Facebook and Instagram ads for Swiss SMEs.

Meta Ads pay off when your offer is understood in the feed within a second and a customer is worth more than you pay to win them. Both can be checked before launch: the first with a look at your imagery, the second with three numbers from your business.

The channel works well for offers with a visual subject: a new lunch menu, a collection, a course with fixed dates, a product from the online shop. Meta can serve such ads tightly by location, for example within a few kilometres of a restaurant, and to people who have already visited your website (retargeting). Job ads for trades whose people are rarely on LinkedIn often run better here than on job boards.

It works badly for services people search for anyway. Somebody with a blocked drain does not scroll Instagram, they search on Google, where paid search is cheaper and faster. And for B2B by role and industry Meta is imprecise, because the platform has no reliable job data — LinkedIn is more precise there, but considerably more expensive per contact.

A Meta campaign has three levels: campaign, ad set and ad. At campaign level you choose the objective — awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion or sales. It is the most important setting, because Meta shows the ads to exactly the people most likely to fulfil that objective. Choose "traffic" and you get clicks, not customers.

At ad set level you fix audience, location, budget and placements: Feed, Stories and Reels on Facebook and Instagram, plus Messenger and Meta's network. The ads themselves are image, video or carousel with copy, a link and a call to action. For leads there are instant forms that open inside the app, pre-filled with profile data. They lower the barrier but also bring less considered contacts; the data has to flow into your system automatically, or it sits at Meta for days.

Creative matters more at Meta than at Google. An ad has to work on a phone, in portrait and without sound, and stand out in the first second. It also wears out: when the same audience sees the same ad too often, the effect drops. Running Meta therefore needs fresh creative on an ongoing basis, not one set produced once.

Without measurement Meta optimises for what it can see — clicks and likes, not your customers. So before the first franc of ad budget we set up measurement, just as with conversion tracking for Google Ads.

The Meta pixel on the website reports what happens after the click: enquiry sent, appointment booked, purchase completed. Since browsers and operating systems restrict tracking and many people decline cookies, the pixel alone misses a large share of the data. The Conversions API additionally sends enquiries and purchases directly from the server to Meta. Shopify has an official connection for this; on custom websites we build it into the form or the checkout.

Consent remains mandatory. In Switzerland the revised Data Protection Act applies, and for visitors from the EU the GDPR as well. The pixel therefore runs through your consent banner, and some conversions will never be measured. Plan that gap in rather than being surprised by missing numbers at the end of the month.

Meta Ads cost the ad budget you pay to Meta plus management — and whether that pays off is decided by the price per enquiry or sale alone. You set the ad budget yourself. Depending on the objective Meta charges per thousand impressions or per click, and the price is set in an auction. It moves with audience, season and ad quality, and rises clearly before Christmas.

We deliberately quote no click or impression prices here. There are no publicly audited figures for Switzerland, and international averages across all sectors say nothing about your account. The only robust arithmetic uses your own numbers: divide the contribution margin of a new customer by the number of enquiries you need for one sale. That is your maximum price per enquiry. After a few weeks the measurement shows the actual price; if it is higher, the campaign is rebuilt or stopped.

There is no flat fee for management. The effort depends on the number of campaigns, on who supplies images and videos, and on the measurement still missing. We set it out in a written quote after a conversation. The ad budget always goes directly to Meta and is never part of our quote. Our binding price is for Google Ads management: from CHF 300 per month for an ad budget of up to CHF 1,500.

For online shops Meta links ads to the product catalogue: the ad shows the products a person has viewed or that suit them, with the current price. The basis is a catalogue in Commerce Manager fed from the shop. On Shopify this runs through the official connection, which also sets up the pixel and the Conversions API.

As with Google Shopping, the campaign is only as good as the product data. Wrong prices, missing sizes or sold-out items in the ad cost money and trust. So we check the catalogue first, then purchase measurement, and only then the campaigns. How we build shops is on Shopify agency Switzerland.

We set up Facebook and Instagram campaigns, manage them on an ongoing basis and judge them by enquiries and sales, not reach. The ad account, the pixel and the audiences run under your company; we work in them as a partner with access.

Management covers the channel decision, building the account and measurement, audiences and campaigns, ad copy and assembling the creative, a matching landing page and a monthly report with the price per enquiry. Images and videos come from you or your photographer; what we produce is stated in the quote. Organic management of your profiles — editorial plan, posts, community — is not part of this offer.

What we cannot show: a published reference for Meta Ads and figures from client accounts. We do not invent any. Ask every provider for a look inside a real ad account, the definition of an enquiry and whose account does the counting — the checks are listed under choosing a digital agency in Switzerland.

In four cases we advise against starting, and we say so before the quote.

• There is search demand you are not yet collecting. If people already search for your service and you do not appear on Google, the budget belongs in search first.
• There is no measurement and nobody wants to set it up. Then all that is left at the end of the month is reach, and every budget decision is a guess.
• There is no imagery. Without photos or short videos that show your offer, the ad loses to every private post in the feed.
• The website cannot take the enquiry. Anyone sent to a slow home page without a clear form is gone. Fix the page first, then advertise.

Which channel comes first is something we settle in digital marketing consulting, before an ad account is opened anywhere.