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Let’s cut straight to the point. If you’re here, it’s because you’re tired of pouring money into Facebook and Instagram ads that don’t deliver the results you hoped for. Maybe you’re frustrated, trying to figure out why your leads are low-quality or why your engagement is barely there. Maybe you’re even wondering if these platforms are still worth it.
Here’s the truth: Facebook and Instagram ads can still be game changers in 2025. But if you want to win, you’ve got to stop running ads the way you did two – or even one – years ago. The platforms have changed, your audience has changed, and if your strategy hasn’t evolved, you’re leaving money on the table.
This isn’t about throwing fancy buzzwords or gimmicks at you. This is about giving you a clear, actionable plan to build ads that attract the right audience, generate real leads, and drive measurable results.
By the end of this guide, you’ll understand exactly how to create campaigns that work.
Setting Clear Objectives and KPIs
Let’s be honest: one of the biggest reasons Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns fail is because advertisers don’t have a clear goal. They dive into ad creation without a solid idea of what success looks like—and when the results roll in, they’re disappointed.
In 2025, defining specific objectives and measurable KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is not optional—it’s the bedrock of a winning strategy.
Think about it: you wouldn’t set out on a road trip without knowing your destination. The same logic applies to running ads.
If you don’t define what you’re trying to achieve, how will you know if your campaign worked? Objectives keep you focused, help you measure success, and ensure every dollar spent moves you closer to your business goals.
Here are the most popular objectives advertisers use on Facebook and Instagram—and when to choose each one:
- Brand Awareness:
- Use this if you’re introducing your business to new audiences or launching a new product
- KPI to measure: Reach (how many unique users saw your ad)
- Traffic:
- Perfect for driving users to your website or landing page
- KPI to measure: Click-through rate (CTR)
- Lead Generation:
- Ideal if your goal is to collect contact information for future sales
- KPI to measure: Cost per lead (CPL) and number of leads collected
- Conversions:
- Use this if you want users to complete a specific action, like making a purchase or signing up for a service
- KPI to measure: Conversion rate and return on ad spend (ROAS)
When setting KPIs, remember this: they should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example:
- Instead of “increase leads,” set a KPI like, “Generate 50 qualified leads in the next 30 days with a CPL under $40”
- Instead of “boost sales,” set a KPI like, “Achieve $5,000 in revenue with a ROAS of 3:1 from this campaign”
One of the most common mistakes advertisers make is trying to achieve multiple conflicting goals with one campaign. For example, running a traffic ad while expecting conversions is a recipe for disappointment.
Each campaign should have a singular focus and align its ad settings, creative, and targeting with that goal. And that’s exactly what setting clear objectives helps us do.
A Quick Checklist for Setting Objectives
- What’s the main outcome you want from this campaign?
- Which ad objective in the platform aligns with that outcome?
- What KPI will tell you if you’ve hit your target?
- How will you track and measure that KPI?
When your objectives and KPIs are crystal clear, you’ll stop guessing – and start running campaigns with purpose and precision.
Crafting Compelling Ad Creatives
Let’s face it: even the best targeting won’t save an ad if the creative doesn’t connect. On Facebook and Instagram, where users are bombarded with content, your ad creative must stand out and deliver value instantly. In 2025, this means embracing visual storytelling, authentic messaging, and interactive elements to engage your audience and drive action.
On top of that, the algorithm gauges reactions to your creatives and tries to find more people who are likely to positively respond to your creative, based on the characteristics of the users who have already engaged with your creative.
Therefore, it’s very important that your creative and copy speaks to your audience, and not any other. If you can make your creative laser-focused on the problems and pain points of your audience, you’ll do the algorithm a big favour and achieve better results in return.
So, how do you do it?
What Makes an Ad Creative Compelling?
At its core, effective ad creative does three things:
- Grabs Attention: It stops the scroll with eye-catching visuals or a bold headline
- Delivers Value: It immediately communicates why the user should care
- Drives Action: It includes a clear call-to-action (CTA) that aligns with your campaign goals
Here’s some ways you could achieve this:
- Visuals That Stop the Scroll:
- For images, focus on bright colours, bold headlines, and contrasting colours
- For videos, laser-focus on the hook (the first three seconds of your video). If you can grab attention with your hook, you’ll stop the scroll and get the user invested in your video. To measure the effectiveness of your hook, you can use the thumb stopping rate metric (you will need to create a custom metric to do this)
- Focus on your audience’s aspirations, pain points, and uncertainties:
- When speaking to their aspirations, try to paint the picture of what their life could look like if they did x action
- When speaking to their pain points, try to focus on avoidance langauge. For example, ‘Avoid the mistake most Aussie Plumbers make and download this guide to make sure you don’t get ripped off by a web design agency’
- When speaking to their uncertainties, use stats, proof or credibility statements. For example, if you have served 1000+ customers, you might say something like, ‘Try the coffee that 1000+ Aussie Women can’t stop raving about’
- Ensure your offer is specific and related to the user’s aspirations or pain points:
- Make sure what you’re offering is very specific. There should be no questions in the user’s mind when they read your ad as to what they might be getting if they click the button
- Make sure that whatever you’re offering directly helps the user move closer to achieving their aspiration or avoiding and overcoming their pain point. For example, perhaps you’re offering a free resource guide that assists them in moving towards their aspiration
If you want to learn more about exactly how you can use these (and more) strategies to scale your Meta Campaigns, check out this podcast episode here.
Implementing the 5 Point Paid Ad Audit
The 5-Point Ad Framework provides a structured approach to crafting ads that capture attention and drive results. By focusing on five essential elements, you can create campaigns that are clear, compelling, and effective.
Read: What is the 5 Point Paid Ad Audit & How to Use It (Detailed Explanation)
The 5-Point Ad Framework is built around these core elements:
- Offer
- Creative
- Copy
- User Experience
- Targeting
Each plays a vital role in ensuring your ads deliver maximum impact.
You can get a free copy of the 5 Point Ad Framework Checklist here.
Let’s look at how to optimise each part of the 5-point ad audit.
1. Offer: The Heart of Your Ad
Your offer is what you’re promoting, and it must be irresistible. Without a strong offer, even the best targeting and visuals won’t save your campaign.
- What Makes a Strong Offer?
- It’s clear and easy to understand
- It delivers obvious value to your audience
Here’s an example of a bad offer vs a good offer to give you an idea.
Bad Offer:
Better Offer:
In the first example, the offer is high friction – booking a 15-minute sales call, whereas the second example is a lower friction option – a webinar.
The second offer is also much more targeted, focusing on an aspiration – how to create revenue generating content 10x faster with AI. On the other hand, the first offer doesn’t really highlight the aspiration or pain point.
The first offer does a great job of linking the offer with an outcome that the user will receive, which is why it works so much better than the first offer. Rather than highlighting the offer itself, the second ad focuses on the outcome the user will experience if they sign up for the offer.
2. Creative
There are four focus metrics that make up a great creative:
- High thumb stopping rate: this metric is calculated by the percentage of 3 second video views divided by the total number of impressions for any video ad. This metric demonstrates the percentage of users that continue watching after the first three seconds of a video, which reflects the power of the hook of the ad. We want our thumb stopping rate to be high so that we can capture users as they scroll on social media. The key to increasing this metric is optimising the first three seconds of the video to effectively capture attention. We should strive for a 30% thumb stopping rate on traffic or conversion-based campaigns. If you’re using an image ad, you can’t directly measure this metric, but you can look at your creative and think about what you expect the scroll stopping power of your image will be
- High Click-through rate (CTR): this metric is calculated as the percentage of users who have seen an ad and have clicked through to the landing page or website. The CTR reflects the power of the ad to spur initial action from our target audience, in the form of a click-through to a website or landing page. If we can get our potential customer to commit to clicking through to view our website or landing page, it is easier to get the user to commit to other things later, such as a purchase or sign up
- Video Watch Rate: this metric is calculated as the percentage of users that started watching a video ad who finished watching the video to completion. While the thumb stopping rate tells us how powerful the hook is, the video watch rate tells us how engaging the rest of the video is. It’s important for our video ads to be more engaging because this helps us build interest and desire in our audience
- Conversions: this could refer to leads generated or purchases, for example. Conversions are important to look at because they determine how successful an ad has been at actually helping us reach our goal. We use HubSpot to accurately attribute our revenue to marketing activities such as paid media
3. Copy
Copy is how we present the offer using words – it can be thought of as the message that our offer is packaged in. Good copy should speak to our target audience’s key motivators and guide them into taking an action that resonated with our objective.
Here’s some quick guidelines for copy creation:
- Headline: Hook the user in with a compelling headline. Example: “Over 1200+ Aussies Swear by this Meal Prep System”
- Body Text: Address pain points, explain benefits, and close with a CTA
- Keep it Short: Brevity is key on platforms like Instagram, where users skim content quickly
4. User Experience (UX)
The ad is just the start—the user’s experience after clicking matters just as much.
- Landing Page Alignment: The landing page should match the ad’s promise. If the ad promotes a discount, make sure the page prominently features it
- Speed and Accessibility: Ensure your landing page loads quickly and is mobile-friendly
- Clear Path to Action: Make it easy for users to complete the desired action, whether that’s filling out a form or making a purchase
With Meta now offering on platform user experiences, you can leverage tools like ‘On Facebook Lead Forms’ and ‘Instant Experience Ads.’
5. Targeting
It doesn’t matter how great your offer, creative, copy and user experience is if you target an audience that doesn’t resonate with the solution you’re providing. Targeting is all about finding the audience that matches with what you have to offer.
Your targeting and creative choices should be considered in tandem. There’s no point in running the MYOB ad example we shared above with a broad targeting option.
There are two approaches you can take with targeting on paid media channels such as Facebook and Instagram.
You can target broad audiences, and only define the audience further by age, gender, and location.
You can target interest-based audiences and test different pockets of the broad audience to find winners, and scale those winners once discovered.
In the first approach, you’re letting the algorithm decide who your ad is served to. If we want to get a little technical, this strategy is great for testing ad creative, because you can have the same audience per ad set, but use a different creative each time. However, the downside with this strategy is that you’re giving the algorithm more control to choose who your ad is delivered to. You might also say this is a positive point, because the algorithm has the power to find the right people for your offer. You also need to consider a higher budget before the algorithms find their sweet spot.
In the second more targeted approach, we control who our ad is delivered to by using a single interest per ad set. There are two downsides with this approach. First, you might miss out on delivering your ad to audiences that would have resonated with your message. And second, it’s difficult to test ad creative in this way, because every ad set is differentiated by the audience you’re using, so an a/b test with creative isn’t necessarily pragmatic. On the opposite side of the coin, this approach can be extremely valuable, because we can end up finding pockets of audiences which react really well to our ads, giving us the opportunity to scale results from these specific audiences.
One great strategy you can use for targeting is to combine the above two approaches, where you use broad targeting to a/b test creatives, and then use the successful creatives in a second campaign where you run interest-based targeting.
What’s clear here is that there are most definitely different approaches that you can take when it comes to targeting, but the key is to create a strategy that works for you.
Overall, the 5-Point Ad Framework simplifies the complexity of ad creation. Instead of guessing, you focus on the elements that drive results. This approach ensures that every ad you run has a clear purpose, resonates with your audience, and aligns with your business goals.
Optimising for Lead Quality
Generating leads is one thing, but generating high-quality leads—the kind that actually convert—is where true success lies. In 2025, as competition for attention intensifies on Facebook and Instagram, focusing on lead quality over quantity is critical for maximising ROI.
Low-quality leads waste time, energy, and resources. They may click on your ads but are unlikely to convert into paying customers.
So, how exactly do you do it?
Read Complete Guide: How to Improve Lead Quality from Your Paid Media Efforts
On top of the above guide, here’s a few things we’ve found to be successful:
There’s a few things you can do to optimise your lead qualification process, including:
- Implementing lead scoring to rank prospects based on key factors such as interest, engagement level, and decision-making power
- Establishing clear qualification criteria based on buyer intent signals—like downloading content or engaging multiple times
- Using lead forms strategically by asking qualifying questions such as budget range or decision-making authority early in the funnel
- Ensuring a seamless handoff from marketing to sales through an agreed-upon process will also help reduce the chances of unqualified leads taking up valuable time
Horizontal & Vertical Scaling
Scaling your Facebook and Instagram campaigns is all about growing your reach and results without sacrificing performance.
In 2025, scaling campaigns effectively requires a strategic approach, focusing on two key methods: vertical scaling and horizontal scaling.
What Is Vertical Scaling?
Vertical scaling involves increasing the budget of your existing campaigns or ad sets to boost their reach. This method is ideal when you have a winning ad that’s performing well and you want to generate more results without making major changes to targeting or creatives.
How Vertical Scaling Works:
Vertical Scaling works to gradually increase the budget on a high performing ad set to reach more people but also avoid disrupting the ad’s performance or forcing the algorithm to re-enter the learning phase (a period when Facebook optimises delivery based on limited data). Sudden, large budget changes can reset the learning phase, leading to inefficiencies and a dip in performance.
To scale vertically without risking performance, set up automated rules for small, incremental budget increases. For example:
- Increase the daily budget by 3% every 48 hours if the campaign meets specific criteria, such as maintaining a high ROAS or low cost per result over the last 3 days
- This steady approach allows the algorithm to adjust to the higher spend while maintaining performance
Here’s what that rule might look like:
When to Use Vertical Scaling:
- You have a campaign that’s consistently delivering excellent results (e.g., high CTR, strong ROAS)
- Your audience size is large enough to handle increased impressions without oversaturation
What Is Horizontal Scaling?
Horizontal scaling involves expanding the reach of your campaigns by creating additional ad sets or targeting new audiences. Rather than increasing the budget of a single ad set, you duplicate or diversify your campaigns to target different groups, placements, or geographies.
How Horizontal Scaling Works:
- Duplicate high-performing ad sets and adjust targeting parameters, such as:
- Audience Segments: Expand to broader or new lookalike audiences (e.g., 1% to 3% similarity)
- Geographic Regions: Add locations where your target audience resides but hasn’t been targeted yet
- Ad Placements: Test additional placements like Instagram Stories, Reels, or Facebook Audience Network
- Refresh creatives to ensure your ads resonate with the new audience segments
When to Use Horizontal Scaling:
- You’ve maximised your existing audience and need to expand your reach
- You want to maintain stable performance without increasing the budget on a single campaign
How to Decide Between Vertical and Horizontal Scaling
Both methods have their place in scaling your campaigns, and the choice depends on your goals and the performance of your existing campaigns.
| Scenario | Recommended Method |
| A campaign is performing well, and you want to maximise results without changing the audience or creative. | Vertical Scaling |
| You’ve reached saturation with your current audience or want to explore new segments. | Horizontal Scaling |
| You want to balance growth while mitigating risks of performance drops. | Combine Vertical and Horizontal Scaling |
Scaling effectively ensures you’re making the most of your ad spend while avoiding common pitfalls like overspending or ad fatigue. With vertical scaling, you amplify your best campaigns without disrupting performance, while horizontal scaling lets you reach untapped audiences to grow your overall impact.
By understanding and applying both techniques strategically, you’ll set your campaigns up for long-term success and sustainable growth.
So, What’s Next?
Let me level with you: running Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns in 2025 isn’t easy.
It’s no longer about throwing up an ad and hoping for the best. The platforms are smarter, the competition is tougher, and users are savvier.
But here’s the good news—if you’re willing to put in the work and follow a proven process, the results can be game-changing.
Here’s the deal: everything we’ve talked about—from understanding your audience to creating killer ad creatives to fine-tuning your budget—comes down to this: are you putting the right message in front of the right people at the right time?
The strategies I’ve shared aren’t theories. They’re real, actionable steps that businesses are using right now to generate high-quality leads, boost ROI, and scale their campaigns. And you can, too.
But there’s one thing I need you to remember: no strategy is perfect from day one. You’re going to need to test, tweak, and adapt as you go. Success in paid ads isn’t about getting it all right the first time—it’s about learning what works and doubling down on it.
Next, read our article on Google Ads vs Facebook Ads to find which one is right for your business.
