On Google, someone types what they want and you appear. Intent already exists and you are buying a place in it.
On Facebook and Instagram nobody is looking for you. They are looking at a friend''s holiday. You are the interruption.
That changes everything about how it has to work.
The creative is the targeting
The instinct is to narrow the audience. Age, suburb, interests, job title. Build the perfect segment and show it one ad.
That worked years ago. It works much less now, and it means you are paying to reach a small pool repeatedly.
The approach that works: go deliberately wide, and let the creative do the segmenting. One campaign, one ad set, and a lot of different creative. The right ad finds the right person, because the person who stops scrolling on an ad about retaining walls is telling you something no targeting checkbox can. That is how we run Meta ads.
For one client we ran twenty two creatives that way. Social cost per lead went from $221.14 to $92.34.
What makes an ad stop a scroll
It looks like a photograph, not an advertisement. Real work, real site, real weather. The polished render loses to the phone photo of a finished driveway almost every time.
It says one thing. An ad that lists six services says nothing.
It is legible at the size it is actually seen, which is small and moving.
And it is honest about what happens next. "Get a quote in 24 hours" beats "contact us".
Volume is the method
You will not guess which creative works. Nobody does, including people who have been doing it for twenty years.
So produce more than feels reasonable, run them, and let the numbers decide. Most will do nothing. One or two will carry the account. That is normal and it is why volume is not laziness, it is the method.
The honest part
Meta leads are colder than Google leads. Somebody who searched is ready. Somebody who saw an ad between two holiday photos is curious.
That shows up as a lower conversion rate from enquiry to job, and it is fine as long as the lead is cheap enough. What it is not is a channel where you can send one ad and wait.