Google Ads catch people who are already searching for what you sell. Facebook and Instagram ads do the opposite: they put your café, clinic, gym or shop in front of people in your town who were not looking yet. Most Cyprus owners have tried this once by pressing the blue Boost post button, spent twenty euros, and decided it does not work. It does work. It just needs five things set up properly first.
Boost is not the same as an ad campaign
Boosting pushes an existing post to more people and reports likes and reach. That is fine for a one-off event. For anything that should bring customers through the door, open Ads Manager inside Meta Business Suite instead. It lets you choose what you are paying for, where the ad is shown, exactly who sees it, and what counts as a result. Both Facebook and Instagram are run from the same place, so one campaign covers both.
Pick one objective and mean it
Ads Manager asks what you want before it asks for money. For a local business the honest answer is almost always one of three:
- Leads: messages on WhatsApp or Messenger, or a short form. Best for clinics, services, trades and anything booked by conversation.
- Traffic: visits to one specific page, such as a menu, a price list or a booking page.
- Sales: purchases on your online shop. This needs the Meta Pixel installed so the ad platform can see what happened after the click.
Skip "awareness" unless you are opening a brand-new place. Awareness campaigns are cheap per view and report big numbers, but they are built not to ask anyone to do anything.
Targeting in a small country
Cyprus is small, and that changes the advice you read online. Start with a radius around your location, not the whole island: five kilometres for a café or salon, fifteen for a clinic or showroom. Set the languages to both Greek and English, because the platform reads the phone's language and a large part of your customers use each. Then stop. Stacking ten interests on top of a 15 km radius leaves an audience so small the ads stop being shown.
Two audiences beat any interest list. The first is people who have already visited your website or engaged with your Instagram in the last 30 days. They know you, and a reminder ad to them is the cheapest result you will buy, which is the same idea behind retargeting. The second is a lookalike built from your customer list once you have a hundred or more real buyers to upload.
Creative that works for local ads
People scroll past stock photos in a quarter of a second. What stops the thumb is a real photo or a ten-second phone video of your actual place, your actual food, your actual team. Put the offer in the first line of text, because that is all most people read. Make one version in Greek and one in English rather than mixing both in one ad, and end with one clear action: message us, book now, see the menu.
Upload three or four variations of image and text and let the platform spread the budget towards the one that performs. In a market this size the same ad wears out fast, so plan to refresh the creative every two to three weeks.
Budget, patience and the numbers that matter
Five to ten euros a day is enough to learn something, and that is the point of the first campaign: learning, not profit. Give it two full weeks before judging, because the platform spends the first days finding the right people. Then look at one number only: cost per lead, cost per message, or cost per purchase. Reach, likes and video views are not results.
To see that number you need the Meta Pixel on your site and, ideally, the Conversions API set up by whoever built the site, since browsers now block part of what the Pixel alone can see. Add UTM tags to every ad link so Google Analytics shows the same visits from its side. The method is the same as the one in our guide to conversion tracking. From then on a twenty-minute weekly check is enough: pause the ad costing twice as much per lead as the others, and move its budget to the winner.
Five mistakes we see every month
- Sending the click to the homepage instead of one page built for the offer.
- Switching the campaign off after two days because nothing happened yet.
- Running ads with no Pixel, so nobody can say what the money bought.
- Letting messages and comments wait until the next morning. Ads create enquiries fast, and the reply speed decides the sale.
- Boosting every post equally. Boost the one that already proved itself, as covered in our Instagram guide.
Where to start this week
Install the Pixel, build one campaign with the leads objective, a 10 km radius, both languages and three ad variations, and give it fourteen days at seven euros a day. If you would like a second pair of eyes on your current page and ads before you spend, our free social media audit is the quickest place to start, or talk to us about running campaigns for you.
- facebook ads
- meta ads
- social media
- advertising
- cyprus
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