45M+
UK Facebook users
£500
Recommended min monthly spend
3-5x
Achievable ROAS with proper setup
£200
SKALR management from
Step 1 — Set up your Business Manager correctly
Before you run a single ad you need a Meta Business Manager account, a Facebook Page for your business, a Meta Pixel installed on your website, and Conversions API set up server-side. Most businesses skip the last two. Without proper tracking you cannot measure what is working, which means you are spending budget and guessing at the results. Get this right before you spend anything.
Step 2 — Choose the right campaign objective
Meta's campaign objective tells the algorithm what you want to achieve. For most UK businesses the right choice is Leads (if you want form submissions or calls) or Sales (if you want purchases on a website). Do not choose Traffic or Awareness — these optimise for clicks and reach, not for the actions that make you money. The algorithm will find the cheapest way to hit your objective, so choosing the wrong one is expensive.
Step 3 — Build your audience properly
Start with Advantage Plus Audience and let Meta's algorithm find your best customers. Add interest suggestions relevant to your business but do not over-restrict. The more constraints you add, the smaller the audience, the faster it fatigues, and the more expensive your ads become. Once you have 100 or more conversions tracked, build a Lookalike Audience from your best customers — this is usually the highest-performing audience type.
Step 4 — Create ads that stop the scroll
The most common reason Facebook Ads fail is weak creative. The first three seconds of a video or the first image in a carousel determines whether someone keeps scrolling or stops. Your creative needs a clear hook, a specific message, and an obvious call to action. Use real photos of your business, your product, or your team rather than stock images. Real content builds trust faster than polished advertising.
Step 5 — Set a realistic budget
Start with at least £500/month in ad spend. Set a daily budget and let it run consistently rather than turning campaigns on and off — every time you pause and restart a campaign it re-enters the learning phase. Meta needs 50 conversion events per week per ad set to optimise properly. At £500/month with an average cost per conversion of £20, you are generating 25 conversions per week — just below the threshold. Budget accordingly.
When to hand it over to a specialist
Running Facebook Ads yourself is possible. But the learning curve is steep, the cost of mistakes is real, and the time investment is significant. Most business owners who try to self-manage their Facebook Ads spend three to six months and thousands of pounds learning lessons that an experienced specialist has already worked through. If your time is worth more than £200/month, the maths of outsourcing is straightforward.
Questions
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