FAQs

Meta is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, so "Meta ads" means adverts running across those platforms, bought and managed through Meta's own advertising system (Ads Manager). One campaign can run on either platform, both together, or split across specific placements.

They're run through the exact same system and often the exact same campaign - you're not choosing one platform over the other so much as choosing which placements to include. Instagram tends to suit more visual, story-driven content; Facebook often has a slightly older, broader audience. For books, we typically run on both, since readers show up on each.

Placements are the specific spots an ad can appear.These can be Instagram Feed, Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels, Facebook Feed, Facebook Stories, and others (like Messenger or the Audience Network, which shows ads on other apps/websites). We can let Meta automatically choose the best-performing placements, or manually select specific ones if we want more control.

Think of it as three layers: the campaign sets the overall objective (e.g. sales, traffic, awareness); the ad set sits inside it and defines who you're targeting, your budget, and schedule; the ad is the actual creative - the video, image, and copy someone sees. One campaign can contain several ad sets, and each ad set can contain several ads being tested against each other.

The objective tells Meta what outcome you want the ads optimised for - sales, traffic to a website, video views, or engagement. Meta's delivery algorithm shows the ad to people it predicts are most likely to take that specific action, so choosing the right objective genuinely changes who sees the ad, not just how it's measured.

Meta's newer automated tools (like Advantage+ placements or Advantage+ audience) let the algorithm make more of the targeting and placement decisions itself, based on machine learning across all its ad data, rather than us manually specifying every setting. It often performs well with less manual tweaking, though it gives us less granular control and transparency over exactly who's being shown the ad.

The learning phase is the time period right after you launch a new ad (or make a significant change to one) where Meta's delivery system is still gathering data to figure out who to show it to for the best results. During this time, performance is often less stable, so costs can be higher and results more inconsistent, all because the algorithm hasn't yet learned the optimal audience and delivery pattern.This can take anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days depending on budget and audience size. Smaller budgets or niche audiences often take longer to exit learning phase.

The percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked it. Calculated as clicks ÷ impressions. A higher CTR generally means the ad is resonating enough to get people to act, though it doesn't tell you what happens after the click.

How much, on average, each click on your ad costs. Calculated as total spend ÷ total clicks. Lower is generally better, though it needs to be read alongside CTR and conversions - a very cheap click that never converts isn't actually good value.

The cost to reach 1,000 impressions (views), regardless of clicks. Calculated as (spend ÷ impressions) × 1,000. This reflects how expensive it currently is to reach your audience. It can be affected by competition for ad space, audience size, and time of year, rather than how well the ad itself is performing.

Reach is the number of unique people who saw your ad. Impressions is the total number of times it was shown, including repeat views to the same person. If reach is 1,000 and impressions are 1,500, that means some people saw it more than once.

The average number of times each person has seen your ad. It is calculated as impressions ÷ reach. A frequency creeping up over time (especially past 3-4) can signal an audience is becoming "tired" of the ad, which is often when engagement starts to drop and cost per result starts to rise.

Revenue generated for every pound spent on ads, shown as a ratio (e.g. 4x means £4 back for every £1 spent). Useful for judging overall efficiency, though for book campaigns it can be incomplete on its own, since a single low-priced ebook sale (like 99p) produces a very different ROAS to a paperback sale.

"Results" is Meta's term for however many times your chosen objective was achieved (e.g. clicks, if that's the objective selected). "Cost per result" is spend ÷ results so effectively it is your cost per sale, click, or whatever the objective was set to track.

Meta's delivery system is constantly learning and adjusting based on real-time performance, competition for ad space (other advertisers bidding for the same audience), and normal audience behaviour changes. So daily fluctuations are expected and not usually a sign something's wrong, especially with smaller budgets or newer campaigns still in their "learning phase."

Meta can only track what its own Pixel/Conversions API sees, and for book sales completed on Amazon rather than your own website, that visibility is often limited or absent. This is why Amazon Attribution links matter, since they report the actual on-Amazon sale back to the specific ad that drove it, giving us a more accurate view than Meta's own numbers alone.