We tried ads before and they didn’t work

Almost every brand we speak to has run ads at some point. Usually a boosted post, sometimes a few hundred pounds through an agency, and the money went somewhere without much coming back.

Two things go wrong far more often than anything else. The first is that three or four pieces of creative were made and run until people stopped reacting to them. Meta’s system needs a real spread of angles to find who responds, and a handful of near-identical ads never gives it that.

The second is where the click lands. A brilliant ad pointing at a slow page, or a page that says something different from the ad, will lose most of the people it just paid for. That is not an ads problem and no amount of budget fixes it.

So “ads did not work” is usually the wrong conclusion. What did not work was one specific attempt, and it is worth knowing which of the two it was before spending anything again.

What we would actually do

• Look at what actually ran last time and tell you which of the two it was, honestly, even if the answer is that the ads were fine and the offer was not.
• Make the content properly rather than boosting what is already posted, across enough different angles to give the system something to work with.
• Fix where the click lands before we spend on sending anyone there.
• Run the ads, the content and the social together, so they move as one thing instead of three people blaming each other.

How long before you would know if it is working?

You get early signal in days on whether people react to the creative. Whether the money makes sense takes longer, because you need enough sales through the door to be looking at a pattern rather than a good week.

What if it does not work this time either?

Then we tell you. We would rather say the offer is the problem than keep spending your budget proving it is not. There is no contract holding you in while we work that out.

Do we have to spend a lot on ads?

No. There is no minimum spend with us. What matters is whether the profit on a sale can carry the cost of getting it, and that is worth checking before you commit to a number.