In short: Advertising on Instagram means running the ad through Meta's Ads Manager, not pressing Boost. Boosting is the same money spent with almost none of the control and none of the measurement. The order that matters is: fix what happens after the click, set up the tracking, make several genuinely different pieces of creative, then build the campaign and leave it alone long enough to learn. Most people do the reverse, start with the settings, and blame the algorithm.
Below is a full worked example. The brand is invented for this article, a fictional candle maker, so nothing here is anyone's real numbers or real campaign.
The example
Ridge & Ember, an invented small candle brand. Sells online, one hero product at $48, decent photographs, a Shopify store that works. Never advertised before.
Step 1. Look at what happens after the click
Before any account setup, open the page the ad will send people to, on a phone.
For Ridge & Ember that is the product page for the $48 candle, not the homepage. Sending paid traffic to a homepage asks the customer to go looking for the thing you just showed them, and a good share of them will not.
What gets checked:
- Does it load quickly on a phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi?
- Is the price visible without scrolling, and is postage knowable before checkout?
- Do the photographs answer the obvious questions? For a candle: how big is it, what does it smell like, how long does it burn?
- Can someone buy it in a few taps without making an account?
If something here is broken, fix it before spending anything. Ads pointed at a leaking page buy you a bigger audience for the same disappointment, and this step costs nothing.
Step 2. Set the account up properly
- A Business Manager account, with the ad account inside it, in the brand's own name. Never run ads from a personal profile, and never let anyone else own the asset.
- The Meta pixel installed on the site, plus the Conversions API if the platform supports it. Shopify does, through Meta's own channel app. The two together give a far more complete picture than the pixel alone.
- The events that matter switched on and confirmed working: page view, add to cart, purchase. Test with a real purchase, or Meta's testing tool, and watch the event arrive.
That last part is not optional bookkeeping. If purchases are not recorded properly, the system cannot optimise toward them and you cannot read the results. Everything downstream becomes guesswork with a chart on top.
Step 3. Make several genuinely different pieces of creative
For Ridge & Ember, five ideas, not five crops of one photograph.
- The product, cleanly. The candle lit, in a dark room, shot close.
- In use. A hand lifting the lid, the wick catching, someone reading beside it.
- The making. Wax being poured, wicks trimmed, labels going on.
- Founder to camera. Fifteen seconds, in the workshop, no script. "I started making these because every candle I liked cost ninety dollars."
- Something unexpected. The candle burning down over ten hours in time lapse. Odd, oddly watchable, and unlike anything else in the feed.
Different formats too: at least one still and several videos, all shot vertical, all readable with the sound off. Each video opens on its strongest three seconds. No logo, no title card.
Step 4. Build the campaign
In Ads Manager, from the top down.
- Objective: Sales. Not traffic, not engagement. Tell the system to find buyers and it will find buyers. Tell it to find clicks and it will find people who click and never purchase.
- Conversion event: Purchase. Optimise for the thing you want, not a proxy.
- One campaign, one ad set to start. Splitting into many ad sets divides your budget into pieces too small to learn from.
- Audience: broad. Location, an age range if genuinely relevant, and little else. Stacking interests to build a small audience mostly makes reach expensive now. The creative does the targeting.
- Placements: automatic. Let Meta put the ad where it performs. Manually restricting placements is a common way to pay more for less.
- All five creatives inside that one ad set, so they compete and the system can pick.
Ridge & Ember sets a daily budget it can sustain for several weeks without flinching. That number matters more than its size.
Step 5. Then do nothing
This is the hardest step and the one most people fail.
Meta needs an uninterrupted run of results before its delivery settles. Every meaningful edit disturbs that: changing the budget, swapping the audience, pausing and restarting. Do it repeatedly and you pay for the learning period again and again without ever arriving at the part where it works.
So leave it. Not "check it hourly and resist the urge", genuinely leave it, and look properly after a couple of weeks. A quiet first weekend means nothing at all.
Step 6. Read it, then act
After a fortnight, look at one thing first. What did a purchase cost, against what you keep from a sale?
Ridge & Ember keeps roughly half of $48 after wax, glass, packaging and postage. So the question is whether a sale costs meaningfully less than that. If yes, put more budget behind it. If it is close, the repeat purchase question decides it. Candles get rebought, so a first sale can be worth more than it looks.
Then look at which of the five creatives did the work. Usually one or two carry it and the rest do nothing. Make more like the winners, retire the rest, and keep at least one new idea in rotation.
If nothing worked, the answer is almost never the settings. It is the offer, the page, or the creative, in that order of likelihood.
What to skip
- Boost. Same money, far less control, no proper conversion measurement.
- Buying followers or engagement. It measures nothing you can bank.
- Rebuilding the campaign every few days. See step five.
- Detailed interest targeting, unless you have a specific reason. It is the instinct that costs beginners the most.
The order, one more time
The order that matters
- 01The page
- 02The tracking
- 03The creative
- 04The settings
- 05Patience
- 06The numbers
Related: how many ads to run, how long your video should be, and what it all costs in Australia.
If you would rather not learn all this yourself, that is exactly what I do. Meta ads set up, run and handed over, in your name.