What is Meta Ads? Features, Campaigns, and KPIs

Meta Ads: A complete guide to Facebook and Instagram advertising

What is Meta Ads and what is it used for?

Meta Ads is the advertising platform of Meta, allowing businesses and marketers to create paid advertising campaigns across Meta’s ecosystem, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network. Designed to enhance brand visibility, drive traffic, and increase conversions, Meta Ads offers advanced targeting and analytics tools that help advertisers reach their ideal audience.

Meta Ads serves a variety of business objectives, including:

• Brand Awareness: Increasing visibility among potential customers.
• Lead Generation: Collecting user information via forms.
• Sales and Conversions: Driving purchases or sign-ups.
• Traffic Generation: Directing users to a website or landing page.

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Advantages of advertising on Meta Ads

Meta Ads enables us to run advertisements on the world's most popular social media platforms, reaching over 2.28 billion users on Facebook and 1.74 billion users on Instagram as of February 2025, according to a study by We Are Social. In addition to reaching a large audience, Meta Ads is one of the most cost-effective advertising platforms.

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The Meta Ads interface

The Meta Ads Manager is the main dashboard for creating, managing, and optimizing campaigns.

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Account Overview

This page, displayed above, summarizes the key aspects of your campaign and provides recommendations to help you improve its performance.

Campaigns

You will see the details of your various campaigns and how they perform.. Meta Ads operates on a three-level hierarchy:

• Campaign Level: Define the marketing objective (awareness, consideration, or conversion).
• Ad Set Level: Set targeting, placements, budget, and schedule.
• Ad Level: Create the ad content, format, and CTA.

So, when you click on a campaign, a new page will open, providing a deeper level of information.

Ads Reporting

On this page, you can apply filters to analyze your campaign and ads in depth. Simply select the criteria you want, and the data will be displayed in a structured sheet.

This table provides basic insights but is not optimal for refining your strategy. We recommend creating a dashboard with the KPIs that matter most to you, using a tool like Looker Studio. To help you get started, Catchr offers a ready-to-use template for Meta Ads.

Audiences

‍Advertisers can refine their audience using:

• Core Audiences: Based on demographics, interests, and behavior.
• Custom Audiences: Retarget users who have interacted with the brand.
• Lookalike Audiences: Expand reach to users similar to existing customers.

Advertising settings

As the name suggests, this page allows you to customize your advertising settings to better suit your needs.

‍‍‍Ad Formats

‍Meta Ads supports multiple formats, including:

• Single Image or Video Ads
• Carousel Ads
• Collection Ads
• Stories and Reels Ads

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Different types of Meta Ads campaigns

Meta offers several campaign types tailored to different objectives:

Awareness

• Awareness: Show ads to people who are most likely to remember them.

Consideration

• Traffic: Drive users to a website, app, Instagram profile, or Facebook event.
• Engagement: Increase interactions, messages, video views, post engagement, and event responses.
• Leads: Collect potential customer information for businesses.
• App Promotion: Encourage people to install and engage with an app.

Conversion

• Sales: Target people likely to make a purchase.

Essential KPIs to track for Meta Ads

To optimize campaigns, advertisers must monitor key performance indicators (KPIs):

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Start analyzing your Meta Ads campaigns on Looker Studio

‍Gain deeper insights into your Meta Ads performance with Catchr. Get a free Meta Ads Looker Studio template, specifically designed to help you monitor and optimize your campaigns effortlessly.

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Meta Ads is a powerful advertising tool for businesses of all sizes. With its advanced targeting, diverse campaign formats, and robust analytics, advertisers can maximize their ROI. Tools like Catchr further streamline data analysis, providing actionable insights through Looker Studio templates. By leveraging these resources, marketers can optimize campaigns effectively and drive measurable success.