Facebook ads

Who Facebook ads reach best

Facebook has become the platform of adults with homes, families and businesses. That's good news if you sell kitchen renovations, family dentistry, cleaning, insurance, landscaping, daycare spots or anything else that people over 30 decide on. It's also where community life still happens in many smaller Canadian towns, from local buy-and-sell to event pages. Facebook ads let you appear in the middle of that, between posts from friends and local groups.

It's a weaker fit for brands that only appeal to teenagers, and for urgent services where people search rather than scroll. For those, Instagram, TikTok or Google Ads usually do better.

Placements that matter on Facebook

A Facebook campaign isn't one spot on one screen. The main placements I use:

• Feed on mobile and desktop: the workhorse, good for photos, carousels and short videos.
• Marketplace: people browsing to buy, which suits furniture, vehicles, home services and local products.
• Video feeds and in-stream video: short clips shown between other videos, useful for demonstrations.
• Right column on desktop: cheap, small, mostly for remarketing.
• Search results inside Facebook: limited reach but people there are actively looking.

I usually start with automatic placements, then look at the breakdown after a couple of weeks and exclude anything that spends without results.

Lead forms, website or Messenger?

Where the ad sends people changes everything that follows. Instant forms keep people inside Facebook and give the most leads, but some of them are less committed. A landing page brings fewer but warmer enquiries and lets you show reviews, prices and photos. Messenger suits businesses where people want to ask a question first. I go into detail on forms on my lead generation ads page and on chats on the Messenger and WhatsApp ads page.

Special categories: housing, jobs and credit

If your ad is about housing (real estate listings, rentals, mortgages), employment or credit, Meta usually requires you to declare a special ad category. That removes age and gender targeting and limits how narrowly you can target by location or interest. It's easy to trip over and have ads rejected. For realtors, lenders and employers recruiting staff, I plan the campaign within these rules from the start and lean harder on the creative and the landing page to filter the right people.

What a typical Facebook ads account looks like after setup

For a local service business spending about $1,000 a month, the structure is usually simple: one prospecting campaign with a conversion goal, one smaller remarketing campaign for people who visited the site or watched a video, and a handful of ads in each. Simple structures give the algorithm enough data to learn. Complexity comes later, once there are results worth splitting.

Seasons and distances

Canadian demand moves with the weather. Furnace and snow-removal offers make sense in October, decks and landscaping in March, patios in May. I plan ads a few weeks ahead of the season so the campaign has finished learning when people start deciding. Distance matters too: in a city a ten-kilometre radius can hold a huge audience, while a business outside a small town may need to cover the whole region to reach enough people.

Honest expectations

No one can promise a cost per lead before running ads, and anyone who does is guessing. What I can promise is a clean setup, a clear report every two weeks and decisions explained in plain language. You'll know what each dollar did. If after a fair test Facebook doesn't bring customers at a cost that works for you, I'll tell you and suggest what to try instead. To see how Facebook fits with Instagram under one budget, read about my Meta ads management.