Facebook and Meta Ads management
Organic reach on a business Page is somewhere around one or two per cent of your own followers, and no amount of posting fixes that. What does work is an account built properly underneath, enough creative to keep the auction fed, and someone reading the numbers who will tell you when the money would do more elsewhere. That is the whole job.
Everyone your age left Facebook and your audience did not. They are older, they have money, they read the comments and they buy things, and the reach in Reels and groups is still the cheapest attention on the internet. The work is turning that into something that pays rather than something that flatters. We take that end of it.
Three minutes, twelve questions, no email needed to see your score.
A perfectly good post, written by somebody who cared about it, published at the time the guide said.
Illustrative, and not far off. Ask your Page for its last thirty days and see.
What we run across Facebook and Meta
One platform, done properly, before anyone talks you into five.
Where we come in
They arrive in different words and they are usually the same problem underneath.
They arrive in different words and they are usually the same problem underneath.
Three posts a week, written properly, scheduled properly, and reaching a couple of hundred people out of thousands who chose to follow you. Nobody did anything wrong. The distribution was quietly withdrawn about ten years ago and nobody sent a letter.
Split by age, by gender, by interest, by county, because that is how it was done in 2018. Every one of them is starved, none of them ever leaves the learning phase, and the system never gets a clean enough signal to work out who buys from you.
Meta reports sixty-four conversions, your own system shows twenty-three, and the last agency explained it with the word attribution and changed the subject. Both numbers can be honest. Until somebody sits down and reconciles them you cannot spend confidently, so you spend timidly instead.
Fourteen thousand people, real conversations, questions answered at eleven at night, and a moderation load that has quietly become a second job. None of it is connected to anything that sends you money, which is a fixable problem and not a moral one.
Facebook is handing out enormous reach on Reels at the moment, largely to keep people watching there rather than somewhere else. Reach on its own is a number. Whether any of it walks anywhere is decided by things that happen after the video ends, and almost nobody has built those.
One automated review, one wrongly flagged post, one hacked admin account, and a decade of work is behind a support form with no telephone number. Everybody knows this and almost nobody has an email list, which is the only version of the audience you actually own.
The Feed Test
Nobody sees your ad next to other ads. They see it on a phone, in a feed, between people they know, and they decide in about half a second. Write something in the boxes below, pick a format, and the column on the right redraws exactly as it would appear, cut off in the same places. The ad in there now is a deliberately poor one so you can see the checks working.
0 of five checks clear. It is a checklist, not a prediction: nothing can tell you in advance what an auction will do with your ad.
Everything here happens in your browser. What you type is not stored, not sent and not seen by us.
Well that is the caravan finally back on the drive. Never again. Photos to follow when I have stopped shaking.
The description line, which Meta shows when it feels like it.
Does anyone know who did the block paving on Marsh Lane? Asking for a friend who has been quoted an eye watering amount.
The Meta Scorecard
It is the same set of questions we work through on a first call, so you may as well have the answers before you decide whether to book one. Nothing is sent anywhere while you answer, and you see your score without handing over an email address.
Four things, weighted evenly, because a weak one drags the other three down with it. An account can have beautiful creative and still fail on all four.
Your answers stay in your browser. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent and your score never leaves this page, so copy it out below if you want to keep it.
The Vision Note
What is actually working in search, paid and AI right now, written for people who have a business to run rather than a marketing degree to finish. Sign up and the guide below comes through straight away.
Four of the twelve workflows in it are the ones this page has been describing: turning one filmed hour into a month of Reels, generating enough ad variations that you can afford to reject most of them, reading a week of comments and Messenger down to the ones that need a person, and turning a Meta report into one page somebody will act on. They work the same whether an agency runs your account or you do.
No more than twice a month, from [email protected]. Unsubscribe in one click, and your address is handled as set out in our privacy notice.
What we do
Most people take the lot. Some take two or three because the rest is already covered, and that is a perfectly sensible way to buy it.
Pixel, Conversions API, domain verification, event priority, catalogue feed and clean access through Business Manager. Dull, invisible, and the reason everything above it either works or does not. We do this first on every account, including the ones that say it is already done.
Statics, video, carousels and Reels, produced in volume because the only reliable way to find a winner is to run enough things that one of them is. Shot vertical, captioned, and built to work with the sound off, which is how most of it will be seen.
Consolidated campaigns, budgets set where the system can actually use them, Advantage+ used where it earns its place and switched off where it does not. Tests that run long enough to mean something, and one person who knows why every line item exists.
The organic side kept alive because it is what people check before they buy, not because it drives traffic. Reels get real attention here since that is where the free reach currently sits, and a group gets built where there is a genuine reason for people to gather.
Lead forms, Messenger and WhatsApp, with the answers written and the replies fast, because a Facebook lead goes cold in about an hour. We will also tell you honestly if your own team cannot answer them quickly enough, because that is usually the real reason the ads look expensive.
One page a month: what we spent, what came back, what we are changing and what we need from you. Meta's numbers and your own numbers side by side, with the gap between them explained rather than buried.
Facebook and Instagram are bought through the same system and we run them together, but they are not the same audience and they should not get the same creative. If Instagram is the bigger half of your business, the Instagram page covers that side in the same detail.
AI and Meta
Meta advertising rewards volume more than almost anything else, which makes it one of the few places where AI genuinely changes the economics rather than just the vocabulary. It is very good at producing forty versions of something and hopeless at knowing which one is worth running, so a person still chooses. Our costs are lower than they were three years ago and this is most of the reason.
How we use AI across the agencyHooks, angles, headlines and openings generated in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. The value is in having enough to be genuinely picky, not in the machine happening to write the good one.
Sorted by whether they are a complaint, a question worth a real answer, or somebody asking the price. The ones that matter reach a human within minutes. The reply is written by that human.
The transcript finds the moments that stand alone, a person picks which of them actually do, and the edit follows. Clipping at random is how a Page ends up with forty Reels and no new customers.
We will not generate a testimonial or put a synthetic face in your ads. Where AI has made part of an image, it gets labelled, which is both Meta's rule and the right way round. A named person signs off everything before it runs.
How it runs
The first four weeks look different from the rest, because most of the value sits in the plumbing and the decisions rather than in the spending.
Every campaign you have run, the creative behind it, the events firing, the domain, the catalogue and the last agency's structure. We come back with what is broken underneath, what is merely inefficient, and what is already working and should be left alone.
Conversions API in, events prioritised, domain verified, access cleaned up. Then the first proper batch of creative, built from what you already have wherever possible, and a structure that gives the auction something to learn from.
New creative every week, losers killed, winners scaled slowly enough not to reset the learning, comments and enquiries answered. You see everything before it goes live and can veto anything, though most people stop looking by month two.
One page, twenty minutes, in plain English. What the money bought, which creative earned its place, where Meta's figures and your own disagree and by how much, and what we are changing because of it.
Monthly is the common one and it is not always the right one, and we will say so on the call.
Creators tend to start with the day and come back for the monthly once there is something being sold behind the audience.
An audit and a working session for teams who intend to keep running Meta themselves.
We run the account as an extension of your team, with one senior person named on it.
A fixed run with a start and a finish: a product launch, a sale, or a seasonal push done properly.
An audit, a content system and a plan for turning attention into income, built with you in one session.
We take the business end so you can stay on the part only you can do, which is being the reason people turn up.
A single campaign run properly, usually the one that matters considerably more than the rest.
Everything is quoted before anything starts, so you see the scope and the number on one page and decide from there. Ad budget is separate and stays on your own card, in your own account, where you can see it.
What we measure
Whether the budget is enough, whether the creative is the problem, whether the landing page is the problem. Four numbers settle most of it in about a minute, and the fourth one is the one nobody looks at.
Move the sliders to something close to your own account. The cost per thousand is what Meta charges you to be seen, the click-through rate is your creative, and the conversion rate is your website doing its job or failing to. Budget is the only one of the four you can change today, and it is almost never the one worth changing.
That budget buys 333,333 impressions and 3,333 clicks a month.
Against that audience it is a frequency of 0.8. Comfortable. Most people in that audience will not see you twice, which is a different problem: at this level you are buying reach rather than persuading anybody.
One extra point of click-through rate takes the cost per enquiry to £15.00. One extra point of landing page conversion takes it to £22.50.
Straight arithmetic, not a forecast. It assumes nothing about your product, your competition or the season, and it treats the audience as one clean pool, which no audience ever is. The point of it is the comparison at the bottom, not the numbers in the middle.
If we cannot show you the gap between what Meta claims and what your own system recorded, we have not finished the report.
An illustration of the monthly page rather than a real client's numbers. The order is the point: the thing at the top is the thing we are being paid to move.
Before you ask
You do, throughout. The Business Manager, the ad account, the Page and the Pixel all sit in your name and on your billing, and we work inside them as a named partner you can remove in one click. If an agency ever asks you to run inside theirs, understand what you are agreeing to: when you leave, the pixel data, the custom audiences and the learning stay with them. It happens constantly and it is the single most expensive mistake on this page.
No, and please do not, to anybody. Meta Business Manager exists precisely so that named people can be given the access they need without a login being shared. It takes about ten minutes to set up and you keep the ability to revoke it instantly.
Yes, but not for the reason most people think. Almost nobody will see it in a feed. What it does is answer the question a stranger asks after they see your advert, which is whether you are real, and a Page whose last post was in 2023 answers that badly. Treat organic as the shop window rather than the road, spend the effort on Reels where the reach genuinely still exists, and put the money behind the things that already earned attention.
Enough that the system gets a usable signal, which in practice means enough to produce somewhere near fifty conversions a week at your own cost per conversion. If that number is uncomfortable, the honest answer is to optimise for something cheaper and further up the funnel until the volume is there, not to spread a small budget across more campaigns. We would rather tell you that on the first call than take a retainer against a budget that cannot work.
The browser side of tracking has been degrading for years and it is not coming back. The answer is server side: the Conversions API sending the same events from your own systems, with proper event matching and deduplication, so Meta can still tell what worked. It is the single highest return job on most accounts we are handed and it is usually either missing or half installed. It is also why the two cost per sale lines in the report above will never match, and why we show both.
Almost certainly. Reels are currently where Facebook gives away reach, because it wants people watching there rather than elsewhere, and that will not last forever. Shoot vertical from the start rather than cropping something wide, burn the captions in, and judge them on whether anything downstream moved rather than on views alone.
Both, bought together, with different creative. They run through the same system and the same budget, which is why they belong with one supplier, but the audiences are not the same and the ad that works on one frequently dies on the other. Placement level reporting tells you which is carrying the account, usually within a fortnight. There is an Instagram page like this one if that is the half you care about.
Only where there is a real reason for people to gather that is not your product. A group built around a shared problem, a place, a hobby or a trade can become the most valuable thing you own on the platform, because it is the last corner of Facebook with genuine organic distribution. A group built around a brand is a ghost town within six weeks, and building one is a serious ongoing commitment rather than a campaign.
Assume a fortnight before anything is worth reading at all, because an ad set needs to leave the learning phase before its numbers mean anything, and roughly ninety days before you know whether the account works. Anyone who promises you a result in week one is either lucky or describing a number that does not survive contact with your accounts. We agree at the start what we expect to see by day ninety and review it against that honestly.
It depends on how much creative we are producing, whether Instagram and the community side are included, and how much fixing the foundations need, so we quote after the first call rather than putting a package price on a website. You get the scope and the number on one page before anything starts, and it does not change without you agreeing to it.
No. The scorecard and the feed test both run entirely in your browser, your answers are gone the moment you close the tab and your score is never sent to us at all. There is a button under your result that copies it out as text if you want to keep it. If you sign up for the guide further down the page, that is a separate thing and only your email address travels, to Brevo, which sends our email. It is all set out in the privacy notice.
Also worth a look
What happens when they arrive decides whether any of it was worth buying.
Book a call
Share your Ads Manager on the screen and we will go through it with you. You will leave with at least one thing worth changing this week, whether or not you ever hire us.
Book a call