On this page
- The short version
- Your radius is the hard control. Everything else is broad.
- Use Advantage+ audience, but feed it suggestions
- Optimise for conversions, even on £5 a day
- Switch off Advantage+ creative enhancements
- Check your placements every week
- Website first. Lookalikes later.
- What £5 to £10 a day actually buys, and how to read it
- Your set-up checklist
- Read next
The short version
The catch: Meta is very good at spending your money. Left on its defaults, it will happily find you cheap clicks from people who will never buy, run your ads on random apps, and let its AI "improve" your creative until it looks like everyone else's.
Here's how we stop that for small local clients:
- Your location radius is the only hard control. Keep it tight.
- Go broad and let the ad do the qualifying. No interest stacking.
- Use Advantage+ audience, but feed it suggestions. Your customer lists, retargeting lists and a few relevant interests, as hints.
- Optimise for conversions, even on £5 a day. Not Traffic. This is the opposite of LinkedIn.
- Switch off Advantage+ creative enhancements by default.
- Check your placements every week. Facebook Feed often wins. Turn Audience Network off completely and push spend towards the feeds.
- Send people to your website, not Meta's instant forms, unless you don't have a usable site.
- Lookalikes come later, once you have real customer or conversion data.
What this looks like in practice: one of our local services clients launched on a brand-new website with no history, spending £10 a day. Set up this way, it's bringing in regular qualified leads at £13.43 each.
01Your radius is the hard control. Everything else is broad.
Set a tight location radius around where you actually work or deliver. If you clean offices in Leeds, that's Leeds plus the few miles you'll realistically travel. Not "United Kingdom". Not "Yorkshire" because it felt safer.
The radius is one of the few settings Meta treats as a rule rather than a suggestion. So it's where your precision lives.
Then go broad on everything else. Most B2B interests on Meta are either tiny or meaningless. We checked in Ads Manager in October 2026: "Business decision makers" reaches 1,200 to 1,400 people in the whole of the UK. "Small business owners" reaches over a million, which tells you how loose it is. (Full breakdown here.)
So stop trying to find the perfect interest. Stacking five of them with "Narrow audience" mostly just makes your ads expensive.
Let the creative do the qualifying instead. An ad that only makes sense to an office manager who's been let down by their cleaner will filter better than any interest. A photo of a grim office kitchen with "Cleaner not turned up again?" does more targeting work than a week fiddling with audiences.
Your landing page does the rest. If the page is clearly about commercial cleaning contracts in Leeds, the wrong people bounce and Meta learns who the right ones are.
02Use Advantage+ audience, but feed it suggestions
Advantage+ audience is Meta's AI deciding who sees your ad. A lot of people switch it off because it feels like losing control. For small local businesses, we leave it on. Inside a tight radius, with decent creative and a clear landing page, it gets better over time.
What we do with clients is give it a head start. Under audience suggestions, add:
- Your customer list. Names, emails and phone numbers. Add phone numbers, because people sign up to Facebook with personal emails, not work ones, so B2B email-only lists match badly.
- Your website visitors from the last 30 to 180 days.
- Retargeting lists: people who've engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page, watched your videos, or opened a lead form.
- A few relevant interests. As hints, not filters.
This is not interest stacking. You're not narrowing the audience. You're telling Meta's AI where to start looking, then letting it find more people like them.
It helps to know which settings Meta treats as rules and which it treats as hints:
| Meta treats as a rule | Meta treats as a hint (with Advantage+ audience on) |
|---|---|
| Location | Interests and detailed targeting |
| Minimum age | Custom audiences you include |
| Custom audience exclusions | Age range and gender |
| Language | Lookalikes |
So if something must not happen, like showing ads to your existing customers or to people outside your area, set it as an exclusion or in the location. Everything else is a nudge.
03Optimise for conversions, even on £5 a day
This is the one most small businesses get wrong. They pick "Traffic" because it feels like the cheap, safe option for a small budget.
Traffic does exactly what it says. Meta finds the people most likely to click. Not the people most likely to fill in your form. Those are very different people, and the clickers are usually the cheap, bored, scroll-happy ones.
So on Meta, choose the Leads objective, set the conversion location to Website, and optimise for your actual conversion event: the quote request, the contact form or the booked call.
Do this even on £5 a day. Meta's official line is that an ad set needs around 50 conversions a week to fully exit the learning phase, and you won't get anywhere near that on a small budget. Doesn't matter. In our experience Meta still optimises towards conversions far better than towards clicks, even when conversion volume is low.
A real example: for a US tax specialist we run Meta for, a conversions campaign took the weekly cost per booked call from $119 (£89) down to $64 (£48) within six weeks of launch. Their Google Search account averaged $92 (£69) per consultation over the previous six months. Same business, same calls. Meta caught up fast because it was optimising for the booking, not the click.
This is the opposite of LinkedIn. On LinkedIn we start on Website visits, because conversion volumes are tiny and the targeting is already precise. On Meta the targeting is loose, so you need the conversion signal to steer it.
One rule before you spend anything: your Meta Pixel and conversion event must be working. Submit your own form, check the event shows up in Events Manager, then launch. If you optimise for an event that never fires, Meta is optimising for nothing.
04Switch off Advantage+ creative enhancements
Advantage+ audience: good. Advantage+ creative: be very careful.
When you build an ad, Meta switches on a stack of AI "enhancements" by default. Depending on the format, that can mean rewriting your text into variations, expanding or cropping your image, "touching up" brightness and contrast, adding music, adding overlays, or dropping your ad into a template.
Some of these are harmless. Plenty of them quietly ruin the ad. Your carefully written hook gets swapped for a bland AI variation. Your plain, slightly scruffy iPhone photo, the thing that made it feel real, gets polished into something that looks like every other ad in the feed.
We've seen campaigns go from working to not working with nothing changed except Meta's enhancements kicking in.
So our default is simple:
- Switch them all off at ad level when you create each ad.
- Only turn one back on if it keeps the ad exactly as you designed it.
- Check again every time you add or duplicate an ad. New ads often come with the enhancements switched back on.
05Check your placements every week
Meta shows your ad across a lot of placements: Facebook Feed, Instagram Feed, Stories, Reels, Messenger, the right-hand column and Audience Network (third-party apps and websites). A lot of those are a waste of money. They rack up cheap, meaningless impressions and clicks that never turn into anything.
Turn Audience Network off completely. It's full of accidental taps inside mobile games. There's no version of a small local campaign where it earns its place.
Feeds are the premium placements. Facebook Feed in particular. Everyone says Facebook is dead. The business owners in your area scrolling it at 9pm say otherwise. Stories and Reels can do well too, but only for the right audience with creative made for them, not a square image stretched to fit.
So shift the spend. Where your account lets you, use Meta's value rules to bid significantly more for Facebook Feed and less for the weaker placements.
For the US tax specialist above, Facebook Feed brought in 12 of their 16 booked calls, at $105 (£78) per booking. Instagram Feed cost $259 (£193) per booking. Same ads, same audience. So we moved the bids towards Facebook Feed.
The important bit is checking regularly. Every week:
- In Ads Manager, open Breakdown, then By delivery, then Placement.
- Look for placements eating budget that aren't turning into landing page views or conversions.
- Move spend away from them, and towards the placements that are.
Cost per click on its own will mislead you here. The cheapest clicks are often the worst ones.
A warning: since August 2026 Meta has been testing removing placement exclusions on some Leads and Sales ad sets. If you can't untick a placement any more, the weekly check matters even more: watch the breakdown, adjust your value rules, and make creative for the placements that work. (Source and context.)
06Website first. Lookalikes later.
Send people to your website, not Meta's instant forms. Instant forms pre-fill people's details, so filling one in takes two taps. That sounds great until you call the leads. Lots of them don't remember enquiring, gave a personal email they never check, or just tapped through by accident.
Your own website makes people put in a tiny bit of effort, which is exactly what filters out the time-wasters. It also lets you track properly and build retargeting audiences from your visitors.
The exception: if you genuinely don't have a usable website, an instant form is better than nothing. Add a question or two that makes people think, so you're not drowning in accidental leads.
Lookalikes come later. A lookalike built from a list of 40 customers, or from a pixel that's seen three conversions, is mostly Meta guessing. Wait until you have a decent customer list (a few hundred, with phone numbers) or real conversion data. Then test one as an audience suggestion, alongside your others, not as your whole strategy.
07What £5 to £10 a day actually buys, and how to read it
On a £150 to £300 a month budget, with Meta clicks typically costing £1 to £4, you're looking at somewhere between 40 and 300 clicks a month. That's enough to learn something. It's not enough to judge a campaign after three days.
Give it at least a week of proper spend before you change anything. Then work through it in this order, because the order matters:
- Is it actually spending? Daily budget × days live should roughly match what you've spent. If you're well under, that's a delivery problem (audience too small, ads stuck in review, payment issue). Fix it now. Don't wait.
- Are the settings right? Optimising for the conversion event, tight radius, creative enhancements off, Audience Network gone.
- Is your tracking working? Fill in your own form. Does the conversion show up in Events Manager?
- Are the right people clicking? Check the age, gender and placement breakdowns. Mostly Facebook Feed, mostly working-age adults in your area? Good.
- If all of that checks out and you're getting clicks but no enquiries, it's not the ads. It's your landing page or your offer.
That last one is the uncomfortable bit. Check whether the page headline matches the ad, whether there's one obvious next step above the fold, and whether it works properly on a phone. Then be honest about the offer. "Contact us for a quote" is weak. "Free trial clean for your office, no contract" gives a busy office manager a reason to act today. (Our B2B landing page template.)
And change one thing at a time. Change the audience, the creative and the landing page in the same week, and you'll never know which one worked.
Your set-up checklist
Before you launch:
- Meta Pixel installed and your conversion event tested with a real form fill
- Objective: Leads, conversion location Website, optimising for your conversion event
- Tight location radius around where you actually work
- Advantage+ audience on, with your customer list, website visitors and engagers added as suggestions
- Existing customers added as a custom audience exclusion
- Advantage+ creative enhancements switched off on every ad
- Audience Network unticked
- Ads point to a page that matches the ad, with one clear next step
- Daily budget set to your monthly budget ÷ 30
Every week after:
- Spend roughly matches budget × days (if not, fix delivery first)
- Placement breakdown checked: anything spending without turning into landing page views or conversions gets less budget
- Creative enhancements still off on any new or duplicated ads
Want the full walkthrough, with an AI coach that knows your business?
That's what B2B Ads Kickstart is for. If you're spending £1,500+ a month and don't have time to run it yourself, book a call instead.