One supposedly simple Instagram campaign and the increasingly complicated business of spending your own advertising budget.

I wanted to run an Instagram ad.

A defined audience, a modest budget and a piece of creative already designed and ready to go. Nothing particularly complicated. Well, that’s what I thought.

Several hours later, I was still in Meta Ads Manager, trying to establish which settings I’d actually changed, which ones Meta was recommending I change and whether any of the decisions I’d made were still in place.

I’d been through audience controls, audience suggestions, Advantage+ placements, creative enhancements and spending settings. I’d encountered creative previews with mysterious black borders and an option concerning spending on placements I’d specifically excluded.

Then, as if to congratulate me on my perseverance, Meta Ads Manager presented me with a score of 100. Perfect, except the ads were inactive.

I was beginning to suspect that Meta Ads Manager had been designed by several different teams who had never met, each determined to make their particular settings impossible to find.

All I wanted was to run an advert. Instead, I was getting a rather intimate introduction to Meta’s internal bureaucracy.

Kafka would have loved it.

When did Meta become the marketing manager?

Here’s what bothers me. I’m paying to advertise. I’ve decided who I want to reach, where I want the ad to appear and how much I want to spend. These are basic campaign decisions, and I’ve already made them.

Meta, however, seems determined to have the final say.

Choose an audience and you’ll encounter controls and suggestions that don’t necessarily mean the same thing. Choose placements and Meta will enthusiastically explain why you might be better off letting its systems decide. Open the creative settings and you’ll find more opportunities to optimise something you thought you’d already finished.

Some recommendations are useful and the algorithm may well spot opportunities I’d otherwise miss, but having to hunt around Meta’s rather clunky interface just to work out whether I’m being offered advice or being told what to do is infuriating.

Surely that distinction should be obvious without having to open another six menus?

I don’t mind Meta offering automation. What I mind is how difficult it makes things when I want to make those decisions myself.

If I’ve made a deliberate decision, I shouldn’t need to conduct an archaeological dig through Ads Manager to establish whether it still applies.

The curious case of the unticked box

At one point, I found myself investigating a setting related to spending on placements I’d specifically excluded.

The relevant option appeared unticked. Yet there I was, trying to work out whether it affected something I’d already decided. I wasn’t witnessing Meta secretly spend money against my instructions. The campaign wasn’t running and I hadn’t established that anything had been overridden. That’s almost beside the point.

Why was the interface making me question a choice that should have been clear?

It’s like dealing with a particularly stubborn bureaucrat who asks you to complete another form confirming that you really did mean what you wrote on the previous one. The frustration isn’t simply the number of settings. It’s the uncertainty about what they actually do.

In advertising, that matters. A placement can affect how the creative looks, audience choices influence who sees the message and a small change to delivery can undermine the point of a carefully designed test. I’d rather spend my time making those decisions than trying to work out whether Meta has made them for me.

A perfect score and an inactive campaign

Of everything I encountered that afternoon, the score of 100 remains my favourite.

I know what an opportunity score is. It’s based on the platform’s recommendations, not on whether the campaign has delivered results. A score of 100 doesn’t mean the advertising is performing brilliantly, or even that it’s running.

There’s still something gloriously ridiculous about seeing that perfect score while trying to get an advert off the ground.

It felt like being congratulated for completing a marathon while standing at the starting line. A gold star from Meta was the last thing I needed. What I wanted was a clear explanation of why my ads weren’t running.

Instead, I had another number on a dashboard.

Advertising wasn’t the most expensive part

My irritation aside, there’s a rather serious business problem hiding underneath all this.

Small businesses are encouraged to advertise on social media because the entry cost is relatively low. You don’t need an enormous budget to test an idea, reach a potential customer or find out whether a particular message works.

In principle, that’s a tremendous opportunity, but the advertised cost of running a campaign tells only part of the story. Nobody puts the hours spent navigating Ads Manager into the daily advertising budget.

A founder might have a few hours a week to devote to marketing. They may understand their customers, know exactly what they’re selling and have a perfectly sensible idea of how to reach the right people. They may have survived cash flow crises, difficult customers and countless sleepless nights, yet nothing could quite prepare them for the labyrinth that is Meta Ads Manager.

Next thing they know, they’re trying to work out where Meta has hidden the option they need, why an audience suggestion isn’t necessarily an audience restriction or whether an automated placement will make their carefully designed creative look dreadful. All this just to run a small advertising campaign.

Even professionals who use these platforms regularly can lose valuable hours investigating settings, deciphering warnings and checking that a campaign has been configured as intended. That time has a cost and it’s often higher than businesses realise.

Think about what else could have been done in those hours. A conversation with a prospective customer, a better landing page, a sharper offer, a piece of content worth reading. Instead, the work becomes an exercise in managing the tool that’s supposed to help you do the work.

A campaign might eventually deliver a perfectly respectable cost per click. But if getting it live required half a day of professional time, the numbers on the advertising dashboard don’t tell the whole story.

When did the advertiser become the inconvenience?

Meta has built an extraordinarily powerful advertising business. It gives organisations of all sizes access to audiences and targeting capabilities that would once have been out of reach, which makes the experience of actually using its advertising tools all the more infuriating.

Meta can analyse enormous amounts of data and automate remarkably complex advertising decisions. Explaining a setting to the person paying for the advert appears to be beyond it.

There’s also an uncomfortable imbalance here. Businesses invest in creating content, building brands and developing relationships with customers. They pay Meta for access to audiences, then have to work within whatever interface and advertising options Meta chooses to provide.

Every advertising platform has its own rules. Fair enough, but when businesses depend on those platforms to reach customers, a difficult interface is no longer just an annoyance. It costs them time and money.

Dear Meta, here’s a radical idea

Make it easier for advertisers to make decisions.

If a setting is compulsory, say so. If it’s a recommendation, explain why. If accepting it changes my audience, placements or creative, tell me how. Briefly. Preferably in plain English.

If I’ve excluded something, make it clear whether that exclusion still applies. If my ads aren’t running, make it easy to find out why before showing me another perfect score.

Nobody expects digital advertising to be entirely straightforward, but surely a company with Meta’s resources could make running a simple campaign a little less of an ordeal.

The irony is that Meta keeps promising to make advertising easier through automation, while making it increasingly difficult to understand how much control you’ve handed over. I guess that’s what irritates me most. I don’t mind technology being clever. What I can’t stand is feeling as though my decisions are merely suggestions until Meta has had its say.

I began the afternoon trying to promote an Instagram post. By the end of it, I was wondering whether Ads Manager should come with a complimentary counselling session.

The advertising budget wasn’t the expensive part.

My afternoon was.

Written by Vanya Milovanovic, Stellar & Rose