02/07/2025 • Ryan Hakeney
How to Optimise Your Meta Ads
Paid Social Article
TL;DR
- Structure your campaigns by objective
- Ruthlessly test your activity, and your assumptions
- Know your unit economics
- Consider your ideal customers typical journey to conversion
- Your landing pages need some love
- Make use of your partnered Meta resources
- Ensure your tracking is calibrated and optimised
- Integrations, integrations, integrations
“But my target market isn’t pensioners”
Facebook is still the most active social media platform when it comes to paid ad activity. With around 3.07 billion monthly active users (and roughly 2.11 billion logging on daily), and the 25–34 age group still making up the largest share according to recent stats, it remains a key channel for brands. Facebook offers a huge range of ad formats, making it a go-to tool for businesses of all sizes. And with over 10 million active advertisers all competing for attention, getting your ads optimised is essential – and there are plenty of different ways to do that.
Some businesses/advertisers claim their major target market isn’t present on Facebook. But whether you want to believe it or not, their attention is there to be captured somewhere across Meta’s landscape.
Whilst the initial setup of accounts takes a lot of best practice, I’m going to focus on optimising accounts that are already active. I want to share tips that will help you get the most out of a healthy account. Of course, abiding by Facebook’s advertising policies is going to support good performance, that goes without saying. But I want to focus on the processes we go through that support driving business growth. And hopefully in a format that you can take away to give you an advantage, too.
It’s all about incremental growth. At least 1% a week. But let’s start from the top.
Share it with friends
Takeaway tips
Structure is becoming an underappreciated factor for scaling
Ad campaigns can be structured in many different ways, by:
- Objective
- Target audience
- Product or service
- Stage of the funnel
- Location
- And more.
I would recommend you structure your campaigns by objective. Let’s say your business sold trampolines on its own ecommerce site. But it also had partnerships with leisure centres around the UK to regularly fulfil their needs. And finally, you have some stores in various counties across the country.
Your ad activity may cover lead generation for potential partners, conversions for local families within a 30-mile radius around Scarborough, as well as brand awareness activity and core sales to keep bringing new customers to your ecommerce site where you have the strongest margins. Then your ad account campaign structure would look something like this:
- Traffic_BrandAwareness
- LeadGen_Partnerships
- Conversion_StoreVisits
- Conversion_CoreEcom
Pro tip - naming conventions. They need to be simple, logical, and concise. I tend to try and position the naming conventions as “could a client open the account, and piece together what we’re doing for them?” If the answer to that is ever no, then it needs to change. And it’s not only for the client’s benefit either. When it comes to analysing data around which ads are performing and which business goals we’re supporting, naming conventions will save you so much time trying to filter it all down.
From there, your ad sets within each campaign would be separated by target audience, and your ads would be separated by format and angle.
For example, a boutique beauty and skin care brand is looking to drum up interest and a contact mailing list for a new product range launching right before Black Friday. This would have its own campaign, separated into different audiences at ad set level, with specific ads for each emotional trigger angle down at ad level. Following structuring rules, each would have unique naming conventions for analysis to easily decipher which audiences, angles and formats are working. Allowing you to scale what’s working, and bin off what is not.
“LeadGen_RetargetingKlaviyoList_Trust_6sVideo” = ‘CampaignGoal’_’AudienceType’_’Angle’_’Format’
Structure is more than turning Advantage+ Shopping on and hoping for the best. You need to be strategic with your setup. That doesn’t mean separating everything into itty bitty pieces, nor is it targeting broad with no other considerations. It means taking your overall objectives (STRATEGY) and applying a logical, best-practice approach to your structure, incorporating a sound use of data and creativity to fuel your targeting. I can’t teach you how to do that in a blog article.
And this is why Meta generally doesn’t work for people new to the platform. There’s a perception that it’s a matter of “turn on and print cash, because my audience is on the platform”. It’s just not that simple.
Ruthlessly test your activity
This is where those naming conventions come in handy.
Testing is the cornerstone of optimising your activity. It doesn’t necessarily matter how good your return on ad spend (ROAS) is, how low your cost per action (CPA) is compared to the industry benchmark, or how amazing your link click-through rate (CTR) is. If you think it couldn’t possibly be better, then you’re only doing yourself a disservice.
Put your assumptions to the test and pitch your copy in an A/B test against some copy written by a colleague, or better yet, a professional copywriter (luckily for me, we have one in-house). Have your creative colleagues whip up a new reel video asset and compare that to any existing video ads (just another brag - we have them in-house too). Have you been using the learn more call to action (CTA) button for the last 6 months? Maybe it’s time to try another option - SPLIT THAT TEST.
Never hold onto a feature of your activity like it’s your baby - it can always be set up better, and when a test surprises you and shows you your old idea was outdated, be ruthless. And get rid.
Know your unit economics
Now sometimes, this one can’t be helped. We’ve worked with many clients who haven’t given us margin data, and still supported them to drive year-on-year growth with Meta as a significant part of their channel mix.
But, you can be a lot more aggressive and dynamic with your spend and targets if you know the true profitability of your ROAS.
If you know how much life time value (LTV) can be generated across all channels when Meta is driving breakeven new customers every week, then ROAS becomes a metric just as important as engagement rate, or CPC. It’s important, but when you can measure PROFIT, then ROAS becomes less important.
All of these factors come down to understanding all of the costs that cut off your revenue before ad spend comes into play.
The more ecommerce clients we’ve worked with who can give us this data, the more clarity we have on whether they can:
- Afford to spend on conversions (the foundational decision associated with paid media), and
- Get aggressive enough to invest in regular ad creative, and spend enough to claim a big enough click share in their industry to scoop up a chunk of the demand.
So that’s something you should be working into your plans too. Knowing that product A sells for £80 but only has £6 profit per unit sold, whereas product B sells for £30, but has £6 profit per unit, and leads to a second purchase within 6 months twice more often than product A. You can only stand to gain from knowing that information to get your activity singing.
Consider your ideal customers' typical journey to conversion
When building out your ad account and strategising your activity, be sure to consider the entire marketing “funnel”. Now, I have put “funnel” in quotation marks not to mock the idea like a marketing hipster, but because I wouldn’t personally consider the funnel as some black-and-white process of every user going from an awareness stage, to consideration, to conversion.
Instead, I like to consider these as guidelines for frames of mind that users consuming your ads can be in. In actuality, there is nothing simple about the way the user journey works. It is considered rare, especially for any item or service of significant value, that a user journey skips down the yellow brick road from awareness, to consideration, to purchase.
And if you want to learn more about this, I strongly encourage you to go and watch SEO thought leader Ash Liddell’s talk on ‘Search Everywhere’ from Power Hour 6 over on YouTube.
So for optimising your ad account activity, make sure you reflect a somewhat typical buyer journey, unique to your business in how your activity is built. Have some activity optimised for traffic to site to cultivate some brand awareness in your category, other activity optimised for conversions for those in the consideration phase where you look to educate them on why you’re the right option for them, and then more conversion activity optimised to capture those who are READY to convert. Remarketing activity that gets them over the line - discounts, promotions, social proofing, you know the score.
And poetically woven between all of these “stages” should be emotion. Whichever emotions are important to your target consumer at that “stage” of their journey, include them in your ads. If you don’t know what emotion is important, research it. Once researched, test it. Once tested, double-down on what’s working.
We’re currently rustling up a study on how important emotion is to ad performance. Bottom line, it’s significantly important to consider emotion. More on that another day.
And for the love of all that is holy, use exclusions to make sure you’re not serving ads designed for people who have never heard of you to your most loyal customers. The same goes vice versa. Don’t serve ads to people who have never heard of you as if everyone knows your name. You’re not Billy Ocean and you never will be. Be respectful of the users’ time and attention.
Your landing pages need some love
Now this is another topic that was hammered home at Power Hour 8 - by one of our own no less, Andy Lowdon, Strategy Director @ 43CN - and the full talk is available on YouTube.
You can structure your activity in an ideal way, have your Meta Marketing Pro on speed dial, and create the most ambient reels the world has ever seen. But, if you’re sending ecommerce traffic to a landing page that takes 25 seconds to load, 20 full-screen swipes before they see a CTA, and 15 clicks to complete their checkout, you’ve got no chance of long-term success or scalable activity.
For any activity looking to accomplish a goal - a long-winded way of saying all activity ever - you need a landing page that loads quickly, is optimised for mobile traffic (the primary device for social users), and considers what the user wants and how many steps you’re going to ask them to take to get it. For traffic activity and brand awareness, you want a landing page that educates the individual on who you (or your client) are, memorably.
For conversion activity, a landing page that efficiently sells the product/service, both in terms of making the user want to buy, and the actual process of converting. You can use custom landing pages for this sort of thing if it doesn’t exist on the website already, but we’re leaving the realms of ad optimisations there.
Landing pages are seriously slept on by marketers and businesses using paid social channels. If you want to learn more, seriously get that YouTube video above on your watchlist. (We’ve linked it again for good measure).
Make use of your partnered Meta resources
Look, I know the random calls can be irritating, and you feel like they just want you to spend more. But within there, there’s an opportunity to collaborate with someone.
Between regularly changing trends in what audiences want to see, a never-ending stream of competition, and funky events management, it’s a big job. But, a super underutilised part of Meta ads is the Meta Pro Team.
Connect with a Marketing Pro to get custom strategies and recommendations based on your goals (the more cooperative you are, the better support you tend to get; otherwise, you run the risk of them having to give you super general recommendations).
Tap up a Technical Pro to support with optimising and calibrating the headache that is tracking.
Having issues with your account or policies? Support Pros are on hand to troubleshoot and unblock you fast.
Bottom line - if you are after squeezing more success from Facebook but find yourself a bit stuck, get in touch with the Pro Team. #notanad
Or an agency. 👀
Ensure your tracking is calibrated and optimised
The easiest way to do this is to revert back to the previous point - use your Meta Marketing Pro. They can put you in touch with Meta technicians who can support you with Conversions API, creating custom conversions, and making sure the code is set up as it should be - the whole process of Meta tracking, they get it better than many of us ever could. Don’t waste your time.
Integrations, integrations, integrations
Since third-party cookies have gone the way of the dodo, integrations have become essential to how Meta Ads work. Without them, you're swimming upstream compared to those using Shopify, WooCommerce, and the like.
It’s harder than ever to find your ideal customer without exceptional ad creatives — which takes time, talent, and budget. Integrations bridge that gap. They give your Meta account a direct line into your backend data — whether that’s Klaviyo, Shopify, GA4, HubSpot, whatever — so Meta can keep learning who your customers are, what they do, and what they might want next.
That means sharper new customer targeting. Smarter retargeting. Better campaign performance over time. You don’t rely on Meta's guesswork — you give it real feedback. The CAPI (Conversions API) should be your baseline here, but anything that helps Meta see the user journey beyond the click is going to pay off. This is especially true post-iOS14. Integrations help you maintain signal quality, find high-intent users again, and stay top of mind when they’re ready to buy.
In short, integrations don’t just support your ad performance — they unlock it. Don’t skimp on them. Don’t sleep on them. And if you’re serious about building a profitable Meta funnel, make sure your tech stack is playing nice with your ad account.
And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, EXCLUSIONS. Integrations unlock these pots of data that help you exclude properly. You can’t just name a campaign “New Customer Conversions” and expect Meta to never serve people who already know who you are. You need to exclude purchasers, mailing list loyalists, and your nan’s IP address. Get it all gone if you’re expecting to find real new customers.
Conclusion
So, there you have it: a wee guide to getting the most out of your Meta ads. Are there other things you could do which would drive growth? You bet. But this is a good start for some foundational optimisations we generally see making a big impact in the first month or so with new clients. Strategy, structure, and serious attention to detail involved — not to mention creative, which deserves a whole blog in itself.
If you’re feeling stuck on what your next move should be, or you’re just starting and want to avoid the common pitfalls, give us a shout. Or dive deeper into our paid social services to see how we can help you turn your Meta ad account into a finely tuned, growth-driving machine.
Share it with friends
SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER
Once a month, every month
A monthly round up of our expert insights, tips and careers - straight to your inbox.
43 Clicks North will use this information to be in touch and to provide updates and marketing. Please see our privacy policy.