A bakery posted a photograph of a cake, pressed “Boost post” and reached twelve thousand people for twenty euros. The result: four likes, three of them from relatives, and no orders. The owner concluded that Facebook doesn’t work.
Facebook works. It just does something entirely different from Google, and if you expect the same from it you will be disappointed with every invoice.
One difference that everything else follows from
On Google a person is searching. They type “bike repair Leeds” because their bike is broken. Your ad is the answer to a question they have just asked. They have done half the work themselves — they arrived with intent.
On Facebook and Instagram a person isn’t searching for anything. They are on the sofa, scrolling past holiday photographs and a video of a cat. Your ad interrupts them. They asked you nothing, they need nothing, and at that moment they don’t know who you are.
That isn’t a weakness. But it is why everything else is turned on its head between the two:
- On Google the keyword decides. Catch the right search and half the job is done.
- On Facebook the ad itself decides. The photograph, the first sentence, the offer. Targeting matters, but the best targeting won’t save a boring ad.
That is also why the boost button disappoints. A post you wrote for your existing followers isn’t an ad. Followers already know you. A stranger scrolling past sees a photograph of a cake with no price, no occasion and no reason to stop.
What an ad has to do in three seconds
Stop the scroll and say what this is about. That is all. None of it is art; a fair bit of it is craft:
- Make it look native, not like an advert. A phone photograph from your workshop will almost always work better than a flawless stock image. People have learned to skip anything that looks like a catalogue.
- Make the first sentence concrete. “We repair your roller shutter within 48 hours, Saturdays included” stops people. “Quality you can rely on” stops nobody.
- Say the price, or a range. Price is the strongest filter you have. Without it you are buying clicks from people who would have left at the first number.
- One offer per ad. Not five services in one ad, because someone scrolling won’t weigh them up.
- Vertical format. People hold the phone upright. A square image loses half the space.
A small market shows up in the advertising
If you sell in a country of two million people, or target one region within a larger one, the arithmetic changes. Target women aged 25 to 45 in one region who are interested in furniture, and you get an audience you exhaust within a few weeks.
The consequence isn’t obvious: an ad wears out faster in a small market than in a large one. The first week goes well, by the third week the cost per result climbs even though you changed nothing. You did nothing wrong — the same people have seen your ad five times and no longer notice it.
So in a small market, changing the ads regularly helps more than refined targeting. Three simple ads you swap every month bring in more than one perfect ad running for six.
Who this genuinely pays for — and who it doesn’t
It is fair to say both.
Facebook and Instagram work well when the product is visible and can be wanted before it is needed: furniture, cosmetics, fashion, food, gifts, local services that are pleasant to look at. They also work well for local recognition — so that people nearby start to know you before they need you. And they are excellent for retargeting: showing an ad to someone who has already been on your site is the cheapest good ad there is.
They work badly for urgent services. Someone with a burst pipe at seven in the evening will not wait for an ad in their feed — they will type it into Google and call the first person who picks up. The same goes for narrow professional services where there are thirty buyers in the country and no way to catch them by interest. In those cases the money is better spent on search visibility.
What to expect from the numbers
A click from Facebook is colder than a click from Google. That isn’t a settings error, it is the nature of the channel — the person wasn’t looking for you. So the path to an order is longer and it rarely happens on first contact.
Two practical conclusions follow. First, judge by enquiries and orders, not by likes and reach; reach is the least useful number in the entire interface. Second, count on two steps: the first ad introduces you, the second (retargeting) brings them back. Anyone expecting orders from a stranger’s first contact will write the channel off too early.
And wherever the ad leads, everything has to be ready. If you send people to a page that takes five seconds to load on a phone, you have paid for a visit you will never see — a subject we also cover on the online stores page.
How we approach advertising and what it costs is on the advertising pricing page — Facebook and Instagram management starts at 249 €/month, with the ad budget separate. If you aren’t sure whether Facebook is the right channel for you or something else is, describe your situation through the contact form or call +386 40 529 425. We will also say so when we think your money would be better spent elsewhere.