Do Facebook ads work for small businesses?

It is one of the questions I get asked most often, usually with a slightly weary look. Someone has spent a few hundred pounds boosting posts on Facebook, seen a flurry of likes and precisely no new customers, and concluded the whole thing is a con. Then a friend in a different trade swears blind it is the best money they spend all month. Both of them are right, which is exactly why the honest answer is not yes or no. It is: it depends what you sell, and whether you use it properly.

So rather than give you a sales pitch, let me tell you how I actually think about it, and how to work out whether Facebook and Instagram are worth your time and money.

The one difference that explains everything

The whole thing hinges on a single idea, and once it clicks, the rest follows. When someone searches on Google, they are already looking for you. They have typed "emergency plumber Gloucester" because water is coming through the ceiling right now. You are catching demand that already exists. That is why Google Ads tends to bring enquiries quickly, and why it suits urgent, need-it-now services.

Facebook and Instagram are the opposite. Nobody opens the app because they want to buy a new kitchen. They open it to see what their sister is up to, and your advert slides in between a baby photo and a football result. You are not catching demand. You are creating it, interrupting someone who wasn't looking, and hoping the offer is good enough to make them stop scrolling.

That difference is not a flaw in one or the other. It just tells you what each is good for. Google is for people who already know they need something. Meta is for planting a seed in people who don't yet, and for staying in front of the ones who nearly bought.

When Facebook and Instagram genuinely work

In my experience, Meta ads earn their keep for a fairly clear set of businesses.

If what you sell is visual, you are already halfway there. A landscaper's before-and-after, a florist's arrangements, a cafe's Sunday roast, a beautician's results, a builder's finished extension. These stop the scroll because they are nice to look at, and people buy them partly on impulse and emotion rather than pure urgency. Instagram in particular rewards a good photo.

It also works well when the thing you sell is a considered purchase people mull over for weeks. Kitchens, weddings, home improvements, gym memberships, anything with a long think-about-it phase. You can gently warm someone up over time, so that when they are finally ready, yours is the name they already half-recognise.

And it is very good at one unglamorous job: staying in front of people who visited your website and left. Most people do not enquire on their first visit. Retargeting, showing a quiet reminder to someone who looked at your services page three days ago, is often the cheapest, most sensible pound you will spend on Facebook. It is not flashy, but it works.

Local awareness is the other strong suit. A new business wanting the surrounding few miles to simply know it exists can put itself in front of thousands of nearby people for very little. That is genuinely useful when you are starting out and nobody is searching for your name yet.

When it is usually a waste of money

Now the other side, because pretending it works for everyone is how people end up disappointed.

If you run an urgent, high-intent service, boiler repairs, locksmithing, emergency call-outs, Meta is largely the wrong tool. Nobody scrolling Instagram on the sofa suddenly needs their locks changed. By the time they do, they will be on Google, not Facebook. Spend your money where the intent already is.

The same goes for anything niche or high-value to a very specific person. If your customer is a procurement manager at a manufacturing firm, they are not in a buying frame of mind while watching dog videos at nine in the evening. The audience is too broad and the intent too thin to be worth it.

And a word on boosting posts, which is what most small businesses actually mean when they say they have "tried Facebook ads". Hitting the blue Boost button is the weakest thing the platform offers. It optimises for engagement, likes and comments, not enquiries, which is why it produces a warm glow of activity and an empty inbox. Real campaigns built in Ads Manager, aimed at leads or sales with proper tracking, are a different animal entirely.

The mistakes that quietly burn the budget

When Meta ads fail for a business that should have done well, it is nearly always one of a few familiar reasons.

The most common is sending clicks to a homepage. Someone taps an advert about your kitchen offer and lands on a general site with a menu, a blog and six other services competing for attention. They get lost and leave. A dedicated landing page, one page, one offer, one clear next step, will out-perform a homepage almost every time.

Close behind is tracking, or rather the lack of it. If the Meta pixel is not installed and set up properly, you are flying blind. You cannot see which advert produced an enquiry, so you cannot double down on what works or switch off what doesn't. You are just spending and hoping.

Then there is patience, or the shortage of it. Meta's system needs a little time and data to learn who to show your ads to. Judging a campaign after four days and £30 tells you almost nothing. Give it a fair run before you decide.

And finally, tired creative. The same image shown to the same people for two months stops working, people simply glaze over it. On Facebook and Instagram the picture and the first line of text are doing most of the heavy lifting, so they need refreshing more often than you would think.

They are not rivals

Here is the bit people miss. The question is rarely Facebook or Google. Used together they cover ground neither manages alone.

Meta builds awareness and interest in people who weren't yet looking. Some of those people, days or weeks later, go to Google and search for what you offer, and your Google Ads or your SEO catch them at the exact moment they are ready to act. One creates the demand, the other captures it. I have watched search enquiries climb simply because a sensible Facebook campaign was quietly warming up the local audience in the background. If you want to go deeper on that, I have written before about how SEO and Google Ads work together, and the same joined-up thinking applies to Meta.

So, should you try it?

If you sell something visual, considered, or impulse-led, and you are willing to run it properly rather than boost the odd post, then yes, Facebook and Instagram are well worth testing. Start with a modest budget, send the traffic to a proper landing page, make sure tracking is in place, and give it a few weeks before you judge it. Then do the thing I bang on about with every channel: watch the enquiries, not the likes. Vanity metrics feel lovely and pay no bills.

If you would rather someone set it up so you are not throwing money at the Boost button, get in touch. We will look honestly at what you sell and tell you plainly whether Facebook and Instagram ads are likely to work for your business, or whether your money is better spent elsewhere. Sometimes the most useful thing we can say is that it isn't for you, and that is worth knowing too.