With Meta ads, on Facebook and Instagram, you show an ad to people in an area you choose, for example the Kempen, and you pay Meta directly for the reach. For a small business that can work to announce an opening, an offer or something new. It is not a way to buy turnover: what it brings in depends on your offer, your photos, your site and what other advertisers are bidding at that moment. This is not legal advice either: ask a lawyer about your own case.
How does an ad account work and who pays what?
The account and the money are yours. With your first ad, you link a payment method to your ad account, and Meta charges the costs straight to that payment method. If you work with me, you never pay the ad budget through me: it goes from your card to Meta.
You keep control of the spending. Meta says you decide your total spend with the budget, and that you can set a limit per campaign or per account. A daily budget is an average: on a day with better opportunities, Meta may spend more, but over a calendar week it stays within seven times your daily budget. A lifetime budget is the amount for the whole run.
What does a small daily budget get you?
Nobody can honestly say in advance, and Meta itself does not publish a fixed amount per click or per person reached. Ads get a chance to be shown through an auction, based on bids and performance, and the price depends on your audience, your dates and your competition.
What Meta does do is show an estimate of reach and results before you publish the ad, based on your budget, bid and audience. Use that estimate as a direction, not as a promise. Meta also sets a minimum budget and shows a message in Ads Manager if yours is too low. That minimum differs by country and by objective.
Do the sum yourself: €5 a day is about €150 a month. If your audience is small, such as only your own town, the same people can often see your ad many times. So keep an eye on frequency (see below): if it rises while results fall, try a different image or a different audience.
Why does the Meta pixel need consent?
The Meta pixel is a piece of code on your website that sends data about visitors to Meta, so that Meta can measure ads and build audiences. That is not a harmless detail, for three reasons:
- Europe. The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) writes in its Guidelines 2/2023 of 7 October 2024 that adding tracking information to a pixel is an instruction to the visitor’s device, and that collecting those identifiers falls under Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive.
- Belgium. The Belgian Data Protection Authority (DPA, in French APD) states in its cookie checklist that you must not place, or access, cookies that are not strictly necessary before you have valid consent. According to the same checklist, cookies for sharing or liking a page on social media and cookies for personalising ads serve a different purpose, so you ask for consent for them separately.
- Meta itself. In the Meta Business Tools Terms, you state that in the European Union you will obtain, in a verifiable way, all the consents needed before you use Meta’s tools to store or read cookies or other information on a visitor’s device. For the processing of visitor data, you and Meta are also, in certain cases, joint controllers.
In short: a pixel without the visitor’s consent is not an option. If you want to use one, you need a cookie banner that makes rejecting as easy as accepting, as the guide to the cookie banner explains.
How do I measure whether it works?
With a UTM link. That is an ordinary web address with labels added: utm_source (where the traffic comes from, for example facebook), utm_medium (the type of traffic, for example cpc) and utm_campaign (the name of your promotion). That way your statistics show which ad a visit came from. Google describes these three parameters in its explanation of custom campaign URLs, and you add them to the address of the page the ad leads to.
What happens on your own site counts too: enquiries through the form, taps on “call” or “directions”, bookings. My sites record contact requests and clicks on the main buttons, without anything from Meta on the page. Which analytics tool you use on top of that, and whether it asks for consent, is a separate question, also covered in the cookie guide.
The extra benefit: you measure what happened at your business, not what Meta thinks happened.
How do I read the numbers?
Meta shows a lot of numbers. For a small business, five are enough:
- Reach: the number of people who saw your ad at least once.
- Impressions: the number of times your ad was on screen. Someone who sees it twice counts twice.
- Frequency: impressions divided by reach, so how often a person saw your ad on average.
- Link clicks: clicks that took someone to your site or form. “Clicks (all)” is a bigger number, because it also includes likes, comments and clicks on your page name.
- Cost per click: the amount you spent divided by the number of link clicks.
Look first at link clicks and at what came in at your end afterwards, and only then at the cost per click. A cheap click that nobody phones after is not cheap. When I go through the numbers with an owner, the first question is usually not “how many clicks?” but “what happened next?”.
What can nobody promise?
Nobody can promise a number of clicks, enquiries or sales, not even with a fixed budget. Meta gives estimates, not guarantees, and your result depends on the offer, the page the ad leads to and the timing. Anyone who predicts your turnover is guessing. What can be agreed is the work: a well-set-up account, clear images and text, a check on the spending and an honest overview of the numbers.
How does Ovrick handle this?
I set up your Meta account, build the audiences and set up the first campaign. Every month I make two new ads, check the campaign weekly and send you a monthly report. You pay the budget directly to Meta, with your own card. There is no minimum term, and I sell the work, never a result. All the details are on the Meta ads page. A good Google Business Profile and a site that is ready remain the foundation: the guide to SEO explains why.