Smarter Facebook & Instagram ads

Start with the step-by-step guide to running a Facebook ad. It covers setting up a Meta Business account and ad account, choosing a campaign objective, setting the budget, audience and placements, and building the creative. Once your first campaign is live, the how-to and category guides help you sharpen what is already working.

No. You can start with a small daily budget and scale what works, but an ad set still needs enough budget to gather results and leave the learning phase before you judge it. The guides explain how to set a realistic budget and read the results before you spend more.

There is no fixed price. You set a daily or lifetime budget and pay per result in an auction, so your cost depends on your objective, audience, and creative. As reference points, the average cost per click ran near $0.70 in 2025 (WordStream) and CPMs commonly fell between about $8 and $16 (Gupta Media and Shopify); your own cost per result in Ads Manager is the only number that fits your account.

For most advertisers it is the creative, not the targeting. Meta now automates much of the audience and placement work through Advantage+, so the hook, the format, and how often you refresh your ads decide whether a campaign performs. The guides focus on improving exactly those levers.

Less than you used to. Meta’s Advantage+ delivery now handles much of the audience and placement work, so broad targeting paired with strong creative often beats narrow interest stacks. Feed the system clear signals through your creative and conversion data, and let it find the buyers.

It depends on the goal, and the only reliable answer is to test. Short vertical video tends to win attention in the feed and in Reels, carousels suit multi-product or step-by-step stories, and a single strong image is fast to produce and easy to iterate. Run a few formats against each other in the same ad set and let the results decide.

Plan for a learning period before you judge an ad. Meta’s delivery system needs roughly 50 optimization events within about 7 days to exit the learning phase and stabilize (Meta Business Help Center), and editing the audience, budget, or creative during that window restarts it. Give a new ad set that runway before deciding whether it works.