Here at Whole Whale, we’ve run quite a few Meta ad campaigns. For this article, we put together 9 of our favorite strategies to help you be successful with your next advertising campaign.
Tip 1: Know Your Objectives
Without defined campaign goals, it’s hard to measure progress or return on investment. By aligning every decision with specific objectives, organizations can focus their resources more efficiently and ensure that their marketing efforts support broader organization goals.
Knowing your objectives is also important to structuring your campaigns. In ad manager, objectives are set at the campaign level, and only one objective per campaign is allowed. This means that if you have multiple objectives, you need to split your campaigns into their own campaigns. Meta has a handy list of objectives you can use to determine your goals. Some common objectives include traffic and lead acquisition.
Tip 2: Know Your Audience
Understanding your audience is essential to effective marketing because it allows you to tailor your message, tone, and strategy to resonate with the people most likely to engage with your brand. When you know your audience’s values, needs, and challenges, you can create campaigns that speak directly to their interests and pain points. This not only increases the chances of capturing their attention but also builds trust and loyalty over time. Without this insight, marketing efforts can feel generic or irrelevant, wasting resources and missing opportunities to connect meaningfully with potential supporters.
One of Meta’s strengths is its granular audience targeting options. Before you dive into ad manager, you will want to do research on which audience options offered in Meta are relevant to your campaign. Meta provides basic demographic targeting, like geography, age, and gender, but it also offers remarketing (people who have visited your Facebook page, Instagram page, or website), Lookalikes (users who are similar to the users who have engaged with your site or profile in the past), and Interests + Behaviors based psychographic targeting.
The image below is an example of the research we would do if we were trying to reach people who care about the environment. We would come up with keywords relevant to our audiences, type it in Meta’s detailed targeting search box to see what targeting options exist, then pick the most relevant ones.
Check out Whole Whale’s guide to targeting while you are planning your ad sets to help you determine your different audiences.
Tip 3: Use Clear and Concise Messaging with a CTA
The less friction your ad creates, the more people will engage with it. On social media, you are competing with every other influencer, entertainer, advertiser, etc. on your audiences’ feeds for their attention. With so many options, users will decide whether or not to engage with your ad within a few seconds. If your ad is confusing or too long, users will simply scroll past it to watch content with immediate payoff. Using clear and concise messaging gives your ad a fighting chance to capture users’ attention.
Another best practice is to include a direct call to action (CTA) in your ad copy to guide your audience toward the desired action you want them to take. For example, if you’re promoting a webinar, your call to action might be “sign up for the webinar”. You can also add an incentive for people to take action, like “download the free 2025 social media report”. Your call to action should connect back to your campaign and organization objective to push your goals forward. Having a call to action also builds trust on what a user can expect next once they interact with your ad.
Tip 4: Organize Your Strategy
Now that you have your objectives, audiences, and clear messaging with a call to action, it’s time to organize your strategy and campaign structure in one place. Meta can be divided into 3 nested levels: Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. Ads are nested in Ad Sets. Ad Sets are nested in Campaigns. Therefore, Campaigns are the broadest level that contain Ad Sets and Ads.
Campaigns: This is where you will set your campaign objective.
Ad Sets: This is where you will define your target audience. Each target audience segment should have their own ad set with their own targeting. By separating audiences in separate ad sets, you can determine the performance of different audiences, then optimize your campaigns for the best performing audiences.
Ads: This is where you set your copy and creative. You want to have a few different ads to test which messaging resonates most with your audience.
Tip 5: Use Dynamic UTM Tagging
Once you have your ad plan set, the next step is to make sure all of your ads are UTM tagged. A UTM tag is a code added to the end of your ad’s landing page url to help Meta pass information to Google Analytics about where the user clicked from. Some information that gets passed includes:
Source: Platform the user came from, like Google, Meta, Email Newsletter.
Medium: What type of marketing the user came from, like email, social, SMS, CPC.
Campaign: The ad campaign a user came from.
Content: An optional parameter that can be used to differentiate similar content within the same campaign, like “image_ad” or “text_ad”. We recommend using it to track which ad a user came from.
Term: An optional parameter that can be used to identify keywords in paid search campaigns, or audiences in paid social campaigns. We recommend using it to track which ad set a user came from.
By UTM tagging all your links, you’ll be able to track on-site user behavior by campaign, ad set, and ad level. This will allow you to determine which campaign, ad set, or ad is performing best for your desired digital outcomes and optimize your campaign. If you need to, you can build your UTM tagged URLs manually with Google UTM builder, or our custom UTM builder spreadsheet.
Tip 6: Customize Your Reporting
You’ve built your campaign according to your spend planner and created trackable links. Before you set your ads loose, you’ll want to set up Meta’s custom columns to monitor the information most important to you, whether it’s clickthrough rate (CTR), reach, frequency, cost per click (CPC), or otherwise.
Because you built those UTM links, you can also track what the people from your ads do on your site. See our GA4 course to learn all about customizing reports to see on-site actions.
Tip 7: Establish a Moderator
Sometimes we’ll run ad campaigns that have 13 ad sets with 4 ads in each one. That means, at any time, we could have 52 ads with users making comments that we should be keeping an eye on. Even if you only have a few ads running, regular moderation gives you a chance to engage with your audience and, if needed, address questions or misinformation that might crop up.
To see ad comments:
- Navigate to the ad.
- Hover on the ad name. Small grey text will appear below the name. Click edit.
- Go to ad preview.
- Click the arrow in the top right corner.
- Click Facebook Post with Comments or Instagram Post with Comments.
Getting a lot of confused or angry comments? Here is a guide to handling negative comments. This could also be a sign that your targeting is off. Take a second look at your targeting and see if you are truly targeting an audience that is right for what you are advertising. If not, adjust accordingly.
Tip 8: Make Small Changes One at a Time
When an ad set is delivering ads, Meta is continuously optimizing your spend to find users within your targeting that meet your objective. Because of that, making any changes to an ad set can throw Meta’s algorithm off and impact the efficiency of your spend.
If you want to make tweaks to your settings, first wait to make sure the algorithm is out of its learning phase (when Meta is learning which users connect best with your campaign). Then, test small changes, ideally one at a time. Making small changes avoids drastic performance fluctuations. Making changes one at a time helps you determine which change caused what outcome.
Tip 9: Dig Deep into the Metrics
One reason why we set our own custom columns in Meta’s reporting view is because, by default, they might not be showing us the most relevant metrics. In particular, if we are running a campaign with a video view objective, Meta shows 3 second views by default. Considering the fact that some of those views could be people simply scrolling slowly past the video, it’s not necessarily the best metric. Within the custom columns, there are some stronger metrics, such as thruplays (15 second video views), that will help you get a better idea of how your campaign is truly performing.
The benefit of digital advertising is the granular tracking it offers at every step of the way. Take full advantage of this and get busy analyzing your user’s journey! Identify any trends or patterns you are seeing within your data numbers. Make an educated guess as to why the trend is happening. Test your hypothesis. See if it improves campaign performance. Continue repeating this process to optimize your campaigns.
If you follow these 9 tips, you’ll be better prepared to run an effective and data-informed advertising campaign with Meta.
More Resources
Want to learn more? Find your next course at Whole Whale University. We’ve compiled years of knowledge and learning in the social impact sector to create the best courses, webinars, and templates for nonprofits.
And remember, we have a lot of free advertising resources on our site too.