Meta Ads is Meta’s online advertising platform. It allows businesses to pay to show advertisements across platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
For example, if you sell gym memberships, you could create a Meta ad showing your offer to people in a particular city, age group, or audience with relevant interests.
How Meta Ads works
- Create an ad: Image, video, carousel, or other format.
- Choose your audience: Location, age, interests, behaviors, or custom audiences.
- Set a budget: Decide how much you want to spend.
- Choose an objective: Such as getting website visitors, leads, messages, app installs, or purchases.
- Meta delivers the ad: Its system determines which eligible people are shown the advertisement.
- Measure results: You can track things such as clicks, leads, purchases, and cost per result.
Meta Ads vs Google Ads
| Meta Ads | Google Ads |
|---|---|
| Mainly Facebook & Instagram | Mainly Google Search, YouTube, Display, etc. |
| Can target people based on audience characteristics and behavior | Search campaigns can target people based on what they are actively searching for |
| Strong for discovering products/services and building demand | Strong for capturing existing search demand |
| Often uses visual content such as videos and images | Search ads can be primarily text-based |
Simple example:
Someone searches Google for “buy running shoes” → Google Ads can show an ad based on that search.
Someone is scrolling Instagram and sees an advertisement for running shoes → that can be a Meta Ad.
