Paid social can feel like a dark art, but when you run Ads alongside your organic social media strategy, it can offer huge return on spend and drive brand awareness.
As we near the end of Q3 with Black Friday and Christmas on the horizon, now is the perfect time to start thinking about how you can leverage paid social to boost your product ahead of the busiest retail period of the year!
So how do you make paid social a success? Follow these steps and give yourself the best chance of success for your product or service.
Are you actually “Ad Ready”?
This is arguably the most important step in the process, and without doubt the most important question to ask yourself before you get started. First and foremost, you must have evidence that your product or service sells organically. We’re not talking about huge numbers, just enough to know it solves a real problem or fulfils a need. Putting ad spend behind an unproven offer is a recipe for wasted budget.
In addition, it’s really important that you have an existing organic social media presence. Think of Ads as a tool to generate additional awareness that may have taken a huge time longer to get through the organic route. You still need organic socials to nurture your audience and push people further down the sales funnel. If someone clicks on your profile via one of your ads, what are they going to see? A dead page that looks like a company that might not even exist? Or vibrant, engaging content connects them further to your brand?
Finally, what does your conversion process look like? Great, you’ve got someone who has seen your ad and is highly motivated to convert (buy, give you their email address, download your app), what then? If they hit your website, is it a slick process to buy your product? Ideally you want this process to be as resistance free as possible.
Ads Manager
The Ads Manager interface can feel daunting, but it’s relatively simple to navigate once you understand its structure. While Meta frequently updates the platform without explicit notification, their comprehensive help pages are a great resource for navigating these changes.
Meta’s ads tutorials can be found here.
Budget
Contrary to popular belief, you do not need thousands to start running ads. You can run successful paid social campaigns on relatively frugal budgets, but it is important to manage your expectations. It’s also important to understand your CPA (Cost per Acquisition), if you’re selling cars, running a £100 a month ad campaign is highly unlikely to convert because your consideration period will be long and the CPA is high. So consider how much a customer may cost you to acquire; Meta say that they need around 50 conversion events in a 7 day window to fully optimise your ad and audience.
If this is your first time running ads, my recommendation is to start with a lower budget. Use the data to confirm you’re getting value for your spend, and once you start seeing success, you can confidently scale. Even if you don’t see immediate conversions, the heightened brand awareness is a worthy investment in itself.
Setting up your tracking
Ever look at an item of clothing on a website and then suddenly Instagram is pushing that exact garment back at you in ads? That’s an ad account that have got tracking set up well!
Tracking is vital to configure to ensure that meta can follow your buyers through their journey so they know who to target with your ads, and importantly who looks like a motivated buyer so they can be retargeted in the future and hopefully get them over the line!
The Pixel is the 101 tracking method, but it is very simplistic and in the age of privacy is fast becoming unreliable on browsers. That’s where the CAPI (Conversions API) comes in, it’s more complex to set up but then you can track many more user behaviours and give Meta far more information when it comes for who in your audience is ripe for retargeting!
If you are less technically savvy, then this is definitely something you’re going to want to seek help with configuring; it’s a mixture of web development skills and ad specialism to make sure that this part of the process is singing.
Building your Audience
Think of your buyer journey as a funnel, at the top of the funnel (TOF) where it’s widest is where your cold audience is. It’s a net that you spread wide and generate awareness for your product or service, this part of your audience are less inclined to buy immediately but are where you can begin to find motivated buyers to force them down the funnel.
At the bottom of your funnel is where your most motivated buyers are, this is where you want to start retargeting them with your ads and give them the gentle shove over the line to become converted customers.
It’s important to think about how you may introduce different ad creatives and Calls To Action (CTA) to different parts of your audience, you will also want to balance your budget through the different parts of the funnel, dedicating more spend to TOF where you can build as big a pool of potential buyers as possible, then at the BOF it’s about retargeting (without being annoying) until your buyers convert.
Meta now recommends their AI-based targeting system, Advantage+. My recommendation for successful paid social campaigns is to be as generic as possible when building your audiences, let your creatives do the talking. The Meta algorithm knows far more about its users than we ever could. By providing basic guardrails like location, you can let Meta do the hard work of finding your ideal customers.
Ad Creatives
Ad creative is one of the more difficult elements of the ad process, as there’s no single formula for success. The best strategy is to test, test, test. Build as many different variations of your ad as possible, using a mix of formats like carousels, Reels, pictures, and user-generated content.
Give Meta as many versions of your ad as possible and then let it use them and it will quickly feed back in the data which ones are having the most success and then you can begin to optimise over time. Do not get emotionally attached to what you perceive is a “good Ad”, if it isn’t converting then ditch it.
My advice would be to look at your competitors ads, see what is working for them, particularly if they’ve been running ads for some time. This will give you a clear indication of what your audience may be most likely to convert from. You can find all the ads your competitors are running in Meta Ads Library.
Need help building ad creatives – we got you!
The Data
The key here is once you’ve built your campaign, leave it alone for at least 2 weeks. You’ve given yourself the best chance of success here, so leave it alone unless something is drastically wrong. Let it give you feedback for what ads are performing best; Meta uses your ads and targets buyers, it begins to build a better picture of your audience and will feed back meaningful results that you can use to iterate your ads going forward.
A good ads manager will not just be looking at sales, they will be looking at leading indicators to optimise a campaign. There are many key metrics to review, a couple of examples are CTR (Click Through Rate) which demonstrates the % of users who look at your ad and then click through to your landing page, this demonstrates an ad creative is likely successful or CPC (Cost Per Click) which tells you how much it is costing you for each click on your ad, a high cost per click may mean you’re either in a competitive space or you need to review your audience and targeting.
I’m a data geek, so this is my favourite part of the process. For successful paid social it’s vital that you understand your numbers if you want to have, as they tell you exactly where to kill a failing ad and where to scale a success!
Our checklist will help you understand more about ad data, and how to optimise your ads.
In summary
The more I have written about ads, the more obvious it is to me that there is a lot to it. Successful paid social is definitely not a subject for 1 simple blog post! This blog however, will give you a broad understanding of what you’ll need to consider when building your ad campaign.
Alternatively, if you think this all sounds like too much and you’d like to speak to us about helping you get set up, email us on hello@socialetc.agency and we’ll do all the hard work for you!
Related Posts
Need-to-Know Social Media Updates: January 2026
The changes to the social media landscape through December, summarised for you!
Need-to-Know Social Media Updates: November 2025
The changes to the social media landscape through November, summarised for you!
Your essential guide to building excellent creative that converts
A definitive run through how to build excellent ad creatives and why they are…