We are a social media advertising agency in Toronto

Yes, though the platform has changed enough since 2014 that the approach which worked five years ago often fails now. Meta has become more automated, more competitive and far more dependent on creative quality. The detailed audience targeting that used to be the skill has largely been taken over by the algorithm, which finds buyers on its own if the creative and the offer give it something to work with. That is the practical shift: the lever that moves results is now what you show people, not who you show it to. The businesses doing well have creative that looks like it belongs on the platform rather than in a brochure, an offer people respond to, and enough new material to replace what fatigues. The businesses struggling are usually running one video from last year to a narrow audience and concluding the channel is finished. Two things to plan for. Creative fatigue is real and faster than most owners expect, so a working account always has something new in production. And the learning period is real too, which means constant tinkering resets it and teaches you nothing. We have managed Facebook and Instagram campaigns through every major platform change since 2014, and have generated over a million leads across that period. The channel still works. How you work it has to keep moving.

Costs vary with your category, your audience size, your creative and how many others are bidding for the same attention. Cost per thousand impressions typically ranges from $5 to $30 for most business categories, so a $3,000 monthly budget reaches somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 people depending on targeting. Cost per lead runs from under $5 in broad consumer categories to over $50 in competitive professional services. In our own accounts, gym campaigns average around $22 per lead and one med spa client generated 80 leads at $15 each in their first month, which gives a sense of the range in local service categories. Two things move the number more than bidding does. Creative quality, because a piece of content people actually watch earns cheaper delivery from the platform itself. And seasonality, since January in fitness or December in retail can double what the same campaign cost in the quiet months. Budget matters as well: too small and the campaign never leaves the learning phase, which in most local categories means something in the low thousands per month rather than a few hundred. The question is not what Meta ads cost but what a customer is worth to you, and whether the cost per acquisition beats your next best channel. We give an honest view of the likely range before any campaign starts.

Google Ads meets intent. Someone is already searching for what you sell, and the ad decides whether they find you. Meta reaches interest and behaviour, putting your business in front of someone who fits the profile but was not looking. One captures demand, the other creates it, and the difference decides which is right for you. If people actively search for your service, an emergency plumber, a dentist, a lawyer, search is usually the more efficient starting point. If people do not know they want it yet, or if the product sells on how it looks, Meta is where the demand gets made. Three practical differences follow. Measurement is cleaner on search, because a click on a search term is easy to attribute, while social often creates demand that shows up later as a branded search or a direct visit. Creative demand is higher on Meta, since the ad has to earn attention rather than answer a question, and that means an ongoing production commitment rather than a set of text ads. And the maths differs: search costs more per click and converts faster, while social costs less and takes longer to pay back. Most businesses that do well run both, with search catching the people ready now and social keeping the pipeline filled behind them.

They reach different audiences and expect different content. TikTok skews younger, rewards raw and authentic material over polished production, and favours anything that feels native to the platform rather than like an advertisement. Its algorithm is content-driven rather than audience-driven, which means a strong piece of creative can reach a large audience almost regardless of targeting, and a weak one goes nowhere no matter how the campaign is set up. Facebook and Instagram reach a broader age range, support more formats, from static images and carousels to long video, and lean more on audience signals and retargeting. The practical question is usually creative capacity rather than audience. TikTok needs a steady supply of native video, and a business that cannot produce it, or an owner who will not appear on camera, will struggle there whatever the budget. Meta will run on a smaller volume of assets and can carry still images, which suits businesses whose product photographs well. Retargeting is also stronger on Meta, which matters for anything with a considered purchase. We manage both and put budget where the returns are, which in most local service categories still means Meta first, and TikTok tested where the audience is genuinely young and the product is visual.

Creative, offer and targeting have to work together, and when a campaign underperforms it is almost always the first two rather than the third. The creative has to stop the scroll and then speak to the person as though it was made for them, which usually means real footage of the real place, people who look like the customer, and the first second doing the work. The offer has to give a reason to act now, and it has to be something the business is genuinely happy to deliver, since a discount that attracts the wrong customer is worse than no campaign. Targeting matters least, because Meta has become good at finding buyers when the other two are right. No amount of audience refinement rescues a weak offer. What we do instead of guessing is test systematically: several pieces of creative against one offer, then the winning creative against a different offer, changing one thing at a time so the result means something. Everything after the click counts as well. A lead form that asks for four fields converts better than one asking for eight, and a reply that arrives in minutes converts far better than one arriving tomorrow. We look at all of that before touching campaign settings.

Retargeting shows ads to people who have already visited your site, watched your video, or engaged with your page. Those audiences convert at far higher rates than cold ones, because the interest is already there, and a well-built retargeting campaign usually delivers the lowest cost per acquisition in the account. The mechanics are straightforward: a Meta Pixel and the Conversions API on your website, custom audiences built from visitors and engagement, and ads matched to how far along someone is. What separates a good retargeting setup from a token one is segmentation. Someone who viewed a service page yesterday and someone who watched three seconds of a video last month should not see the same ad, and the person who already enquired should be excluded entirely, since nothing wastes budget and goodwill faster than advertising to an existing customer. Frequency needs watching too. Retargeting audiences are small, so the same person can see an ad many times in a week, which turns interest into irritation. We cap it and rotate creative. The honest caveat is that retargeting cannot carry an account on its own. It converts demand that something else created, so it scales only as far as the traffic feeding it, which is why it works best alongside a cold campaign rather than instead of one.

By connecting spend to outcomes rather than to reach. The starting point is conversion tracking set up properly through the Meta Pixel and the Conversions API, with every meaningful action attributed back to the campaign and the piece of creative that produced it. For an online store the headline number is return on ad spend, revenue divided by spend, judged against a break-even figure calculated from your margins rather than an industry benchmark. For lead generation it is cost per lead and, more importantly, lead quality, because a cheap lead that never books is the most expensive thing in an account. Attribution deserves honesty here. Since the privacy changes, platform-reported conversions and what you can see in your own analytics rarely agree, and both are partly wrong. We look at platform numbers, analytics, and the client business numbers together, and where they disagree we say so rather than picking the flattering one. Two habits keep the reporting straight: comparing total enquiries and revenue against the periods before the campaign, which catches the effect the platform cannot see, and asking your team what the enquiries were actually like. We report cost per acquisition and return on ad spend monthly and tie them to real revenue wherever the data allows.

They support each other. Social advertising builds familiarity at scale, and familiarity shows up as branded searches, direct visits and people arriving already knowing who you are. Those are also the conditions in which an assistant is more likely to name you, because the signals these models weigh, being mentioned in more places, being described consistently, having reviews and coverage, tend to grow when a brand becomes known. What we would not claim is a clean causal line from an impression to a citation. Nobody can measure that today, and an agency telling you otherwise is guessing. What we can do is run both and watch the honest indicators together: branded search volume, direct traffic, review velocity, and how often you are named in AI answers for a fixed set of questions we test each month. There is one practical overlap. The questions people ask assistants reveal how they frame a category before they have the vocabulary to search for it, and those framings often make excellent ad copy, because they are the customer's own words. We manage paid social and GEO together for clients who want visibility in both places, and we report them side by side rather than implying one bought the other.