Ads that bring in jobs – not likes.

Before the first ad: account, objective, basics

You need a free business or creator account on Instagram, linked to a Facebook Page, and Meta Ads Manager. The Boost button under a post is the most convenient and almost always the worst route: it optimizes for engagement with the post, not for inquiries, and hides the most important settings.

In Ads Manager you first choose the campaign objective – and this is where the most important decision is made. Choose the objective closest to the job: Leads, or Traffic to your inquiry page. “Awareness” and “Engagement” buy attention that, for self-employed people with a small budget, almost never translates into jobs. If you want to measure events on your website, your privacy policy needs to mention it and you need your visitors’ consent – sort this out before you install the Meta Pixel.

Audience: narrower is better

Small budgets need small spaces. An ad at €5 a day, served to half a million people, reaches no one often enough to have an effect. Narrow the location down as tightly as your catchment area really is, and add at most one or two interests that your clients actually share.

Meta’s automatic audience expansion (Advantage+) can do good work with larger budgets, but it needs data to learn. When you start with a small budget, a manual, narrow audience is usually the more reliable choice – you know whom you reach and can interpret the results.

The creative decides

On Instagram your ad doesn’t compete with other ads, but with everything else in the feed. The first one or two seconds decide. A real photo or a short video from your working day almost always beats the stock-photo look – people recognize both instantly, and only one builds trust.

A good ad makes exactly one offer and asks for exactly one action: “Request an appointment now”, “Book your free initial consultation”. If you pack three services, two promotions and a brand film into one ad, you get clicks from no one. Formats: Stories and Reels take the 9:16 vertical format, the feed takes the square – the same message, cropped to fit.

• One offer, one action, one image – per ad
• Real material from your day-to-day instead of stock photos
• The core message in the first two seconds, not at the end
• Vertical for Stories and Reels, square for the feed

Budget logic: test small, decide consistently

Start with a daily budget you can sustain for two weeks without getting nervous – for many, that is €5 to €15 a day. You do the decisive calculation beforehand: what may an inquiry cost you? If your average job is worth €2,000 and you close every fifth inquiry, you can pay considerably more for an inquiry than someone with €80 appointments. Your price basis for this comes from the hourly rate calculator.

Give the ad a few days before you judge – delivery needs time to ramp up. After that, the rule is: whatever brings no inquiries after two weeks gets switched off or changed, one variable at a time – first the creative, then the audience. If you change everything at once, you learn nothing.

Measure through to the job, not to the click

Ads Manager shows you clicks and cost per click – but you can’t bank any of that. Count the chain through to the end: what did the ad cost, how many inquiries came in, how many estimates resulted, how many jobs? Only the last number tells you whether the channel pays for itself.

All this takes is discipline about the source: ask every new prospect where they came from and note it on the client record. If you keep estimates and invoices in a system like Sumaro, you see at the end of the month which revenue depended on the ads – and decide on the budget with numbers instead of gut feeling.

The most common mistakes

Almost all failures with Meta ads follow the same patterns. If you avoid the points below, you are further along than most competitors who “tried advertising once” and gave up disappointed.

• Using the Boost button instead of Ads Manager
• Choosing reach or engagement as the objective instead of inquiries
• A huge audience on a small daily budget
• Stopping after two days, before delivery has had time to learn
• Sending ads to a homepage instead of an inquiry page
• Comparing cost per click instead of cost per job