Most of what you spend never reaches us.
Two amounts leave your account every month. A studio that quotes one number is hiding which.
Why we would start with Instagram
A boutique, a pasticceria and a b&b all sell something that photographs well, and Instagram is where a photograph is the whole advert. A heating engineer sells a problem being over, which photographs badly and reads well.
The platform is the same buying system either way. Which surface the money lands on is a judgement about your stock, not about the software.
The two amounts
The budget goes to Meta and buys the showing. The fee comes to us and buys the setting up, the writing, the watching and the changing. They arrive on different invoices because they are different purchases.
Anybody who gives you one figure for both is either guessing at your budget or taking a cut of it.
What decides the fee
How many audiences, how many pieces of creative, how often it changes, and whether somebody is answering the messages that come back. A single campaign for one shop that runs all year is not the same work as 4 seasonal ones.
We charge it flat rather than as a share of the budget, so the advice to spend more is never advice that pays us more.
What decides the budget
What you sell it for, how often somebody buys again, and how many people within reach could plausibly want it this month. A 40 euro haircut and a 4,000 euro boiler need completely different arithmetic before a cent is spent.
Start at a number you would not miss, run it long enough to mean something, and read the enquiries rather than the likes.
Where the money goes missing here
An advert in Italian that lands on a page in English. A message on a Saturday that gets read on Monday. A phone number on the profile that rings in a back room nobody sits in.
None of that is the campaign. All of it is paid for by the campaign, and it is the cheapest part of the whole exercise to fix.
Questions worth asking
Can you run it in Italian?
Yes, and the advert, the page it lands on and the reply all have to be in the same language or the money leaks between them. That is the ordinary case here rather than a special request.
Do you take a percentage of the spend?
No. A flat fee, agreed before anything runs. A percentage pays a studio more for telling you to spend more, and we would rather not have that conversation with ourselves.
How long before we know if it works?
Long enough for the platform to stop guessing and for enough enquiries to arrive that the number means something. Judging a campaign after 3 days is judging noise.
What if it does not work for my trade?
Then we say so and stop. Some things sell on a search and not on a scroll, and a studio that cannot tell you which yours is has not looked.
Tell us what you sell and what a customer is worth to you, and we will tell you whether ads are the right lever at all. Get a free audit.
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