Social ads: advertising on social networks

What are social ads?

Social ads, or social media advertising, are paid ads served on social platforms. They appear in feeds, stories, short videos or messaging apps. Each ad platform has its own management tool: Ads Manager at Meta, Campaign Manager at LinkedIn, TikTok Ads Manager at TikTok.

The difference with paid search lies in intent. On Google Ads, the ad answers a search: the demand already exists. On a social network, the ad interrupts a feed: it has to create interest. The two levers complement each other. How the first one works is explained in our SEA guide.

The lever carries a lot of weight. According to the SRI, Social was the leading growth driver of digital advertising in France in 2025. On its own, it captured 44% of the market’s growth over the year. Video accounts for 58% of its revenue.

How does the social ads auction work?

Every time a slot opens up in a user’s feed, the platform runs an auction. It decides between the ads targeting that person. The winner is not necessarily the one who pays the most.

Meta: total value

At Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger), the winning ad is the one with the highest total value. A floor price applies. According to Meta’s help page on auctions (accessed on September 24, 2026), this value combines three factors:

• the advertiser’s bid;
• estimated action rates, meaning the probability that the person will carry out the intended result;
• ad quality, assessed in particular from the feedback of people who saw or hid the ad.

The consequence: a relevant ad can beat an ad with a higher bid. The same page states that clickbait and engagement bait do not improve performance. Sensationalist language also weighs on quality.

LinkedIn: bid and relevance

On LinkedIn, two factors determine which ads appear: the bid price and relevance to the member. Relevance reflects the likelihood of engagement. It takes into account the member’s activity, the page context, the ad content and the targeting.

Three bidding strategies exist: maximum delivery, manual bidding and cost cap. Source: LinkedIn’s help page on bidding, accessed on September 24, 2026.

Which social ads strategy should you adopt?

A social ads strategy comes down to five decisions: the objective, the platform, the audience, the creative and the measurement. The following sections detail them one by one. They are often organised around the buyer’s journey, in three stages.

Stage of the journey	Audience	Campaign objective	Creative
Discovery	People who do not know you (criteria, lookalike audiences)	Awareness or traffic	Short video: one problem, one benefit
Consideration	People who have watched your videos or visited your site	Traffic, engagement or leads	Demo, customer case, useful content
Conversion	Recent visitors, abandoned carts, warm leads	Sales or leads	Offer, proof, direct call to action

With a small budget, start with the stage closest to the sale. Remarketing to visitors of your site is part of it, with their consent. Then expand towards discovery, once measurement is reliable.

Which platform should you choose: Meta, LinkedIn or TikTok?

The choice depends on your target and on what you sell. Each platform has its strengths, none suits everything.

Platform	Where the ads appear	Strength	Typical use
Meta	Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, partner network	Audience volume, optimisation for sales	E-commerce, B2C, lead generation
LinkedIn	LinkedIn feed, messaging, partner network	Targeting by professional criteria	B2B, recruitment, high-value offers
TikTok	“For You” feed, TopView, partner network	Vertical video, young audiences	Awareness, launches, products that can be demonstrated
Pinterest, Snapchat	Pins, stories, messaging	Visual inspiration, vertical format	Home decor, fashion, food, consumer goods

A simple rule to start with: concentrate the budget on a single platform. Keep it there as long as measurement is not reliable and no combination works yet. A combination means one audience, one message and one offer. Spreading a small budget over three platforms prevents each of them from learning.

Which campaign objective should you choose?

The objective is the most important setting of a campaign. It tells the algorithm which result to look for. Meta offers six simplified objectives, described in its help page on objectives (accessed on September 24, 2026):

Meta objective	What the algorithm looks for	When to choose it
Awareness	Reach as many people as possible who are likely to remember the ad	New brand, name change, launch
Traffic	Send visitors to a website, an app or a page	Get content read, feed a remarketing audience
Engagement	Get messages, video views, interactions	Start conversations, run a community
Leads	Collect contact details (form, call, sign-up)	Lead generation, sign-ups, quote requests
App promotion	Get an app installed or used	Mobile user acquisition
Sales	Find the people most likely to buy	E-commerce, with conversion tracking in place

A common trap: choosing “Traffic” when you want sales. The algorithm will then deliver clicks, often from people who click a lot and buy little. If you expect a sale or a lead, choose the matching objective. You then need to be able to measure it.

How do you target the right audiences?

Three families of audiences exist on every platform:

• Audiences defined by criteria: age, location, interests, and on LinkedIn, job title, industry, company size.
• Custom audiences: visitors to your site, people who have engaged with your content, imported customer lists.
• Lookalike audiences: people similar to your customers, calculated by the platform from a source audience.

The platforms push towards broader targeting, left to the algorithm. It finds by itself the people close to the objective. This works if the algorithm receives enough conversions to learn. On a small account, more precise targeting often remains easier to read.

Which ad creatives work on social networks?

As targeting broadens, the creative becomes the main lever. It is the creative that selects the audience. A video that speaks to small business owners will be watched by small business owners. The algorithm will then learn to find more of them.

• a hook visible in the first three seconds, readable without sound;
• the native format of each placement: vertical for stories and Reels, square or vertical for feeds;
• a concrete benefit rather than a slogan, and a proof (sourced figure, demo, customer review);
• a call to action consistent with the campaign objective;
• several variants tested in parallel, refreshed when performance drops.

To find examples, look at other advertisers. The Meta Ad Library shows the active ads of each page. TikTok offers a creative center with ad examples. The goal is not to copy. It is to spot the formats and hooks your market has already seen, so you can stand out from them.

Organic content that performed well is a good candidate for sponsoring. It has already proven that it interests people. Production methods are in our guide to social media strategy.

How do you measure social ads conversions?

Each platform provides a tracking tool to install on your site. At Meta, the pixel can be complemented by the Conversions API. It connects your marketing data directly to Meta’s optimisation systems: server, website, app, CRM. It also covers offline conversions, according to Meta’s help page on the Conversions API (accessed on September 24, 2026).

At LinkedIn, the LinkedIn Insight Tag is a JavaScript snippet. It is used to measure conversions, retarget site visitors and obtain aggregated insights about audiences. Source: the Insight Tag FAQ, accessed on September 24, 2026.

Read the platforms’ figures with some distance. Each one attributes conversions to itself according to its own rules. Added together, the totals often exceed actual sales. Compare them with your analytics tool and your CRM. When the platform offers it, measure the real effect of a campaign from time to time with an incrementality test. The tracking method is detailed in our web analytics pillar.

What budget should you plan for social ads?

Social ads have no fixed price. You set your own budget, daily or lifetime. The cost of a result depends on your audience and on the competition for that audience. It also depends on your creatives and your conversion rate. As with SEA, the calculation works backwards, from what a customer brings you.

1. Target cost: set the acceptable acquisition cost. Start from the margin on a sale, or from the value of a lead multiplied by the close rate.
2. Test phase: a few weeks, two or three audiences, several creatives, a single objective.
3. Sufficient budget: give each ad set enough budget to get readable results.
4. Reallocation: shift the budget to the combinations that reach the target cost, cut the others.

Fictional example: you are willing to pay €60 per quote request. After four weeks, one audience brings in requests at €45, another at €120. You shift the budget to the first one. You test new creatives for the second before dropping it.

If clicks come in but requests do not follow, look at the landing page before touching the campaigns. That is the territory of conversion rate optimization.

Social ads or Google Ads: which should you choose?

The two levers do not meet the same need. Google Ads captures expressed demand. Social ads create demand among people who were not yet searching.

Criterion	Social ads	Google Ads (Search Network)
Trigger	The user’s profile and behaviour	The query typed by the user
Timing	Before the need is expressed	When the need is expressed
Main lever	The creative and the audience	The keyword and the ad
Strongest use	Awareness, launches, remarketing	Existing demand, purchase intent

Remarketing makes the link. A visitor who came through search can be reached again on social networks, with their consent. Retargeting on partner sites and apps falls under programmatic display.