Growth · Meta Ads
Facebook Ads agency for reaching customers before they start looking for you.
On Facebook and Instagram nobody is looking for what you sell. So the job isn’t to show up: it’s to make the right person stop, understand what you’re offering and take the next step. That depends on the ad, on who you put it in front of, and on what they find when they click.
- Facebook Ads
- Instagram Ads
- Lead generation
- Remarketing
- Ecommerce
Nobody asked to see any of these ads.
What the ad talks about
Who sees it
Doesn’t know you
Already saw your site
Abandoned your form
Their problem
What they want
Why you
Why now
What works decides what we show next.
The starting point
More reach doesn’t mean more customers.
Almost every account we review has good numbers. And still, nobody inside the company could tell you which part of the business came from there.
What Meta can get you quickly
ReachImpressionsClicksEngagementFollowersCommentsForm submissionsCheap leads
You could have all of this by next week.
What we’re actually after
Someone who wasn’t looking for you stops, understands what you sell and wants to talk to you.
The work of the campaign is everything in between.
Creative
Creative isn’t the packaging. It’s the filter.
Your ad isn’t competing against other ads: it’s competing against everything that person actually came to see. And the message you choose doesn’t only change what they see. It changes who stops, what they expect to find when they click, and what sort of enquiry ends up in front of your sales team.
The same offer, told four ways
Leads come in. Your sales team never calls half of them.
Fewer forms. More meetings worth having.
We’re after customers, not form fills.
Your customer isn’t looking for you yet.
Who stops
- Already spending and can’t tell what’s working
- Their sales team complains about lead quality
- Checks cost per lead every week
- Wants meetings, not form fills
- Was promised results that never came
- Doesn’t know this can be measured better
- About to launch something new
- Their customer doesn’t search for what they sell
- Gets visits that never come back
- Has been running the same ad for months
- Comparing agencies right now
- Hasn’t even thought about it yet
Changing the message doesn’t just change what people see. It changes who replies.
And whatever the ad promises, the page has to deliver: if it says one thing and the click lands on another, you’ve already paid for that click and the sale is lost right there. Which is why we try several ways of saying the same thing — creative angles, in the trade — because the one that works is almost never the one you expected. We write the copy and build the visuals ourselves; if a project needs video production, that gets contracted separately and we direct what each piece has to say.
What we do
What running Facebook and Instagram Ads involves.
Four areas — the four things a campaign’s results actually depend on.
Ads and messaging
What people see and read, and what makes them stop.- Different ways of telling the same offer (creative angles)
- Ad copy
- Visuals for Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads
- Several versions, compared against each other
- Different messages depending on how close they are to deciding
Campaigns and audiences
Who each ad is shown to, on what budget and at what point.- Account review and campaign structure
- Campaigns to reach new people (prospecting)
- Remarketing: going back to people who visited or left something half-done
- Custom audiences and lookalikes built from your own customers
- Traffic, lead generation, sales and awareness campaigns
- What the platform decides and what we decide
- Budget, and how to raise it without breaking what works
Where the click lands
The page or the form that receives whoever clicked.- Instant forms inside Facebook and Instagram, or your own landing page
- Making sure the page says what the ad promised
- Conversion work (CRO) on the pages already getting traffic
- Catalogue and product pages for ecommerce
Measurement and quality
Knowing what’s working, and whether the enquiries coming in are any good.- Pixel, events and conversion tracking set up properly
- What counts as a result, agreed before launch
- What an opportunity costs, and the quality of the contacts
- How often the same person sees the same ad, and when to change it
- A link with your forms, your CRM and your sales team
- Reporting to decide with, not to file away
A campaign is very quick to expose problems that aren’t in the campaign. When what’s failing is what happens after the click, we fix it inside the same project: Web design and Ecommerce. Without changing supplier, and without the budget paying for the same problem every month.
How we work
We don’t know which will work. So several go live.
A campaign doesn’t launch with one idea. It launches with several ways of telling the offer, each put in front of a different sort of person, and at the start they’re all worth the same. The work is finding out which ones actually work, as fast and as cheaply as possible.
At launch
Once the responses are in
What we try next
“Customers, not form fills”Comparing agenciesComes out of the one that’s working.
And none of this stands still. The ad that works today wears out — the same people see it again and again, with less effect each time — so new ideas have to keep coming in. A live campaign runs on new ads, not on one good one defended for six months.
What we decide
What’s on offer, which messages go out, which audiences we don’t want, how many versions run at once, what counts as a result and when something gets switched off.
What Meta decides
Which of those people sees it first, at what moment, in which spot on Facebook or Instagram, and how much it pays each time it shows it. It does that far faster than we could, and it only does it well if the frame is set properly.
No campaign launches knowing what will work. It launches knowing what we’ll be watching and what we’ll do with whatever comes back.
What counts as success
Meta looks for whatever we tell it to look for.
When a campaign launches you have to tell Meta what counts as success. Tell it a submitted form, and it will go and find more people who submit forms. And far more people fill in forms than ever turn into anything.
Forms that come in
Meta gets you plenty of these.
The ones worth having
Far fewer. And they’re the ones that matter to the business.
Diagram of the mechanism. Not data from any account.
A contact that costs little and that your sales team can’t do anything with ends up costing more than one that costs three times as much: same phone call, nothing at the end of it. What you have to compare isn’t the price of a contact, it’s what an opportunity costs and what it’s worth when it closes.
So, whenever it can be done, we feed back to Meta which contacts turned into something: with that, it goes looking for people like them rather than just people who fill in forms. It can’t always be done — it has to happen often enough, and somebody has to record it, in the CRM or in the sales team itself. When it can’t, we pick the closest result that still means something and filter earlier: in the ad, in the audience and in the questions on the form.
Meta doesn’t know who will make a good customer. It knows how to find more people like the ones we point at.
Before we start
Five things we make clear from the start.
- The ad account, the pixel and the data are yours. If we stop working together, they stay with you with all their history.
- Before launch we agree what counts as a result, and it goes in writing. Not decided afterwards, looking at whichever number came out best.
- You have access to the account and see exactly what we see, whenever you want. Not a summary at the end of the month.
- If the problem isn’t in the campaign but in the site, the offer or the sales follow-up, we tell you before raising the budget.
- Before there’s data from your own account we can give you estimates, and we give them for what they are: estimates, with their margin. Never as a promised result.
Fit
When Meta Ads makes sense for you.
- Your customer doesn’t go looking for what you sell, or looks too late, and you need to reach them earlier.
- You already spend on Facebook or Instagram, enquiries come in and nobody can tell you which of them were any good.
- You can produce new ads every so often: the ones that work do wear out.
- You get visits to your site that never come back, and right now you’re doing nothing to bring them back.
The sort of company we work with
- Service businesses
- B2B
- Ecommerce
- Training
- Healthcare
- Property
If there’s no room to make new ads now and then, or to let the campaign learn for a few weeks before judging it, Meta Ads isn’t the channel to start with. We’d rather say so than spend it.
Frequently asked questions
Before you put an ad in front of anyone.
Is Facebook Ads or Google Ads better for my business?
They aren’t competing for the same thing. On Google people are already looking for what they need and you have to be there. On Facebook and Instagram nobody is looking for you: they’re for getting known, for coming back to people who already visited, and for supporting decisions that take time. If your customer searches for you on their own and there is volume, Google is usually the first channel; if what you sell needs explaining, Meta usually pays off sooner. In plenty of companies they end up running side by side, with separate budgets so each one can be read.
How much budget do I need to start with Meta Ads?
There is no figure that works for everyone, and be wary of anyone who gives you one over the phone. It depends on the sector, on what it costs to reach your audience, and on how many results the campaign needs before it can learn. The useful question is a different one: what an opportunity is worth to your business and how many you need a month. With that, you can already say whether the channel makes sense and what to start with.
How long does a Meta Ads campaign take to work?
The first data arrives within days, and that is misleading: early on the campaign is still learning and it isn’t good enough to decide on. Stable performance comes once enough results have built up and several ads have been compared against each other, not once a deadline has passed. Which is why switching campaigns on and off every week usually delays the result rather than speeding it up.
Do you run lead generation, remarketing and ecommerce campaigns?
Yes, and each one is set up differently. In lead generation the challenge isn’t the number of forms, it’s that whoever fills them in matches what you sell. In remarketing the work is separating out who already knows you, what they did and how long ago, so you aren’t repeating the same cold ad at them. In ecommerce the catalogue, the product page and the relationship between ad, offer and buying experience all come into play. Usually several run together, with separate budgets so you can read what each one contributes.
Who makes the creative and the ads?
We do: the copy and the visuals are part of the result, not an extra. What we don’t do is video production — shoots, editing, creators; when a project needs it, that gets contracted separately and we direct what each piece has to say. If you already have a design team or material of your own, we work with it. What we do ask for is the ability to produce new ads every so often, because the ones that work get used up.
Who owns the ad account, the pixel and the data?
You do, always. Normally we work on the account and the pixel that already exist, because their history is worth money; if they have to be created, they are created in your company’s name and we come in with access. If we stop working together, the account, the pixel, the audiences and the history stay where they are and we hand the access back.
Can you guarantee a cost per lead or a return?
Guarantee it, no: the result depends on the auction, on the audience, on the offer and on what happens after the click, and none of those can be fixed in a contract. What we can do before starting is an estimate based on your average order value, your close rate and what is being paid in your sector right now, telling you what margin we are giving it with; it then gets revised as soon as the account has data of its own. What we do commit to is the judgement behind the decisions, and telling you straight when something isn’t working — even if the conclusion is that this channel isn’t for you.
Let’s talk
Tell us what you sell and who you want to reach.
You don’t need to bring ads or a campaign plan. With what you sell, who you sell it to and what you’re hoping for, we can tell you whether Meta is the channel to start with, what we’d do first and what would need sorting out before that. If the problem isn’t the advertising, we’ll tell you that too.