Updated: July 2026 | Originally published: March 2019
We wrote about Facebook advertising for the first time in March 2019. The pitch back then was straightforward: build a custom audience, layer on some interests, pick from a list of ad formats, and let the platform find your people. That advice worked in 2019. Running an account that way in 2026 means fighting the algorithm instead of using it.
So the real question isn’t whether Facebook advertising still works. It’s whether your account is set up to use it the way it actually runs now.
The Reach Question Was Never in Doubt
Facebook still has 3.07 billion monthly users, more than any other single platform, and ads on the platform can reach roughly 2.28 billion people globally. Nearly 40% of social users say they use Facebook to discover new products, which means people on the platform aren’t just scrolling past your ad. They’re often looking for exactly what you sell. Scale was never the argument against Facebook. Cost and relevance were, and both have shifted since 2019 in ways the original version of this post didn’t anticipate.
The Algorithm Took Over Targeting
The biggest change since 2019: Meta stopped relying mainly on the audience settings you build and started reading your creative instead. The system behind that shift, Andromeda, decides who sees your ad based largely on what the ad says and shows, not the interests and demographics you selected when you built the campaign. We covered what that means for how paid media gets managed in The Paid Media Manager Is Dead, so we won’t repeat it all here. The short version: custom and lookalike audiences still work as guardrails, but your creative is doing the targeting work that audience settings used to carry alone.
That’s the part of the 2019 post that aged the worst. Building increasingly narrow custom and lookalike audiences was the right move under the old model. It works against you now.
The Ad Menu Got Shorter
The original post listed ten ad types, from Collections to Instant Experience to Event Responses. Most of those distinctions no longer exist at the campaign level. In 2022, Meta folded eleven separate campaign objectives into six under a framework called ODAX, Outcome-Driven Ad Experiences: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales. You still pick formats like single image, carousel, or video inside a campaign, but the strategic decision happens at the objective level now, and choosing the wrong one is still the fastest way to waste a budget. Pick Traffic when what you actually want is purchases, and Meta hands you a pile of cheap clicks from people who were never going to buy.
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What It Actually Costs
Average cost per click on Facebook runs around $0.83, with CPM near $11.20 and CPA around $7.50 across all objectives, though those numbers swing hard by industry. B2B and SaaS advertisers often see CPMs of $15 to $30 or more because the audience is narrow and valuable, while ecommerce and retail typically land in the $7 to $12 range. Meta’s system needs roughly 50 conversion events per ad set per week to exit the learning phase, so a $20 target CPA means budgeting close to $1,000 a week in that ad set just to give the algorithm enough data to work with. Below that, you’re paying to teach the system rather than to get results from it.
Video is the cheapest inventory on the platform right now, and Reels specifically. Reels placements are currently running 30 to 40% below feed CPMs because ad inventory has grown faster than advertiser demand for it. That gap will close as more advertisers catch on. Right now it’s one of the more reliable ways to stretch a small budget.
What Actually Works Now
A few things separate accounts getting real results from ones burning budget on outdated habits. Creative variety carries more weight than audience precision does. Feeding Meta several hooks, formats, and offer angles gives the algorithm something to test against real behavior. One polished ad, run once, gives it almost nothing.
Clean conversion data matters just as much. Fixing Conversions API setup typically reveals 20 to 40% more conversions than Meta was previously reporting, and an algorithm working off half your actual conversion data optimizes toward the wrong half. If your Pixel and Conversions API aren’t both firing correctly, that’s worth fixing before touching anything else on the account.
And for ecommerce, Advantage+ Shopping campaigns are delivering roughly 32% lower cost per acquisition compared to manually configured campaigns, the kind most advertisers still default to out of habit.
So, Should You Still Advertise on Facebook?
Yes, if you’re willing to run it the way it actually works today. The audience is there, the cost data holds up against most alternatives, and the platform still converts. What’s changed is what it takes to make that happen. An account still running narrow interest stacks, one hero ad, and heavy manual targeting isn’t running Facebook’s current version. It’s running the 2019 one, at 2026 prices.
If you want a read on how your current setup measures up, let’s have that conversation.
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