Facebook advertising for businesses

Facebook and Instagram are the same system

Both run from Meta Ads Manager, often in the same campaign. You create the ads once, and Meta shows them in the Facebook feed, the Instagram feed, Stories and Reels, wherever they perform best. When we say “Facebook advertising” here, we mean both. The industry calls it Meta advertising.

What does Facebook advertising cost?

Meta has a minimum budget per ad set, but it’s low, a few dozen kroner a day depending on what you optimize for. The real minimum is the learning phase. Meta needs around 50 optimization events a week per ad set to learn who actually converts. Until that happens, results are unstable, and Ads Manager labels the ad set “Learning limited.”

Work backwards. If a lead costs NOK 200, one ad set needs around NOK 10,000 a week to reach 50 leads. That’s more than most small businesses spend. It doesn’t mean you can’t advertise on less, but you have to set it up differently (see the test setup below).

Before you set the budget, work out what a sale or a lead can afford to cost. The math is in What is a good ROAS?

The Boost button: what it does, and what it lacks

“Boost post” is the most common way into advertising on Facebook. Boost has gained more objectives in recent years, including website visits, messages and calls, so it’s not just about likes anymore. What Boost lacks is control:

• You get fewer options for audiences and exclusions than in Ads Manager.
• You can’t control placements (feed, Stories, Reels) the same way.
• Each boosted post is one ad, so you can’t test several variants against each other in the same ad set.
• You don’t get the same choices for what Meta should optimize for, such as a lead or a purchase recorded by the pixel.

Boost is fine when you want more followers and people nearby to see a post, for example an event. If the ads are supposed to bring in customers, set up a campaign in Ads Manager with an objective you can measure.

A realistic test setup for a small budget

You’ve probably heard you need to test lots of ads. That’s true, but the number has to match the budget. At NOK 100 a day, ten new ads a week each get almost nothing, and then you haven’t tested anything. Here’s how we would set it up on a small budget:

1. One ad set. The whole budget in one place, so the events aren’t split across several sets. That gives Meta the best chance to learn.
2. A broad audience within your area. Narrow by location and age if you need to, and let Meta find the people. Small, detailed audiences make the ads more expensive.
3. 3–5 ads at a time. Ideally different angles: a video of someone talking to the camera, an image of the result, an image with a price or offer.
4. Judge by cost per lead, not after a few days. Let an ad spend 2–3 times what a lead should cost before you judge it. Meta distributes the budget unevenly, and an ad that has barely had any impressions hasn’t been tested.
5. Replace the weakest one every two or three weeks. Keep the winners and add one or two new ones.

When the budget is big enough for several hundred conversions a month, you can test much more. For clients with the budget for it, we make 10+ new ads a week. At NOK 100 a day, it makes no sense.

Tracking first

Without a pixel and the Conversions API recording real leads and purchases, Meta optimizes for what it can see, like clicks and impressions. Set up tracking before you spend money, and choose an optimization goal that’s actually valuable to you. If you’re nowhere near 50 purchases a week, it may be right to optimize for an earlier step, like “add to cart” or “started form,” and then track what that brings in sales.

The content

Targeting matters less than it used to. Meta finds the people on its own if the ad is good enough, so it’s the content that decides. What works best for us is content that looks like what people otherwise see in their feed: a person talking straight to the camera, real photos of the work, on-screen text for people watching without sound. More about UGC. We’ve made more than 5,000 ads for our clients, including Badstugutta, Utvendig Renhold and a dental clinic in England.

Facebook advertising for local service businesses

Tradespeople, salons, clinics, gyms and repair shops get the most out of Facebook when three things are in place: a tight area (10–30 km around where you deliver, not the whole county), real content (photos and video of your work and your people, filmed on a phone) and a measurable goal (a form, a booking or a call, not likes). For services people actively search for, like move-out cleaning, plumbers or dentists, Google should be the first channel, with Facebook used for retargeting and for staying top of mind locally. For visual and planned services, like painting, a new bathroom or a sauna, Facebook can be the main channel. Clinics and aesthetics have their own rules: no before and after images. Industry by industry: marketing for service businesses.

Do it yourself or get help?

You can do everything above yourself, and on a small budget maybe you should for a while. If you’d rather spend your time on the business: this is what we do. We take a share of the value we create, not a fixed monthly fee, and we work with established businesses with a monthly ad budget of at least NOK 30,000. How it’s calculated.