45M+
UK Facebook users
£500
Recommended min monthly spend
3-5x
Achievable ROAS with proper setup
£200
SKALR management from
Before you spend anything, get the tracking right
The single most important thing you can do before running a Facebook ad is set up your tracking properly. This means installing Meta Pixel on your website and setting up Conversions API server-side. Most businesses skip the second part. Without both in place, Meta only sees a fraction of the conversions your ads are actually generating, which means the algorithm is optimising on incomplete data. You end up paying more per result than you should, and when you try to read your results in Ads Manager, the numbers are wrong. Set up tracking first. Everything else can be adjusted once campaigns are running, but bad data from week one follows you throughout the campaign.
What you need before your first campaign goes live
You need a Meta Business Manager account, a Facebook Page for your business, a Meta Pixel installed on your website, Conversions API configured server-side, and a payment method added to your ad account. If you have a website on Shopify, Wix, or WordPress there are native integrations that make the Pixel and CAPI setup simpler. If your site is custom built you will need developer access. None of this takes more than a few hours to set up properly, but skipping any part of it creates problems later.
Choosing the right campaign objective
When you create a campaign in Meta Ads Manager the first decision is your objective. This tells the algorithm what you want it to optimise for. For most UK businesses selling a service, the right objective is Leads. For e-commerce businesses selling products online, it is Sales. Do not choose Traffic or Awareness unless you specifically need reach or clicks and have no interest in tracking leads or purchases. Meta will find the cheapest way to hit whatever objective you choose — if you choose Traffic, it will find people who click on things without buying anything. Choose the objective that matches the actual result you need.
How to set up your audience
Start with Advantage Plus Audience and let Meta find your customers from a broad starting point. Add interest signals relevant to your business but resist the urge to over-restrict. The more layers you add, the smaller the audience, and smaller audiences fatigue faster and cost more per impression. A broad audience with strong creative almost always outperforms a narrow audience with average creative. Once you have at least 100 tracked conversions, you can build a Lookalike Audience based on your best customers — this tends to be the best-performing audience type once you have enough data behind it.
What makes an ad actually work
The creative is the variable that makes the biggest difference to your results. The first three seconds of a video, or the first frame of a static image, determines whether someone stops scrolling or keeps going. Your ad needs a hook that is specific and relevant to the person seeing it, a clear explanation of what you offer, and one obvious next step. Real photography and video from your business almost always outperforms polished stock imagery. People can tell the difference, and real content builds trust faster. Test at least three different creative approaches from the start and let the data tell you what to keep.
How to set your budget and what to expect
Start with at least £500 per month in ad spend and set a consistent daily budget rather than turning campaigns on and off. Every time you pause a campaign and restart it, the algorithm goes back into the learning phase and your results reset. Meta needs roughly 50 conversion events per week per ad set to optimise properly. At £500 per month with an average cost per conversion of £20, you are generating around 25 conversions per week — just below the ideal threshold. If your budget allows it, starting at £800 to £1,000 per month puts you in a better position to hit that optimisation target sooner.
How to read your results properly
The metrics that matter depend on what you are trying to achieve. For lead generation, focus on cost per lead and lead quality. For e-commerce, focus on cost per purchase and return on ad spend. Impressions, reach, and page likes are not indicators of whether your ads are working — they just tell you how many people saw them. In the first two to four weeks, results will fluctuate while the algorithm is learning. Do not make big changes during this period. After four weeks you have enough data to make meaningful decisions about what to keep, what to cut, and where to put more budget.
When it makes sense to hand it to someone else
Running Facebook Ads yourself is genuinely possible, and plenty of business owners do it well. But the learning curve takes time, the cost of getting things wrong is real, and keeping up with how the platform changes is a job in itself. Most business owners who try to self-manage spend three to six months and a significant amount of money working through the lessons that an experienced specialist has already been through. At £200 per month for full management, the question for most businesses is whether their time and the cost of trial and error adds up to more than that. For most, it does.
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