Meta Ads: your first campaign | Ascension Marketing

Advertising on Facebook and Instagram lets you reach the people most likely to become customers, with budgets that suit small businesses. But it is also very easy to spend money there with no results. Here is how to structure a first campaign that is clean, measurable and useful.

Before you start: three prerequisites

A clear objective: promote an opening, fill an event, get quote requests, sell a product.
A suitable landing page: the page you send visitors to must match the ad exactly and make them want to act. See our conversion levers.
Conversion tracking: the Meta pixel and, ideally, the Conversions API installed on your website, in line with cookie consent.

How a Meta campaign is structured

A campaign has three levels:

the campaign: you choose the objective (awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, sales…);
the ad set: you define the audience, placements, budget and schedule;
the ads: the images, videos and copy people will see.

Choose the objective that matches what you actually want. If you want quote requests, a “traffic” objective will bring clicks, not necessarily requests.

Define the audience

Three main approaches:

defined audience: location, age, interests. For a local business, a radius of a few kilometres around the venue is often relevant;
custom audiences: website visitors, people who interacted with your Instagram page, customer list (with consent);
lookalike audiences: people similar to your existing customers.

For a first campaign, keep it simple. Meta’s tools often find the right people themselves when the objective and conversion tracking are set up properly. Your buyer persona helps you choose the area and message.

Set a test budget

Start with a modest daily budget over a long enough period (at least one to two weeks) for the algorithm to learn. Avoid changing the campaign every day: each significant change restarts the learning phase. Decide in advance how much you are willing to pay for a result (a lead, a sale).

Create ads that stop the scroll

Native visuals: photos and videos that look like Instagram content rather than classic ads.
Vertical format for stories and Reels.
The first three seconds of a video must grab attention.
A simple message: one benefit, one proof, one call to action.
Several variants: two or three different visuals and texts to see what works.

Follow Meta’s advertising policies (no misleading promises, no references to the targeted person’s personal attributes).

Read the results

Look first at the metric linked to your objective: cost per lead, cost per purchase, return on ad spend. Clicks and reach are secondary. Then compare variants and keep the best. Add key figures to your marketing KPI dashboard.

Common mistakes

Using “Boost post” for everything, without a precise objective.
Sending traffic to the home page instead of a dedicated page.
Stopping a campaign after two days.
Not installing conversion tracking.
Targeting an audience that is too broad… or too narrow.

Frequently asked questions

What budget for a first campaign? It depends on your objective and area. What matters is having enough budget to get a few dozen results and draw conclusions.

Facebook or Instagram? Both are managed from the same ads manager. Often, let Meta distribute delivery across platforms, then analyse the results.