At the end of Q4 2025, Meta reported 3.58 billion average daily users, demonstrating the vast potential of advertising on its platforms. Meta campaigns can reach broad audiences, improve brand visibility and drive sales and leads.
What is Meta Ads?
Meta Ads is Meta’s paid advertising platform that allows brands and companies to run ads across its ecosystem, including on apps like Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger.
There are a variety of different advertisement ad formats and placements, allowing for a highly customisable advertising experience. Additionally, due to Meta’s extensive advertising features, it is relatively simple to set up a campaign. Understanding the different types of ads is the first step toward reaching your business goals.
Types of Ads on Meta
Photo Ads
Image ads are great for promotions and traffic campaigns. They are typically placed in Instagram and Facebook feeds.
Video Ads
Video ads are useful for delivering a message or telling a story about your brand or service. They are usually placed in feeds, Stories, or Reels.
Carousel Ads
Carousel ads display multiple images within a single ad, similar to a slide show. They are placed on Instagram and Facebook feeds and Stories.
Collection Ads
Collection ads are ideal for e-commerce business. They provide users with a description, product image, and pricing information.
Targeting on Meta Ads
One of the benefits of advertising on Meta is access to its extensive targeting features, which allow you to decide exactly who sees your ads.
Targeting and audiences are usually split up based on gender, interests, or geographic location.
Once your campaign launches, Meta’s algorithm analyses performance and automatically prioritises the audiences most likely to engage, helping you reach the right people more effectively.
How to Use Targeting with Meta
To begin targeting, you need to define your target audience. A useful approach is identifying shared traits among your current customer base – it could be anything from demographic aspects to interests.
When you enter your audience, Meta will indicate whether your audience is too narrow or too broad. A common tip is to start with a fairly broad audience so that Meta’s algorithm can learn which audience performs best and so that you can refine and narrow your audience with time.
Once you have enough information and know what works well you can start segmenting your audience.
How Much do Meta Ads cost?
The cost of Meta Ads varies depending on several factors, including your goals and your target audience.
Ad Quality
Meta’s algorithm prioritises ads that it deems relevant to users, meaning ad quality directly impacts cost. Producing ads that are highly relevant to your target audience can keep your ad prices down.
Bidding
Meta offers three bidding strategies that you can pick based on your campaign goals.
- Spend-based: when you choose spend-based bidding you are able to enter a set budget for your campaign, optimising either for the lowest cost per conversion or higher-value conversions.
- Goal-based: goal-based bidding involves setting a target conversion rate and allowing the algorithm to allocate your ad-spend based on that. You are still able to set a budget cap.
- Manual: manual bidding overrides the dynamic bidding algorithms, allowing you to manually place bids.
Campaign Goals
Depending on your campaign goals, the price of advertising on Meta varies. There are a number of different objectives to choose from, each with different levels of competition and pricing: awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion and sales.
What is Advantage+?
Advantage+ is a suite of AI advertising features that Meta offers. They help optimise your campaigns based on real-time data and automates features like targeting, placements, and budget allocation with the aim of delivering better results. Using Advantage+ can save you time, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business.
Are you wanting to get more out of your Meta Ads? Reach out to us and we’ll help you optimise your ad accounts.
