Quick recap

Whether you like to analyze your Facebook ad metrics in the Ads Manager or export them to a spreadsheet or 3rd-party analytics tool, the KPIs to check remain the same.

Below is the list of TOP 15 Facebook ad KPIs to remember.

3 most important Facebook metrics:

• CPA – cost per acquisition
• ROAS – return on ad spend
• Frequency – impressions/reach

3 Facebook ad vanity metrics:

• CPM – cost per 1000 people reached
• CPC – cost per click
• Ad click-through rate + relevance score

9 additional Facebook KPIs to understand your campaign performance:

• Total cost v.s. ad budget
• Reach / target audience size
• Number of mid-funnel conversions
• Cost per mid-funnel conversions
• Unique conversions + unique CPA
• ROAS of 7 days + ROAS of 30 days
• Results per ad creative
• Marketing funnel conversion rates
• Landing page conversion rate

Et voilà! You’re set to open your Ads Manager and give your account a quick audit.

For more Facebook advertising advice, let’s connect on LinkedIn.

The post TOP 15 Facebook Metrics to Track or Ignore in 2021 appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

This article’s going to answer all these questions. But first, here’s a quick answer to your question, based on research by Revealbot.

Looking at the Facebook ads cost data from April 2020 – April 2021, we can see that the average Facebook ads CPC is between $0.5 – $3,5.

Facebook ads CPC in 2021

Another important Facebook advertising cost metric that many advertisers keep their eye on is the CPM – cost per 1,000 views. 

In March 2021, the average Facebook CPM was between $2 – $20.

Facebook ads CPM in 2021

As you can already see from the two charts above, the Facebook ads cost can vary a lot based on your Facebook ad campaign setup.

After reading this article, you’ll have a much better overview of:

• How much you should pay for a Facebook ad click?
• Which Facebook ad placements have the lowest costs?
• How to lower the cost of Facebook ads?

Quick tip: One of the fastest ways to lower your Facebook ads cost is to improve your Facebook campaign structure and review your Facebook ad metrics. Start with this Facebook ad audit to ensure you’ve got everything set up correctly.

Alright, let’s start with the most burning question:

How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook?

While there is no way to tell exactly how much you’re going to pay for a click or results on Facebook, there are some benchmarks you can follow.

For example, AdEspresso’s research of 2017 Q4 results shows that the average CPC on Facebook is anywhere between $0.20-$0.80.

In-between 2017-2021, the advertising costs have significantly increased. You should now be ready to pay up to $3 per ad click. (Although some ads for broad audiences still deliver $0.20 CPC, even in the US.)

The average CPC is $0.20-$0.80 – Image source

The cost of Facebook advertising depends on multiple factors:

• Your target audience
• The seasonality
• Your marketing objective
• Competition
• Ad placements
• Quality of your ad creatives

Factor #1. The timing of your campaign

When evaluating your Facebook ads cost, it’s important to take into account the time of year.

For example, it’s more expensive to advertise during the holidays when everyone is using Facebook advertising to increase sales.

That’s also what AdEspresso’s data shows: The most expensive months for advertising are October, November, and December.

October, November, and December are the most expensive months – Image source

Key takeaway;

If your product’s sales aren’t affected by the time of year, you could spend less during the Autumn/Winter season and allocate a higher budget to Spring/Summer.

However, if the revenue you earn per sales is lower than the acquisition via Facebook ads, you should advertise all year round.

In case you’re running an online store, see this guide on eCommerce Facebook ads to bring down your CPC and CPA costs.

There is also a difference in your Facebook ads CPC depending on the hour of day.

Different time of day = different CPC – Image source

As the above chart is taking into account the average per all ads analyzed, it doesn’t reflect as well on how the cost in time depends on your product.

For example, when you’re selling pizzas, people are more likely to be interested in your ads during lunch, dinner, and late at night. That’s also when your CPC will be lower.

On the other hand, promoting B2B or SaaS Facebook ads outside of office hours is likely to make those ads’ CPC higher.

Here’s an example of how a Facebook campaign’s click-through rates and CPC changes, depending on the time of day. It’s not a big difference, but when you’re tight on budget, knowing your most profitable advertising times can be a life-saver.

Find your most profitable advertising times

If you want to advertise only during specific times of day, you can use the custom ad schedule feature.

You can set a custom schedule for your ads

If you’re unsure what are the best times for running your Facebook ads campaign, use the automatic scheduling and let Facebook’s algorithms do the heavy lifting.

You can later check your ad reports to discover which weekdays and times of day worked best.

Factor #2. Your target audience

There’s a high chance you’re not selling your product to the entire population.

And your cost of Facebook ads will also depend on who it is you’re targeting. For example, it costs less to reach people aged between 18-24 than those aged 55-64.

What’s your target audience’s age? – Image source

Moreover, the gender of your target audience can make a big difference in your Facebook ads pricing.

Surprisingly, it can cost more to attain Facebook Page likes from women than from men. This could be due to more eCommerce brands targeting women.

Women’s likes cost more – Image source

Key takeaway: The better you know you target audience, the easier you’ll find evaluating (and lowering) the advertising costs.

Factor #3. Your Facebook ad placement

When setting up your Facebook ads campaigns, you can select automatic ad placements or pick specific channels for your ads to be shown in.

For quick reference, here are the currently available Facebook ad placements:

• Facebook Desktop newsfeed
• Facebook Mobile newsfeed
• Instant Articles
• In-stream videos
• Facebook Desktop right column
• Instagram feed
• Instagram Stories
• Facebook Audience Network
• Facebook Messenger home
• Messenger Sponsored messages

Read more about all the Facebook ad types and their specs here: Facebook Ads Specs and Size (Always Up-to-date Guide)

AdEspresso’s data from 2016 shows that the cost-per-click of your Facebook ads variated greatly between different placements.

Ad placement can make a huge difference – Image source

It looks that the Facebook Audience Network is the cheapest ad placement while Instagram ads cost is the highest.

However, remember that this chart only shows the cost-per-click.

What about the cost per conversion? Or cost per signup?

As Facebook Audience Network consists of thousands of different apps and games, there’s a high chance that many clicks from that channel were accidentally made.

Here’s a randomly chosen campaign example that shows the number of clicks and app installs of a Facebook Mobile App Installs campaign.

Not all clicks turn into conversions

Notice that the click-to-install conversion rate in the Audience Network is only 20.8% while in the Facebook Mobile newsfeed it’s 55.4%.

So how to choose your Facebook ad placements and lower the cost?

I recommend that you run your Facebook ad campaigns with automatic placements for some time. After you’ve got some results, you can exclude the placements where costs are highest.

However, if the cost-per-acquisition in all placements is lower than your earnings from sales, keep all of them running to reach more people.

Factor #4. Your campaign objective

When creating a new Facebook ad campaign, you can choose between many objectives.

Facebook offers you many objectives

Depending on your Facebook ad goals, you’ll be paying a different amount for clicks and other types of conversions.

Usually, campaigns with broad target audiences optimized on Reach (Brand Awareness or Traffic campaigns) have lower cost per 1,000 impressions. Conversion-optimized campaigns make it more expensive to reach your audience, but the audience’s quality and engagement are also much higher.

Facebook ads CPM by campaign objective, 2021 data

Conversion-optimized ads may seem more expensive, but they also deliver more results,

This also makes perfect sense – the goal of a Reach campaign is for many people to see the ad, not click on it.

Tip: If your goal is to get people clicking on your ad, use the Traffic campaign objective.

When promoting your blog articles on Facebook, use the Engagement objective.

For example, there’s also a difference between the cost-per-like and cost-per-app-install.

Cost-per-app-install vs. cost-per-like – Image source

As you can see, the different objectives also perform at different rates depending on the placement.

This is getting too confusing?

We’ll learn more about selecting the right objective and optimization methods in the second half of this article.

Factor #5. Your ads’ relevance

In the end, the cost of Facebook ads comes down to THE most important factor: is your product relevant to people?

Do they want to buy it?

Do they want to click on your ad to find out more?

Or are they looking at your ads and thinking…

These ads are soo annoying – Image source

For example, if Hired were promoting these carousel ads to marketers instead of developers, their Facebook ads cost would skyrocket while their campaign underperforms.

This ad is relevant to developers, but not marketers

Or if Teabox were targeting different ads for people liking chai vs. black tea, their ads would probably have higher click-through rates and lower cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion.

Chai lovers are more likely to click on this ad

When analyzing 104,256 Facebook ads, AdEspresso discovered that Facebook campaigns’ Relevance Score successfully predicts both the cost-per-click and click-through rate.

If your ads’ relevance is high (meaning people engage with your ads), the cost-per-click will be significantly lower.

You better make your ads relevant – Image source

Tip: You can see your ads’ relevance score as you break down your Facebook reports by Performance and navigate to the Ads view.

What is a good relevance score?

I would say it’s anywhere between 5 to 10 points. However, ads with relevance score of 8-10 usually have a lower cost than the rest.

Find every ads’ relevance score

How to increase your relevance score?

• Nail your USP – unique value proposition
• Create eye-catching Facebook ad designs
• Make sure your ad targeting is focused on the right audience

Now that you’ve got an overview of some numbers and benchmarks for Facebook ads cost, let’s move on and see how to set up your Facebook ad bidding.

How Facebook ad bidding works?

Facebook ad bidding works like a worldwide auction where every second thousands of transactions are made.

Even while you’re fast asleep, your ad campaigns are participating in hundreds of auctions that determine whether your ads will be shown to the people you’re targeting.

In order to win the Facebook ad auction and keep your advertising costs low, it’s important to understand how the auction works. Or for that matter, how the entire Facebook ad bidding game works.

How Facebook ad auctions work:

First, you need to know that Facebook’s ad delivery is driven by two main goals:

• Creating value for advertisers by helping them to reach the best target audience
• Providing positive, relevant experiences for people using Facebook, Instagram or Audience Network

Read more: Facebook’s official page about ads pricing.

Unlike in a traditional auction, the winner isn’t the one who makes the highest monetary bid.

It’s the ad that creates the most overall value.

Facebook relies on three factors to determine the winner of an auction: Advertiser Bid + Ad Quality & Relevance + Estimated Action Rates

This is how Facebook ad auctions work

Advertiser bid – that’s the bid you place on your ad sets. You can also use automatic bidding, so that Facebook’s algorithms will determine the best amounts to bid at any given auction.

Ad quality & relevance – your ad’s relevance score isn’t only important for keeping your ad. According to Facebook, if your ad has got lots of negative feedback, it may decrease the ad’s total value.

Estimated action rates – The estimated action rate is a Facebook’s calculated measure that shows how likely a person is to take the actions you’ve optimized for. Facebook needs at least a couple of results per day to be able to estimate your campaigns’ action rates. The longer your ad campaigns will run, the better Facebook can optimize them.

Every time a Facebook ads auction occurs on the background, Facebook will standardize the factors and combine them into a total measure. The ad with the highest total value wins and gets delivered to people’s newsfeeds.

Key takeaway: A high bid won’t guarantee your ads will win the auction, unless they’re also relevant to the target audience.

How to win the Facebook ad auction – Image source

How to set up your Facebook ads budget?

You can set up your Facebook campaign’s budget in the in the Budget & Schedule section during your campaign setup phase.

Up next, we’ll take a closer look at all the options you have.

Go to the Budget & Schedule section

In the Budget section, you can select between two Facebook features:

Option 1: Daily budget

This is how much Facebook will spend on delivering your ads every day during your campaign’s set dates.

Note that when setting a daily budget, you’re setting an average. Facebook might still spend slightly more or less each day, depending on the opportunities that arise.

$10 is the average daily expenditure

Option 2: Lifetime budget

By using the Lifetime budget, you’re telling Facebook the amount you’re willing to spend over the duration of your ad campaign.

This means that on some days, you may spend $10 while only $2 on others.

Important! After you’ve published your Facebook ad campaign, you won’t be able to change the budget type, only the sums you want to spend.

Tip: If you want to switch your ad budget from lifetime budget to daily budget or vice versa, you can duplicate an existing ad set and change its budgeting method. Then, pause the old ad set.

Which budget type should you use?

Some performance marketers believe that using a Lifetime budget gives Facebook more room for optimization. However, if your campaign runs for less than a month, Facebook may not have enough data to optimize the ad delivery.

I personally prefer to set daily budgets – they’re more flexible and transparent when changed throughout the campaign.

January 2018 UPDATE

As a recent Facebook update, you can now also set campaign-level ad budgets. The new feature is called Campaign Budget Optimization.

As you publish a campaign-level budget ad campaign, Facebook’s algorithms will start learning, and will allocate your budget between the ad sets so that you will get the most results at the lowest cost.

How Campaign Budget Optimization works

How to set up your ad optimization & delivery?

As you scroll down to the next phase of your Facebook campaign setup, you will see something like this:

Scroll down until you see this

Optimization & Delivery… What is it?

Basically, here’s where you can tell Facebook what is your desired advertising goal and how much you’re willing to pay for it.

According to Facebook, the campaign optimization works like this:

“Your optimization choice tells us what to value when delivering your ad. For example, you could tell us to show your ad to the people in your target audience most likely to click a link to your website (optimizing for link clicks) or to show it as many times as possible (optimizing for impressions).”

Click on Optimization for Ad Delivery section

As you look at all the optimization methods for the first time, it can get pretty confusing.

Mind blown – Image source

Here’s a quick overview of all ad delivery optimization options together with explanations:

Conversions – When optimizing for conversions, Facebook will deliver your ads to the people who are the most likely to convert. The conversion could be a signup, purchase, app install, etc.

Post Engagement – When bidding on Post Engagement, Facebook will show your ads to the people most interested to like, comment or share your ad.

Impressions – Your Facebook ads will be delivered to as many people as many times as possible while staying within the limits of your advertising budget. There’s no algorithmic optimization regarding who is more likely to engage with your ad.

Link Clicks – Facebook will deliver your ads to the people most likely to click on your ad. With this optimization method, you’ll be charged every time someone clicks on your ad.

Daily Unique Reach – Facebook will deliver your ads to your target audience members up to once per day. That’s a good way to keep your ad frequency under control. I personally like to use frequency capping for Facebook remarketing campaigns.

Brand Awareness – Facebook will serve your ads to people most likely to be interested in your offer. You can use this delivery optimization method to make a campaign visible to a large audience. You will be charged on the basis of CPM — you’ll pay for every 1,000 ad impressions.

Should you use Manual vs. Automatic ad bids?

The next step of your Facebook ad budget setup is to select whether you’d like to use Manual or Automatic bid.

If you’re unsure how much your Facebook ads cost, always use automatic bidding.

However, if you’re interested in reaching more people at a higher Facebook ads pricing, you can set up a Manual bid to win more ad auctions.

Manual bidding options

And as you’re setting the Manual bid, there’s another set of options:

The Maximum vs. Average bid.

By now, you may start to get confused… There are TWO types of manual bids?!

Here’s what’s different about Maximum and Average manual bids.

When using the Maximum bid, Facebook’s algorithms stop delivering your ads if there’s a risk that the cost per result will be higher than your bid.

As you set an Average bid, Facebook will use the Pacing method to optimize your ad delivery for the optimal ROI.

Conversions in the box are missed with max bid – Image source

Here’s Facebook’s Pacing explained by Smartly.io:

“Without pacing, the ad set would spend the entire budget in the beginning of the day for more expensive ads and miss the better opportunities in the end of the day. The Pacing algorithm learns the optimal bid over time.”

Here’s an explanatory table by Smartly.io, showing when to use the Maximum vs. Average bids.

Plenty of useful information here – Image source

Pay close attention to the last rows of the comparison table.

With the Maximum bid, you will maximize your profit. With Average bid, you will optimize delivery while sometimes paying more per conversion.

How to set the right Facebook ad bids?

When setting a Manual ad bid, you likely have two main goals:

1. Get as many results as possible
2. At the lowest advertising cost possible

Wouldn’t that be nice… – Image source

So how can you set the right bid to keep your Facebook ad costs low but at the same time, drive enough traffic to your website?

One option is to use the bids suggested by Facebook.

The suggested bid is a sum that Facebook considers to be sufficient to achieve your anticipated result (e.g. a link click or conversion).

In the parentheses next to the suggested bid, you can see the bid range. This number shows a spectrum of bids that are currently winning auctions across the world that reach the same audience as you’re targeting.

Tip: As you check the Manual bidding method, Facebook is usually suggesting a really high bid. Make sure to change the sum in the box.

For example, if Facebook first suggests that you bid €3.10 per 1k impressions and the bid range is (€1.20–€3.40), you could bid €1.60 or even €1.25.

However, there’s an even better way for finding out how much you should bid per result.

Start running a new campaign on automatic bidding. After you’ve collected enough data about your average cost-per-result, you can change the bidding method to Manual and insert your target bid.

How to keep the cost of Facebook ads low?

Now that you’re aware of the average Facebook CPC and CPM, you may be thinking “But I want my ads to cost even less.”

Well, it’s totally possible.

But there isn’t a shortcut to lower ads costs. You need to put in some extra work and time to achieve better results.

Here’s what you’ll have to do.

1. Improve your USP

USP – the unique selling proposition – is what makes your product relevant to its users while also differentiating you from the competition.

Advertising legend Rosser Reeves explained in his book that USP has three parts:

1. Each advertisement must explain a clear and relevant benefit to the consumer.
2. The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique.
3. The promise must be so compelling that it can move the mass of millions.

For example, App Academy’s Facebook ad offers a clear benefit and also explains how much a person could earn after completing the curriculum.

App Adacemy nailed it!

Sometimes, it’s ok to advertise a message also used by your competitors. But try to find a small differentiator that makes your product more memorable.

There are thousands of companies selling socks in the world. However, through smart branding and great visuals, Happy Socks is able to differentiate its products from the rest.

Happy Socks definitely deserves its name

Key takeaway: Whatever it is you’re promoting try to find the key benefit to the buyer and make sure it’s clearly readable in your Facebook ads.

Check out these 180 best Facebook ad examples for more inspiration.

2. Ensure you’re targeting the right audience

There has been so much talk about buyer personas and knowing your customers that everyone’s kind of tired of it already.

Yea, yea… Don’t come to me with another customer survey talk.

You probably know how your Facebook ad targeting should look like.

But do you really?

Have you checked the Facebook Audience Insights tool to see which demographics are most interested in your product?

No?

You can do it right now.

Facebook Audience Insights tool – Image source

Using Audience Insights, you can get aggregate and anonymous information such as:

• Demographics – Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size
• Page likes – The top Pages people like in different categories
• Location and language – Where do people live, and what languages do they speak
• Facebook usage – How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on
• Purchases activity – Past purchase behavior (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online)

Later on, you can create interest-based Facebook audiences that reach more people interested in your product. Or you will know what are the best locations for promoting your product.

There’s some fascinating data to be discovered.

3. Target advanced Facebook audiences

When creating new Facebook marketing audiences, don’t let yourself be limited to Saved Audiences (the interest-based audiences that are easy to create).

Saved Audiences will only get you so far – Image source

There are also other audience types available on Facebook: Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences.

And these two audience types go a long way in helping you reduce your Facebook advertising costs.

A Custom Audience is Facebook audience that’s based on the data available from the Facebook Pixel on your website/landing page. You can also create Custom Audiences based on e-mail lists or in-app actions.

If you’re interested in 10+ ideas for using Facebook Custom Audiences in remarketing campaigns, check out this article I wrote for KlientBoost.

Creating a Custom Audience

A Lookalike Audience is a Facebook audience that helps your reach new people similar to your existing customers or website visitors. As a result, you can reach people who are likely to be interested in your product.

… and creating a Lookalike Audience

In the perfect campaign structure, you should be using all of the three Facebook audience types to reach slightly different audience segments.

Here’s a more in-depth article explaining how to create Facebook and Instagram target audiences.

4. Exclude past converters from your audience

A tiny yet super efficient hack to keep your Facebook CPC and CPC low is to exclude from your target audiences the people who have already converted.

You can move those people to the next step in your Facebook marketing funnel instead of delivering them the same ads over and over again.

Different levels require different approach – Image source

Here’s how to exclude the past converters from your Facebook audiences:

• Create a Facebook Custom Audience of people who have visited specific web pages (e.g. your download thank you page or a blog article).
• Use the EXCLUDE feature when setting up your ad set’s audience to stop targeting people in this Custom Audience.

Exclude past converters

5. Create highly converting ad images

Consumer Acquisition has found that images are arguably the most important part of your ads. They’re responsible for 75%-90% of your ad performance.

Goes without saying that your ad’s image plays a key role in its success or demise.

There are ads that immediately catch every viewers’ attention. Like this one by Facebook for example…

This ad is eye-catching, isn’t it?

… And then there are ads that just inhabit the newsfeed without anyone noticing.

Want to make sure your ads look more like Facebook’s and catch everyone’s attention?

Here are the key 8 Facebook ad design commands to follow:

1. Use bright colours – a study by UsabilityTools showed that using highly contrasting call-to-actions resulted in 75% higher click-through rate, compared to a low-contrast CTA.
2. Avoid plain stock photos – If you must use a stock photo, use a colour overlay to make it more interesting.
3. Include icons and symbols – Create simple ad designs that mainly consist of symbols and backgrounds. Simple is efficient.
4. Show your product – if your product can be represented in an image, create a Facebook ad with it.
5. Test multiple ad formats – create Facebook Carousel ads or Slideshow ads to bring novelty to your mix of image ads.
6. Match ad design with landing pages – Make sure that before-the-click and after-the-click have the same branded look about them.
7. Use in-image text – add your value proposition in the ad image.
8. Keep your in-image copy short – people prefer images light in text.

Spotify’s Facebook ad just pop with color.

Spotify Facebook ad example

6. Add videos to your marketing mix

Videos aren’t only a nice addition to your ad sets. They can significantly lower your advertising costs.

Facebook did a case study with Refinery29, comparing the results of two various campaign tactics:

• Campaign A employed creative and images focused strictly on generating subscriptions.
• Campaign B over the same period featured different “sequenced” video-first ads that first told the brand story, next provided product information before inviting people to sign up.

The result?

Refinery29 had an 87% increase in traffic to the landing page and a 56% increase in subscription rate for those people who saw the branding video first.

Numbers don’t lie – Image source

The key to successful video ads is engaging people during the first 3-5 seconds.

Wistia did a research and discovered that as the video length increases, the engagement drops.

Short videos are more engaging – Image source

It makes sense to keep your Facebook video ads under 2 minutes. Even better if you’re able to engage people with a 30-second video.

7. Write stronger ad copy

Imagine you’ve spotted a really cool Facebook ad image in your newsfeed.

Would you click on it right away?

Or would you also read through the ad copy first?

If you’re like most people, you’ll also want to know what the copy is saying before making a click, not to speak of making a purchase.

Your ad copy matters. A lot.

So how can you write great Facebook ad copy?

Here’s what Joanna Wiebe, the queen of conversion copywriting, recommends:

• Write for the click. Your ad headline should be a CTA all of its own.
• Connect “what” with “why.” State what to do – and then say why. What’s the benefit or outcome of acting?
• Focus on a single, specific thought. People can’t save time and money. They can save time. Or they can save money. Simplify.
• Use numerals and special characters. We need to draw the eye. So people won’t save a thousand bucks. They can save $1000.
• Show empathy. The more you’re in their head, the more you’re in their head.
• Use “new.” Nothing puts an itch in people like the word “new.”
• Keep it short. AdEspresso found that a max of 5 words is best for FB ad headlines.
• Mention the offer, including any incentives. That could be free shipping or a downloadable ebook.
• Make a promise. But back it up.

Here’s a great Facebook post example by Intercom that’s both actionable and makes you want to get their e-book.

8. Avoid Facebook ad fatigue

Ad fatigue is like a monster gnawing on your good Facebook ad CPCs.

But it’s main goal isn’t to make you lose the Facebook ad auction and fail miserably. Its goal is to improve the experience for people seeing your ads and bring you more sales.

Looks like ad fatigue to me… – Image source

Ad fatigue means that people have gotten tired of seeing your Facebook ads for so many consecutive times.

Once you hit the ad fatigue, several things will happen:

• People stop noticing your Facebook ads in their newsfeed – this means fewer attention, likes, and shares.
• People stop clicking on your Facebook ads – you will start paying more per every Facebook ad click.
• Your ad campaign’s costs skyrocket – to get the same amount of new sales, you must pay a lot more.

So how can you avoid the ad fatigue?

The easiest way to predict ad fatigue is to check your Facebook ad frequency – how many times an avg. audience member has seen your ad.

To check this metric, go to the Facebook Ads Manager, click on a campaign, and in the reporting section select the Delivery view.

Check your ad frequency

You can check the ad frequency per campaign, ad set or specific ads. I recommend that you check the ad set level frequency.

Here you can see the campaign level frequency

Tip: In most cases, it’s best to keep your Facebook ad frequency under 2-3 points.

However, when working with Facebook remarketing campaigns, you can also let your ad frequency get slightly higher. I’ve also seen great remarketing results at the frequency of 15+ views.

Once you see your ad frequency increase and results drop, you can add new offers and ad designs to your campaign to keep your target audience interested.

For example, Lyft is using tons of different ads to catch their audience’s attention.

Keep adding new designs to your Facebook campaign

You can also change your Facebook target audience to reach new people who haven’t yet seen your ads and won’t have the ad fatigue.

Quick Recap

Alright, folks.

This article has gotten way too long and you’ve probably already forgotten some of the key learnings from the first half of the article.

So here’s a quick overview of everything we covered:

• The average Facebook ads cost-per-click in 2021 is between $0.5 – $3.5.
• However, your cost of Facebook ads depends on multiple factors.
• That’s why, there’s no one Golden Facebook CPC.
• But you must check whether your ads have a positive ROI.
• Meaning that your cost-per-acquisition is smaller than what you’ll earn per conversion.

To keep your Facebook ads pricing low, you can:

• Improve your value proposition.
• Ensure you’re targeting the right audience.
• Start targeting advanced Facebook audiences.
• Exclude past converters from your audience.
• Create highly converting ad images.
• Test adding videos to your marketing mix.
• Write stronger ad copy that converts.
• Prevent Facebook ad fatigue.

Are your average CPCs similar to the ones mentioned in this article? Let us know in the comments!

The post How Much Do Facebook Ads Cost – [2021 New Data] appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Quick answer: The average Instagram ads is $0.40-$1.80 per click and $6-$10 CPM in 2026

You will pay more in highly competitive industries, e.g. fashion and travel as more brands are competing for your audience’s attention. Instagram ads cost can reach up to $4.50 per click. Read this article to see how to keep your costs low.

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably a marketer looking to advertise on Instagram. Truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the budgeting question as your Instagram ads cost depends on 10+ different factors.

We’ll be exploring some benchmarks that can give you a additional insight into Instagram advertising cost and the suggested budget.

In this chapter of our extensive Instagram Advertising Guide, we’ll explore the answers to the following questions:

• How much does it cost to advertise on Instagram?
• How does the Instagram ad bidding work?
• How to set your Instagram ad budgets and bids?
• How to select the right ad delivery optimization method?
• What’s the best way to keep your Instagram ad cost low?

How Much Do Instagram ads cost?

One of the most burning questions of marketers interested in Instagram ads is the potential ROI – how much does a click or conversion cost on Instagram?

Here are the latest 2026 Instagram ad cost stats:

Let’s see what different resources suggest.

Instagram ad costs by industry

Instagram ad costs vary about 4.8x across industries.

If you’re benchmarking your account against a blended average, you’re comparing yourself to the wrong number.

What changed in 2026

Four things moved this year, and they all point the same direction.

In 2026, Instagram ads Reach got more expensive, attention got cheaper to buy in Reels.

• CPMs rose 20.1% year over year, from $11.82 to $14.19 across Meta.
• CPC rose 11.4%, from $0.70 to $0.78.
• CTR fell 9.4%, from 1.71% to 1.55% — you’re paying more for less attention.
• Conversion rates improved 6.2%, from 7.72% to 8.20%, which partly offsets it.

The practical read: Reels remain the arbitrage. If you have vertical video that
works, Reels CPMs run 20-40% below feed for the same audience.

And plan for Q4: CPMs spike 30-50% above baseline through BFCM and the holidays.

More Instagram advertising cost statistics

When analyzing Instagram advertising costs in 2018, AdEspresso found that the average cost-per-click on Instagram is around $0.80.

If you’re interested in fresh data, here are the Facebook and Instagram advertising cost numbers from 2021, based on data by Revealbot.

Looking at the Facebook ads cost data from April 2020 – April 2021, we can see that the average CPC is between $0.5 – $3,5.

Instagram ads CPC in 2021

Another important advertising cost metric that many advertisers keep their eye on is the CPM – cost per 1,000 views. 

In March 2021, the average Instagram CPM was between $2 – $20.

Instagram ads CPM in 2021

As you can already see from the two charts above, the Instagram ads cost can vary a lot based on your Facebook ad campaign setup.

For example, there’s a difference in Instagram CPC prices for various age groups.

The highest CPC age groups are 18-24, 25-34, and 35-44-year-olds – the most valuable age groups when it comes to Instagram marketing.

Instagram ads cost per age – Image source

Moreover, Facebook ads cost is higher for brands targeting women. (This may also be the case as less men use Instagram, so you won’t get as many clicks from men)

Instagram ads cost by gender– Image source

One of the most burning questions of marketers interested in Instagram ads is the potential ROI – how much does a click or conversion cost on Instagram?

Compared to Facebook advertising costs, Instagram ads tend to be on the high end of the scale.

AdEspresso’s 2016 analysis on tens of thousands of Facebook ads showed that Instagram is often the most expensive ad placement.

While the cost-per-click of Facebook Mobile newsfeed ads averaged at $0.35, the avg. CPC on Instagram was around $0.70.

Instagram is one of the most expensive ad channels – Image source

After managing hundreds of Instagram ad campaigns, I’ve seen Instagram ads cost anywhere between $0.20 to $2 per click.

2021 update: When comparing some of my clients’ ad results per placement, I’ve noticed that Instagram Stories placements usually brings cheaper results than Instagram Feed.

Tip: When thinking about your investment in Instagram marketing, think how much a conversion is worth to you and make sure that your campaigns has a positive ROI.

Instagram Ads Have a High ROI

According to Forrester, Instagram ads have the highest engagement rate of all digital ad placements. This means that sometimes, you could pay a little more for a click or 1,000 impressions and still come out as a winner.

Instagram ads have high engagement – Image source

A marketing report by Shopify revealed that Instagram users tend to spend the avg. of $65 per referred sale. In comparison, Facebook users only spend $55, and Twitter users $46.26.

Instagram users spend more – Image source

Moreover, Instagram posts have quite a high conversion rate of 1.08%. Even though it’s lower than Facebook (1.85%) it still surpasses Twitter (0.77%) or Pinterest (0.54%).

Instagram ads conversion rate – Image source

In fact, Instagram marketing is so beneficial to brands that the spending on this ad platform is steadily increasing.

According to eMarketer, Instagram ad sales are predicted to hit 2.8bn by 2017 (from $600M this year).

Instagram is taking on Twitter and Google – Image source

How to Get Higher Instagram Ads ROI

Instagram is part of Facebook’s ad network, which means that very often you’ll be combining the Instagram feed with other placements.

To get the maximum campaign ROI, use Facebook’s automatic placements option (or a few selected placements), and use your Instagram campaign reports to see if it’s a good place for showing your ads.

In my experience, Instagram ad costs are lower for B2C brands (companies selling consumer products).

B2C advertisers have the most to gain

For B2B brands, Instagram ad costs can be higher as people are not hanging out on Instagram looking to buy some business tools. Read more about marketing your SaaS or B2B products on Facebook.

If all the mentioned Instagram marketing costs and potential ROI sounded attractive to you, keep reading to learn how the Instagram ads bidding and budget setup works.

How Does Instagram Ad Bidding Work?

Instagram ad bidding works exactly like Facebook ad bidding. After all, both of these ad types are managed on the very same platform.

This means that when publishing an Instagram ad campaign, you’ll be entering a worldwide auction for people’s attention.

There are three factors that contribute to your advertising cost:

• Your Facebook campaign’s bid – The more you’re willing to pay, the more Facebook will deliver your ads. If you’re going to use automatic bids, there’s a good chance you’ll be just fine.
• The relevance score – Your ads’ relevance score will directly affect the cost of your ad results and how Facebook prioritizes their delivery in the bidding auction.
• Estimated action rates – Facebook determines your “estimated action rates” (which are exactly what they sound like) by a number of different factors.

Instagram ad cost factors – Image source

Basically, what this means is that in addition to a high ad bid, it’s also important to create Instagram ads that are relevant and interesting for your target audience.

How to Set Up Your Instagram Ads Budget

You can customize your Instagram ad campaign’s budget in the Budget & Schedule section, during the Instagram campaign setup process.

Set up your ad budgets here

You can select between two types of ad budgets:

Daily budget: This is how much Facebook will spend on delivering your ads every day during your campaign’s set dates.

Note that when setting a daily budget, you’re setting an average. This means that Facebook will try to get you roughly your daily budget’s worth of the results for every campaign day.

Instagram ads pacing

Lifetime budget: That’s the amount you’re willing to spend over the duration of your Instagram ad campaign.

Important! Once you’ve published your ad campaign, you won’t be able to change the budget type, only the amounts you’re willing to spend.

Selecting Your Instagram Ads’ Delivery Optimization

Depending on the campaign objective you chose at the beginning of your Instagram ads setup process, you can select between several ad delivery options.

But what is this “ad delivery optimization” anyway?

Here’s what Facebook says:

“Your optimization choice tells us what to value when delivering your ad. For example, you could tell us to show your ad to the people in your target audience most likely to click a link to your website (optimizing for link clicks) or to show it as many times as possible (optimizing for impressions).”

When possible, optimize for conversions

Here’s a quick breakdown of different delivery optimization methods:

Conversions – When optimizing for conversions, Facebook will deliver your ads to the people who are the most likely to convert.

Post Engagement – As you bid on Post Engagement, Facebook will show your Instagram ads to the people who might like, comment or share your ad or your promotion.

Impressions – Your ads will be delivered to as many people as many times as possible while staying within the limits of your advertising budget. There will be no optimization regarding who is more likely to engage with your ad.

Link Clicks – Facebook will deliver your ads to the people most likely to click on your ad. You will be charged every time someone clicks on your ad.

Daily Unique Reach – Facebook will deliver the ads in your ad set to people up to once per day. That’s a good way to keep your ad frequency under control.

Brand Awareness – Facebook will serve your ads to the people who are most likely to be interested in your brand and offer. This could be an efficient way to acquire new Instagram followers.

Manual vs. Automatic Bidding

Setting up your ad campaign’s budget and bidding in the Facebook Ads Manager can be confusing.

Especially if you look past the default settings and use some advanced options. One of these options is manual bidding.

So which one should you select: manual or automatic bidding?

You can set manual Instagram ad bids

Automatic bidding – use this bidding method if you don’t know how much a result might cost. Facebook will find the best balance between keeping your advertising costs low while delivering enough results.

Manual bidding – This option lets you set a bid based on what a result/conversion is worth for you.

If you’re just starting out, you should either use the automatic bidding or place your bid following Facebook’s suggested bid.

Use the suggested bids as benchmarks

Tip: You can use a manual bid that’s on the low end of what Facebook’s suggesting.

Always change the Facebook’s pre-set manual bid in the custom bidding box. For example, if Facebook first suggests that you bid €3.50 per link click and the suggested bid range is (€0.70–€2.53), you can place a bid of €1.00 or even €0.71.

Pacing in Facebook Ad Delivery

You may not be aware of this, but whenever you optimize your ad delivery for Conversions, Facebook will give you two manual bidding options: Maximum and Average bid.

Select a Maximum or Average bid

What’s the difference between an Average and Maximum bid?

With Maximum bid, Facebook’s algorithms won’t deliver your ads if there’s a risk that the cost per result will be higher than you bid.

As you set an Average bid, Facebook will use the Pacing method to optimize your ad delivery for optimal ROI.

Pacing explained by Smartly.io:

“Without pacing the ad set would spend the whole budget in the beginning of the day for more expensive ads and miss the better opportunities in the end of the day. The Pacing algorithm learns the optimal bid over time.”

How Facebook ad delivery pacing works – Image source

Should you use a Maximum or Average bid?

If your goal is to maximize profit, select the Maximum bid. However, if you’re willing to pay a little more per conversion but get a lot more of them, go with the Average bid.

You can test both options – Image source

How to Keep Your Instagram Ad Costs Low

1. Start With Automatic Bidding

If you haven’t got much Instagram advertising experience, use the automatic Facebook ad bidding.

While it might be tempting to test different manual bidding options, you won’t have any previous data telling you what’s the average cost-per-result. This makes it highly likely that you’ll either overbid or under-bid and get worse campaign results in the end.

If you MUST use a manual bid, check out Facebook’s suggested bid and keep in mind the Instagram ad cost benchmarks mentioned in this article.

2. Optimize Your Instagram Ad Campaign for Conversions

Optimizing your ad campaigns for conversions is the best way to ensure that Facebook will auto-optimize your campaigns so that you’ll get more anticipated results at a lower cost.

We’ve been impressed with Facebook’s ability to deliver ads to the people actually most likely to convert. Their algoriths have grown to be super smart!

Read more: How to Set Facebook Advertising Goals for Ultimate Success

The quickest way to success

3. Set a Frequency Cap

When you optimize your Instagram ad delivery for Reach (available when the ad campaign’s objective is set to Reach or Brand Awareness), you’ll get the option of Frequency Capping.

Frequency cap lets you set a time interval at which an audience member can see your Instagram or Facebook ads.

Cap your ads’ frequency

By setting your Instagram promotion’s Frequency Cap to 3-5 days, you’ll ensure they won’t get bored with seeing your ad too often.

If you want to learn more about Instagram and Facebook ads cost, read these guides:

About Facebook’s Ad Auction – The Official Guide
From 0 to Results. How to Set Up Low-Budget Facebook Campaigns
28 Facebook Advertising Hacks for Skyrocketing Results

The post Instagram Ads Cost in 2026: Real CPC & CPM Benchmarks appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

The size of an Instagram Feed ad is 1080 x 1080 pixels. The Instagram Story ad size is 1080 x 1920 pixels.

However, there is more to know about Instagram ad specs and size.

Need the Facebook equivalents? See Facebook post and ad sizes for 2026 → Facebook ad size and specs in 2026.

When advertising on Instagram, you’ll have an option to use more than one ad type.

In fact, there are currently seven different Instagram ad types, each perfect for a slightly different marketing campaign. (That’s still a lot less than Facebook ad types though.)

It is highly important that you’re aware of all the seven ad layouts and know how to use them. You do want to get the highest possible ROI out of Instagram advertising, right?

In this chapter of the Instagram Advertising Guide, we’ll touch upon the following questions:

• What are all the different Instagram ad types?
• How to set up each ad type?
• What’s the right Instagram ad size?
• What are all the Instagram ad specs?
• What are some of the best examples of Instagram ads?
• How and when to use particular ad types?

We’ll start with the most popular Instagram ad sizes and move on to the more specific ones used by advanced marketers.

Instagram Ad Specs & Sizes 2026: Feed, Story, Reels

Three files cover every Instagram placement that matters: 1080 x 1350 for feed,
1080 x 1920 for Stories and Reels, and 1080 x 1080 for carousel cards.

The Instagram Feed has moved from 1:1 to 4:5 as the default, it claims more of the screen than a square ad.

Master table:

File limits:

Images: JPG or PNG, up to 30 MB. Video: MP4 or MOV, H.264 codec with AAC audio, up to 4 GB. Carousels: 2 cards minimum, 10 maximum — and every card must be the same size.

1. Single Image Ads

The most widely used ad type for both Instagram and Facebook advertising is the Single Image Ad.

This ad type consists of an image, ad copy, and a call-to-action button. The Instagram image size can vary depending on the size of your uploaded photo.

Check out this article with 84 Instagram ad examples for additional inspiration.

This popular ad type can be applied to all kinds of advertising offers as you can use many different types of images and offers inside the Single Image Ad format. Moreover, as you promote a blog article or other types of content on Instagram, you’ll be using the Single Image Ad layout as well.

Different Instagram ad sizes

Single Image Instagram Ad specs:

• Caption: up to 125 characters
• Media type: image
• Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Image format: .jpg or .png
• Max. file size: 30 MB

2. Instagram Carousel Ads

Carousel ads allow you to showcase up to 10 images or videos (named cards) inside a single ad.

You can recognize a Carousel Ad by the small dots under the image, indicating that there is more than one image to be seen.

Instagram Carousel Ads are a bit trickier to compile than Single Image Ads. But these ads provide an excellent opportunity to:

• To create a step-by-step illustration of how to use your product
• Tell a story about your brand in several images or videos
• Give a good sense of the essence of your promoted offer
• Lower your Instagram ads cost

Tip: When setting up Carousel Ads for Instagram, you don’t need to fill in the Description, See More URL and See More Display URL fields. These are only required for Facebook Carousel Ads.

Instagram carousel ad example

Instagram Carousel Ad specs:

• Caption: up to 125 characters
• Media type: image or video
• Recommended image/video resolution: min. 600 x 600 pixels, max. 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Image format: .jpg or .png
• Minimum number of cards: 2
• Maximum number of cards: 10
• Image ratio: 1:1
• Video aspect ratio: 1:1
• Minimum video length: 3 seconds
• Maximum video length: 60 seconds
• Video thumbnail image ratio: Should match the aspect ratio of your video. If not, thumbnail auto resize is available.

3. Instagram Video Ads

Video Ads let you introduce your offer with a video or GIF.

The video ads are a great way to explain how your product works or simply share a fun and engaging message about your brand.

Moreover, video ads’ moving nature helps to better catch people’s attention as they scroll their Instagram feeds.

In 2017, Facebook also added an update that allows advertisers to use GIF-format videos in their ads.

Example of an Instagram video ad

Instagram Video Ad specs:

• Caption: up to 125 characters
• Media type: video
• Recommended video resolution: 600 x 600 pixels (square) or 600 x 315 pixels (landscape)
• Aspect Ratio: 1:1 (square) or 1.9:1 (landscape)
• Minimum resolution: 600 x 600 pixels
• Maximum resolution: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Minimum length: 3 seconds
• Maximum length: 60 seconds
• Maximum size: 4GB
• Frame rate: 30fps max
• File type: .mp4 container
• Video: H.264 video compression, high profile preferred, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan
• Audio: Stereo AAC audio compression, 128kbps + preferred

4. Instagram Lead Ads

Instagram Lead Ads help to collect valuable information from prospects without leading them off the Instagram platform.

As someone clicks on your Lead Ad, they’ll be guided to a new page with a lead form that asks for their name and contact details (e.g. the person’s full name, email address, phone number, etc.)

Instagram lead ad after clicking

Important! When setting up Lead Ads, you’ll also need to include your company’s privacy policy (As you will be collecting user information).

Instagram Lead Ad specs:

• Caption: up to 125 characters
• Media type: image
• Recommended ad image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels or 1200 x 628 pixels (the typical Facebook ad image size)
• Image format: .jpg or .png
• Max. file size: 30 MB
• Other requirements: Privacy policy

5. Instagram Stories image ad

Since the launch of Instagram Stories in early 2017, the user base has grown considerably. Moreover, people appear to be highly engaged while watching the stories from their friends and family.

Now, brands also have a chance to appear in people’s Instagram Stories feed. You can create Image Stories Ads that contain up to six images to tell your brand’s story in a fun and engaging way.

To collect inspiration from the best Instagram advertisers in 2021, see this showcase of 40 Instagram Story Ad Examples.

Instagram Story ad example

Tip: To create Instagram Stories Ads, you’ll have to select “Stories” under the Placement section.

Instagram Story Ad specs:

• Caption: not currently available. Any text must be part of the image file
• Format: Full-screen vertical ad (9:16)
• Recommended Resolution: 1080 x 1920
• Minimum Resolution: 600 x 1067
• File types: .jpg or .png
• Max. image size: 30MB
• Photo content: visible for 5 seconds

6. Instagram Stories Video & Reels Ads

If you want your brand to really shine out among all its peers advertising on Instagram, you should create Instagram Stories Video Ads.

The Instagram Stories Video Ad format allows you to upload a video of up to 15 seconds in length.

It’s an amazingly engaging way of showcasing your product, building your brand’s personality, and engaging your audiences by reminding them of your offers.

Instagram Story video ad example

Instagram Stories Video Ad specs:

• Caption: not currently available. Any text must be part of the image file
• Format: Full-screen vertical ad (9:16)
• Recommended Resolution: 1080 x 1920
• Minimum Resolution: 600 x 1067
• File types: mp4 or .mov
• Max. video size: 4GB
• Max. video length: 15 seconds
• Recommended Video Codecs: h.264, VP8
• Recommended Audio Codecs: AAC, Vorbis

Remember that you can set up your Instagram ads in the Facebook Ads Manager. There is no Instagram-only tool for creating your ad campaigns.

I recommend that you test multiple Instagram ad types and sizes to uncover which ones are most liked by your Instagram target audience and bring the best results.

Safe zones: where not to put your text

Instagram Story and Reels ad placements overlay your creative with interface elements, and anything you place underneath them disappears.

Keep text, logos, and anything you need read out of roughly the top 250px
(profile bar) and bottom 340px (CTA and caption area). That leaves you about
1,330px of usable height on a 1920px canvas.

Design for the safe area, not to the full frame.

For feed carousels, the caption crops after roughly two lines on mobile, so
whatever matters goes in the first sentence.

Now, head on to the next chapter to learn about the top Instagram ad design and copywriting hacks.

The post Instagram Ad Specs & Sizes 2026: Feed, Story, Reels appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

All those campaign objectives, tens of targeting options, A/B testing features…

So what is the best way to structure your Facebook ad campaigns? What is the approach used by the top agencies and Facebook ad experts?

To be honest, some people who like to create tens of campaigns… And then there are the advertisers who believe that the opposite – having max 3 campaigns globally – works. 🤷

Personally, I am somewhere in between. I like to have campaigns split by countries, but I don’t like to set up a different campaign for every single niche audience.

As I figured this might be relevant to many advertisers, big and small, running Facebook ads, I’m going to share my approach.

You’ll find answers to the following questions:

• What is the best Meta ad campaign structure?
• How to select the right Campaign Objective for your campaign?
• On which events should you optimize your campaigns?
• Which target audiences to get started with and to experiment with?
• How to name your campaigns, ad sets, and ads for fast reporting?

So let’s take a look at how to set up your Facebook ad campaigns up for success.

What is a good Facebook ad campaign structure?

After working on Facebook ad campaign audits for 20+ brands while having weekly calls with Facebook reps, here are Facebook campaign structure best practices that deliver good results.

• Have fewer campaigns with broader audiences.
• Trust Facebook’s algorithms to do the targeting and optimization for you.
• Put a lot of emphasis on having good ad creatives.

One more thing that many PPC advertisers forget: You should not use the same campaign structure as you’ve used for Google ads on Facebook. It doesn’t work.

When it comes to Facebook ads, having fewer ad campaigns is not lazy, it’s smart.

Here’s the high-level Facebook ad campaign structure that I always use:

• Set up campaigns per country or region
• Create separate campaigns for prospecting and remarketing

You can also add brand awareness and re-engagement campaigns on top of prospecting and remarketing. The below chart by KlientBoost explains the 4 stages really well.

Create campaigns for multiple funnel stages. – Image source

Take a quick crash course in Facebook analytics by learning about these 15 Facebook ad metrics and KPIs.

Create a separate set of ad campaigns for each market

Why do I like splitting Facebook ad campaigns per country or region? There are a few reasons for that:

1. Countries have different ad costs. 

A click in the US might cost 5x as much as in say Lithuania. If you put these countries into the same campaign, Facebook is likely to spend 80% of ad budget in Lithuania as it seems like the cost-per-result is cheaper there.

2. The reporting and budgeting will be easier

Having separate campaigns per country will also make the reporting a lot easier – you can immediately see in which markets there’s a good product-market fit.

Also, you can easily define on campaign level how much money you want to spend on advertising in each country.

3. Your campaigns won’t get messy

If you add a lot of different countries to the same campaign, you can end up with a lot of different ad sets or ad designs. 

Especially if you want to use ads in local languages, it’s better to create a separate campaign for each market.

So how will the high-level campaign structure look like?

For each country, you should have the following Facebook ad campaigns:

• Prospecting campaigns
• Remarketing campaigns
• Brand awareness campaigns (optional, I don’t usually use them)
• Re-engagement campaigns (optional, I usually use them)

When it comes to the budget split, I usually go for:

• Prospecting campaigns: 60-80%
• Remarketing campaigns: 20-30%
• Brand awareness campaigns (optional, I don’t usually use them): 0-10%
• Re-engagement campaigns (optional, I usually use them): 0-10%

Let’s take a closer look at each of the campaign types and a few different ideas for setting them up.

Facebook prospecting campaigns’ structure

The prospecting campaign is a Facebook ad campaign that reaches a wide audience and attracts people who are potentially interested in your product. 

These people have not yet heard of your brand, so you’re trying to convert a cold audience into customers.

Usually, the prospecting-level ad creatives introduce your product’s benefits or show how great it looks. Like these two ads examples…

Prospecting-level Facebook ad examples.

If your product’s entry barrier is low, e.g. you’re promoting a free mobile app or run ads for your online store, prospecting campaigns will already bring a lot of new customers.

If your product has a longer sales cycle, e.g. software and B2B products, you can use prospecting ads to lead people to your website and convert them with remarketing campaigns.

Facebook campaign structure for prospecting ads

Here’s the general prospecting campaign structure that I always use.

• There are two ad sets: one with a broad audience and another with (1% or 5%) Lookalike audience.
• Both broad and lookalike ad sets have the exact same ad creatives inside them.

Sometimes, I add ad sets with special interest-based audiences (if I want to show these audiences special ad creatives that are more relevant to them).

And by “broad audience” I really mean BROAD. 🌍

For example, if I’m advertising a consumer-facing mobile app, I would target everyone aged from 18-55 in a specific country, optimize the campaign on in-app events, and let Facebook algorithms find the most relevant target audience for the ads.

The best ad campaign objective for prospecting campaigns is one that best reflects what you want to achieve:

• If you want to lead people to your website, use “Traffic” objective
• If you want people to complete an action, e.g. a purchase or mobile app install, use the “Conversions” objective

Suggested reading: Learn more about Facebook mobile app install ads.

Case study: Scheduled vs 24/7 ad delivery

Here’s one more proof that less optimization = better results.

We did a test with a client and the results were pretty staggering: a 300% difference in ROAS. 

💸 The country was the US, the product was SaaS, the test period was Mon-Thu of 2 consecutive test weeks.

WEEK 1: We used a Daily budget and didn’t use a custom ad delivery schedule.

WEEK 2: We used a Lifetime budget and scheduled ad delivery for Mon-Fri, 8am-6pm. (The total spent budget is higher as we spent more during the reported Mon-Thu period)

As you can see from the table below, the ads that were running daily with no restrictions delivered a higher ROI.

Key takeaways:

➟ Sometimes, high-ROAS conversions happen during non-business hours.

➟ It is better to keep Facebook ad campaigns targeting as broad and the ad delivery as unlimited as possible (use all placements, target entire countries + optimize on conversions)

We also ran the same test in other markets, the results were similar.

Keep your Facebook prospecting campaigns broad and don’t overdo with all the special optimization hacks you read in blogs. 😉

Facebook remarketing campaigns’ structure

The remarketing campaigns target people who have already visited your website or showed interest in some other way (e.g. watched a brand awareness video or downloaded an e-book). 

The goal of this campaign is to convert those lukewarm audiences into customers.

The ad creatives in your remarketing campaigns can be different from prospecting campaigns. Here, you should give people an extra incentive to complete the signup or purchase.

For example, Restream is offering a 20% discount from the subscription.

The most fool-proof remarketing audience that you can create for your Facebook ad campaigns is past 30 days website visitors.

Here are some other Facebook Custom Audiences you could include in remarketing campaigns:

• People who have watched 50% or more of your video ads
• People who have visited your Pricing page
• People who have started the signup process, but didn’t complete it
• People who have visited specific landing pages or blog articles (so that you can show them ads with a custom message around specific topics)

Personally, I like to create 1 remarketing campaign per country with a separate ad for every retargeting audience. This way, I can get a quick overview of how each audience performs.

Facebook campaign structure for remarketing ads

Here’s the general remarketing campaign structure I like to use:

Example Facebook remarketing campaign structure.

• There is one campaign per country: as I like to track per-country results from all campaigns (prospecting, remarketing, etc.) together
• All ad sets include the same ads or if you target special landing page visitors, that ad set’s creatives could be different

When setting up remarketing Facebook campaign, I usually go for “Conversions” campaign objective. Other options I sometimes use are “Traffic” and “Reach.”

Tip: The “Reach” objective is useful if you have a big remarketing or re-engagement audience and most people there would convert anyway.

In this case, there’s no point to optimize on conversions as Facebook would show your ads to people who would take action also without seeing the ad. To reach every target audience member, you can optimize the ad-set-level ad delivery to “Daily Unique Reach” – to that each audience member will see your ad once a day, regardless of how likely they are to convert. 💡

Remarketing ad campaigns’ frequency

Remarketing ad sets tend to be the most profitable ones. The ROI of a remarketing campaign can be 10x than that of a prospecting campaign.

So of course, you’d like to add more budget to remarketing campaigns. 🔥

Thing is, you only have a limited number of people in the remarketing audiences. And if you add too much budget to the campaign, the same people will see your ads over and over and over and over again.

At some point, you may reach the ad frequency of 10 points in a 14-day period. This means that on average, people in your remarketing audiences have seen your ads for 10 or more times.

And you know what? – This is fine.

When running Facebook remarketing campaigns for my clients, I usually see that a 14-day frequency of up to 15 points keeps delivering results at a positive ROI. It won’t drive up your Facebook ads cost.

You may bother some people, but in the end, showing more ads to your remarketing audiences pays off. There’s also more research to prove this point:

Meta ad campaign structure for brand awareness and re-engagement campaigns

I won’t stop on these two for long, as they’re both very similar to one of the campaign setups that we already covered.

Facebook brand awareness campaigns have a similar setup to prospecting campaigns. 

The main difference is the event that you optimize your campaign on + the results that you’ll measure.

For brand awareness campaigns, you could use the obvious “Brand Awareness” campaign objective, although options like “Traffic” and “Video Views” may deliver even better results, depending on your product and ad creatives.

Quite often, Facebook brand awareness ad creatives are videos. And you can target both a broad audience or your existing user base to remind them of your product.

For example, this Facebook ad by Oreo could be considered a brand awareness ad: It reminds you how much you love the 🍪 without directly leading you to an online store to buy it. (Although you may go to the grocery store to get it very soon) 🏃

When it comes to Facebook re-engagement campaigns, they’re targeted at your existing user base: to deliver a positive brand experience, educate them, or advertise special offers.

The campaign structure is very similar to remarketing campaigns: you will have one campaign per country and one ad set per each custom audience.

Potential target audiences for re-engagement campaigns:

• People who used your product/service/app, but haven’t done it for the past 30 days
• Past purchasers of your online store that haven’t made an order in the past 60 days
• People who were talking to your sales team 60+ days ago and didn’t make a purchase back them

For example, this Cos SALE ad could be shown to people who have bought during SALE in the past, but haven’t made a purchase in the previous 90 days.

5 best practices for improved Facebook ad campaign structure

Now that you’re aware of the basics, let’s cover 5 additional suggestions that help you improve your current Facebook ad structure or set up new campaigns from scratch.

1. Run the same campaigns and ad sets over a long period of time.

Instead of setting up a new Facebook ad campaign or adding new ad sets every time you want to add a new audience or ad creatives, edit the existing ones.

Using a single campaign over a long period of time is critical for Facebook’s algorithms to learn from the data. If you’re creating new campaigns every few weeks, you will lose out on this.

2. Less is more

Even if you have 20 amazing ideas for different target audiences or visuals, you will probably get better results if you keep the amount of assets lower.

The way I like to work with ad creatives is to always have 5-8 different ad creatives per ad set. And every time I add new ones, I pause some older ones that don’t perform as well.

3. Let Facebook’s algorithms do the work for you

There are 100+ Facebook ad hacks out there, some suggesting you to set a custom schedule, others showing how to leave out some ad placements.

More often than not, such hacks will actually decrease your results. That’s because you’ll be limiting your ads’ delivery without knowing if it actually helps. You’ll be better off using automated ad placements and 24/7 ad delivery and letting Facebook algorithms do the work for you.

However, for example, if I know that 80% of a company’s customers have a certain age or gender, I usually narrow down the target audience to reach a lower CPA.

4. Review your Facebook ad attribution window

Facebook attributes an action to your ad if someone viewed or clicked your ad and then took an action. 

By default, your Facebook ad account’s attribution window is set to 1-day view and 28-day click, which means that you see attributed actions that happened 1 day after someone viewed your ad and 28 days after someone clicked your ad.

To get a more accurate view of Facebook’s real contribution to your marketing results, change the attribution window smaller, to 1-day view and 7-day click.

Here’s how to do it: 

• Go to Facebook Ads Manager
• Navigate to Settings from the main menu
• Click “Edit” under Attribution
• Select your preferred Attribution Window

5. Name your Facebook campaigns in a systematic way

When your Facebook ad account has a complex international campaign structure, it will make your life a lot easier if all the campaigns and ad sets (and ads) are named by the same convention.

Here’s the framework I like to use:

Campaign level: Country-code_Campaign-type_Campaign-objective_Attribution-window. Example: US_Prospecting_Conversions_7days

Ad set level: Country-code_Audience_Delivery-optimization. Example1: US_20-55_Broad_Landing-page-views. Example 2: US_2%-Lookalike_Purchases

Ad set level: AD-number_Format_Content. Example: AD3_Static-image_20%-Discount-pink

Later on, you’ll be able to quickly filter out your Facebook campaigns based on the country, campaign objective, and edit the ads with the same number or content across ad sets on one go.

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Hope that you got some inspiration for improving your Facebook campaigns. 🙌 If you want to learn about more best practices, check out the Facebook ad size guide with all the top formats covered.

If you have more questions regarding Facebook ad campaign structure, reach out on LinkedIn.

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