How to navigate paid social, without setting your budget on fire
Be honest: have you ever logged into Ads Manager and picked an objective because it sounded roughly right, set a budget because it was the money you had, and hit publish hoping for the best?
Well, if the answer is yes, be comforted by the fact you’re not alone.
Paid social is one of those things that feels like it should be simple; you put money in, people see your ad, and a proportion of them will act on it… then two weeks later you're staring at a dashboard trying to work out why £400 bought you 12,000 impressions and precisely nobody doing anything about it.
We know just how tricky it is to get paid ads right.
That’s why we’ve outlined our top tips from our paid media team, exploring the three questions to ask yourself before you open ads manager, two mistakes that show up everywhere, and how much you should spend on each platform.
Three questions before you open Ads Manager
1. What do you want the ad to do?
Instead of having a general idea of what success might look like, for example, "Raise awareness", you’ll have more success if you frame it as "Raise £1,000”. Your goal needs to be measurable, so you can check against it later.
2. Who exactly are you trying to reach?
If you’re struggling to describe your target audience in one sentence, then we’d recommend taking some time to work this out. Knowing exactly who you're talking to will help sharpen what you say and show, and will ensure that it actually resonates with the people you’re trying to reach.
3. What do you want them to see?
Your creative assets will do a lot of the heavy lifting on paid social, so it’s important to pay attention to these. You can have a perfect objective and a beautifully defined audience, but these won’t have a chance to prove themselves if the ad doesn't stop the scroll.
Two mistakes that show up everywhere
1. Choosing the wrong objective
This one's sneakier than it sounds, because you're not just telling the platform what you want. You're telling it who to show your ad to.
If you pick:
An awareness objective finds people who tend to watch and notice things.
A traffic objective finds people who habitually click off-platform.
A conversion objective prioritises people with a track record of taking action.
And this is why the wrong objective gets you lots of impressions and no clicks. Or lots of clicks and no donations.
2. Making the ask too early
People don't usually donate the first time they meet you - and so running a “Donate now" ad campaign at someone who's never heard of your organisation is asking them to understand you, trust you and act, all in one scroll.
And unless you're a household-name charity, with lots of brand awareness, that's a lot.
Our top tip? Save your conversion and donation asks for warm audiences (ie, people who already have a sense of who you are) like website visitors, organic video watchers, or newsletter subscribers).
How do ads work on different social media platforms?
Meta
Meta is a brilliant place to start running ads. The advantage of doing so is high volume at low cost, because with 3.5 billion daily active users across the apps, it means you can find more or less any audience you're after.
It's also unbeatable for retargeting and reaching people who've visited your site, watched your videos or engaged with your posts. And given everything above about warm audiences, that matters a lot.
Compared with other ad spaces, Meta is relatively affordable to be able to test properly. A genuinely useful test can start at £10–20 a day.
Tips for improving your creative:
Lead with people, not logos. Heavily branded graphics get read as "ad" and scrolled past, whereas people-based content gives someone real to focus on.
Design for sound off. 85% of people watch without sound, so for accessibility and performance reasons, ensure you always have captions or on screen text available.
Hook in the first three seconds. You have only a few seconds to grab the attention of your audience.
Yes, the cost per click is higher, but it's not without reason. No other platform lets you target like this. You can filter by job title, seniority, company size and industry.
Suddenly, "Head of CSR or Sustainability at a company with 500+ employees" is a real audience you can build, which makes it useful for corporate partnership prospecting, sector-specific recruitment and volunteer drives, and getting reports or webinars in front of a professional audience.
Creative that works on LinkedIn:
Personal beats corporate. A post from a personal account will almost always outperform the same thing from the company page.
Open with a specific insight. Name the problem in the first line, then give something genuinely useful in exchange for their attention.
Keep video under 30 seconds for top-of-funnel. Longer can work if it's one person's story and the story is strong enough to hold attention.
Design for mobile. Bold, minimal, high contrast.
TikTok
TikTok reaches under-35s better than anywhere else, an audience getting steadily harder to find on Meta or LinkedIn. And it rewards content that looks like it belongs there rather than content that looks expensive, which is good news if your production budget is a phone and a decent idea.
Creative that works on TikTok:
Capture attention in the first frame. Not three seconds in. Open on the interesting moment, not the establishing shot.
Look like a creator, not a brand. Make it chatty, informal, and use platform-native texts, sounds, and trends. Anything that was obviously made elsewhere and dropped in to TikTok gets shown to fewer people.
Under 30 seconds, ideally 15. Completion is a strong signal; watch time drop-off is an expensive one.
So which platform, and how much?
What platform should you use, and how much should you spend on it?
We’d recommend you start with Meta. It’s the cheapest to test, easiest to set up, and has the widest reach. Then go to LinkedIn when you need specific professionals and can justify the cost. Spending ads on TikTok will work if you can genuinely produce native-feeling video on a regular basis - the platform is easy, the content is the hardest part.
Then split whatever you've got three ways:
A third to testing new platforms, new audiences, new creative. Expect some of it to fail. That's the job.
A third to scale what's already working. Increase daily budget by around 20% at a time; big jumps knock you back into learning.
A third to retargeting your warmest audiences. Best return you'll get, every time.
In summary
Here’s a checklist which’ll help you ensure you’re making the right decisions when it comes to paid ads.
Know what you want before you open the platform.
Make your creative native to where it's running, and try to avoid using one asset across all different platforms.
Match your ask to where someone actually is.
If you want to go deeper on this, our Accelerator programme is specifically designed for charities. It provides training, community and consultancy in one. Or if you'd rather just talk it through with someone first, just shout!
