Paid social reaches people by interest, demographics, location, behaviour, and previous interaction with the business. Nobody has to search for anything first. That is the advantage of the channel, and it is why targeting carries more weight here than almost anywhere else you can put a budget.
The hard part is deciding who to target, what to show them, and when to show it. We build campaigns around the business goal first, whether that is leads, ecommerce sales, promoting a service, building awareness, or bringing previous website visitors back to the site.
Starting from nothing or already spending every month on social ads, we look at the same things: who the ads reach, what those people see, where they land, and what the campaign gets judged on.
Request a paid social review →Paid social lets a business reach people based on their interests, demographics, location, behaviour, and previous interaction with the business. None of them need to be looking for you at the time. You choose the room. Earning the attention once you are in it is a separate job.
So the challenge is deciding who to target, what to show them, and when. Build the campaign around the business goal first: generating leads, driving ecommerce sales, promoting a service, building awareness, or bringing previous website visitors back to the site. The goal decides the audience, the creative, and the number the campaign gets judged on.
If your spend sits specifically on Facebook and Instagram, the platform-level detail lives on our Meta ads agency Montreal page. This page is about how a paid social account is managed, whichever social platforms the budget ends up on.
A paid social campaign is not one decision. The audience, the creative, the offer, the landing page, and the tracking only make sense in relation to each other, which is why we manage them as one thing rather than as a monthly checklist. Most of the accounts we look at are not broken in an exotic way. Two or three of these six were never set.
We manage paid social campaigns around the audience, offer, budget, and objective of the business. The structure follows what the business is trying to achieve, not what maximizes impressions or clicks, so we agree the objective before anything gets built.
Facebook and Instagram both reach new and existing audiences. We build campaigns around different audience groups and objectives, and adapt the ads to where people are in the buying process rather than repeat one ad across every stage of it.
Location, demographics, interests, online behaviour, website visitors, existing customers, previous engagement, and similar or lookalike audiences where they are available. We pick the combination per campaign rather than copy the last one that worked.
Images and video, ad copy, headlines, offers, and calls to action, tested in different combinations. Campaign data tells us which messages and formats are producing better results, instead of assuming one advertisement works for everyone.
Campaigns aimed at people who have already interacted with the business, such as website visitors or previous ad engagers. We set the audience and the retargeting period to suit the business and the type of purchase being considered.
Conversion tracking first, then the metrics that match the objective, then the changes that follow from them. Regular campaign reviews are what show whether the targeting, the creative, or the budget needs to move.
We manage paid social campaigns around the audience, offer, budget, and objective of the business. A campaign can be structured around any number of goals, and the right structure is the one that reflects what the business is trying to achieve rather than the one that maximizes impressions or clicks.
Those goals are not interchangeable. A campaign built to fill a form and a campaign built to sell a product want different audiences, different creative, and different budgets, and they stop being comparable the moment they are put in the same report.
So the first decision is which of these the campaign is for, and the second is what would count as it working. Both are business questions, and both are easier to answer before the account is built than after three months of spend. A campaign with no agreed definition of success will always look like it is doing something.
Facebook and Instagram reach both new and existing audiences. They sit in the same ad account and share the same audiences and the same creative library, so they are worth planning together rather than treating as two separate media buys.
We create campaigns around different audience groups and objectives, with ads adapted to where people are in the buying process. Someone who has never heard of the business needs the offer explained. Someone who read a service page last week does not.
One campaign introduces a service to a new audience. Another reaches people who have already visited the website or interacted with the business. Splitting them is also what makes the reporting readable, because the two will never produce the same cost per result.
Paid social gives a business several ways to define an audience. Targeting gets built from location, demographics, interests, online behaviour, website visitors, existing customers, previous engagement, and similar or lookalike audiences where they are available.
For Montreal businesses, location targeting keeps the spend on the areas the business actually serves. A service business with a two-borough radius and a store shipping across the province are not the same campaign, even when the ad is identical.
Which signals to combine is a campaign-by-campaign decision. A prospecting audience and a retargeting audience are defined in opposite directions, and the audience that worked for one offer is not automatically the audience for the next one.
The creative has to give people a reason to stop, understand the offer, and take the next step. A well-defined audience shown a forgettable ad is still a forgettable ad, and the platform will keep delivering it for as long as the budget holds out.
So we test different combinations of images and video, ad copy, headlines, offers, and calls to action. We change one part at a time against the same audience, because a test that moves three things at once gives you a result without giving you the reason for it.
Campaign data shows which messages and creative formats are producing better results, instead of assuming one advertisement works for everyone. The same data tells you when a creative has run long enough and needs replacing.
A visitor who leaves without enquiring is rarely an uninterested visitor. Most of them were just not ready to buy that day. Retargeting reaches people who have already interacted with a business, such as website visitors or previous ad engagers, with an ad written on the assumption that they already know who you are.
These campaigns bring visitors back to a product page, follow up with potential leads, promote an offer, remind visitors about a service, and move people further through the buying process. Each of those wants its own message rather than the prospecting ad shown a second time.
The audience and the retargeting period should be appropriate to the business and the type of purchase being considered. A repeat purchase somebody decides on in a minute and a service that takes two months to choose do not deserve the same window.
For service businesses, paid social generates enquiries through landing pages or lead forms. A campaign targets people in Montreal who fit the business's customer profile and points them at one specific service or offer.
Then track those leads through the process, not just to the form. That is what shows the business which campaigns are producing useful enquiries, and a cheap lead that never becomes work is not actually cheap.
That tracking is also what makes the campaign manageable. Once enquiries can be traced back to the audience and the creative that produced them, the budget has somewhere obvious to move, and the conversation stops being about how many leads came in.
For ecommerce businesses, paid social covers product discovery, remarketing, and sales campaigns. It is one of the few channels where somebody finds a product they were not looking for and buys it in the same session.
We structure campaigns around products, customer groups, previous website activity, and stages of the buying journey. A first-time visitor, someone who left a full cart, and a repeat customer are three audiences with three offers, and the store usually already knows which of them is worth the most.
We measure performance through product views, add-to-carts, purchases, and revenue. Reading the whole chain beats reading one conversion number at the end of it, because the chain shows where people are dropping out.
Impressions are the easiest number in the account to grow and the least useful one to manage against. They belong in the report as context, not as the headline, and a campaign can pile up plenty of them while the business gets nothing.
The most important metric depends on what the campaign is designed to achieve. A lead-generation campaign should not be judged in the same way as an ecommerce sales campaign, and reading either one against the wrong number is how a campaign that was working gets switched off.
Paid social campaigns underperform for reasons that usually sit outside the advertising platform. Audiences left too broad, the same creative running for months, traffic sent to an unrelated landing page, messages never tested against each other, poor conversion tracking, retargeting audiences too small to serve, and clicks measured instead of actual business results.
None of those show up as an error in the ad account. They show up as a campaign that spends its budget on schedule and produces very little, which is the hardest kind of problem to notice from inside a monthly report.
Regular campaign reviews are what identify where changes are needed. Not every review ends in a change, but the ones that do usually start somewhere in that list rather than in the bidding.
For businesses serving Montreal and the surrounding areas, a campaign can be fenced geographically and still use audience and behavioural signals inside that fence. The two are not alternatives. Location narrows the room, and the rest of the targeting decides who in it is worth paying to reach.
We build the campaign around the locations, customers, services, products, and budget that matter to the business, not around whichever setup the platform suggests by default.
Local leads, online sales, and reaching a new audience are three different jobs, and the strategy has to follow whichever one the business is actually after. Worth settling before any budget is spent.
Paid social creates demand from people who were not looking yet. These are the pages for the platform underneath it, the channel that catches that demand once it turns into a search, and the store side of the same budget.
We plan and manage paid social campaigns: audience targeting, campaign setup, creative testing, retargeting, conversion tracking, and ongoing optimization. Book a free 30-minute call and we will tell you what we would change first and why.