Beginner struggling with Meta Ads settings on small budgets — need advice
Hi everyone, I’m pretty new to Meta Ads. Before this I worked as a door-to-door salesman, so my challenge isn’t really finding customers—it’s figuring out how to make ads and campaigns that actually work.
I’m from the Balkans, where we don’t usually work with big budgets, and honestly that part scares me a bit. My portfolio isn’t huge yet, but I’ve managed to get a few clients by pitching them something like: “$100 for 7 days, and if I don’t deliver results, you don’t pay me anything.” Kind of like a test drive.
The main issue I feel stuck on is the settings—I keep thinking I’m missing something. YouTube is full of videos that are basically just people trying to sell you a course or a Discord group, which isn’t helpful. After spending a few hours here, I learned about funneling and how it works. Can that even be applied with smaller budgets, like $300–$400 a month?
Right now, most of the people I work with want Instagram DMs—photographers just starting out, personal trainers, etc. With some of the ads I ran, I got good reach and decent conversion (around $2 per message), but with others I spent a chunk of the budget and got zero conversions.
So I’ve got some “stupid” questions:
- How many ads should I run at the same time?
- Could the client’s offer just be bad, and that’s why conversions are low (though I kind of doubt that)?
- I’m also not sure what style of images I should use for ads. Is there any place I can look for inspiration? And are videos generally better than images?
Any tips or advice would mean a lot. Thanks in advance!