What are Meta ads?

Paid placements bought through one system that serves Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network.

You choose an outcome and a budget, supply creative, and Meta's models decide which people see which ad. That last part is the whole modern story — you no longer buy audiences, you supply creative and rules and the platform does the matching.

The parts, in the order you'll meet them.

An account holds everything. Inside it, a campaign sets the objective and the budget; an ad set governs delivery and any targeting constraints; an ad is the creative itself. Three levels, and most confusion comes from arguing about the wrong one.

Above that sits your Business Manager — the container that owns the ad account, pages and pixel. It should always be yours, not an agency's, because it's where every asset you're paying to build actually lives.

How Meta decides who sees your ad.

Every impression is an auction. Meta estimates how likely each eligible ad is to produce the outcome you asked for, weighs that against your bid and the quality signals, and serves the winner. You're not buying attention directly; you're buying predicted outcomes.

Two systems do the heavy lifting: retrieval narrows millions of possible ads to the ones eligible for a given person, then ranking sequences those candidates. Advantage+ campaigns simply hand more of that decision to the models by default.

The practical implication is uncomfortable for the industry: constraining delivery usually costs more for less. Your leverage is what you feed the auction, not how tightly you fence it.

What they cost, and what to measure.

Cost per thousand impressions is set by competition, not a rate card, and Australian CPMs run above the US. Manage cost per outcome instead — per purchase, per qualified lead, per booked job — because expensive clicks with cheap purchases is a good result.

Be careful with ROAS: it's the platform reporting on itself, inside its own attribution window. Change the window and the number changes with no change to reality. Blended revenue over total spend (MER) is harder to fool.

A fuller breakdown of Australian costs, fees and GST is in the cost guide.

How to tell if yours are working.

Three questions. Is cost per outcome stable or improving as spend rises? Is total revenue moving, not just attributed revenue? And are new creatives surviving long enough to scale?

If you can't answer those, the problem is usually measurement, not media. That's the first thing we fix in a setup and the first thing we look for in a check.

Where Meta ads actually appear.

One buy, many surfaces. You rarely pick these by hand any more — Meta distributes across whichever placement is cheapest for the outcome you asked for, which is why one creative needs to survive several shapes.

The objectives, and which one you probably want.

The objective tells Meta what to optimise toward, and it's the single most consequential setting in the account. Pick the wrong one and the models will faithfully deliver the wrong outcome, cheaply.

Automation sits on top of all of this — what Advantage+ actually does and where it takes control away from you.

Why creative is now the whole game.

When targeting was manual, the lever was audiences. It isn't any more. The models find the buyer if you give them enough distinct ads to test — so the constraint moved from who you target to how much new work you can put in front of them, and how fast you act on the results.

More on this: how to test creative properly, and what breaks when you scale spend.

Questions people actually ask.

Want yours read by someone who does this daily?

Fifteen minutes with Josh, no pitch. You'll leave knowing the two or three things costing you the most right now — and what it would take to fix them.