How do I start running Facebook ads in India?

Create the ad account in your own Business Manager, install and verify the pixel, choose Messages or Leads as the objective, start at ₹700–1,000 per day on one ad set with manual targeting, run two or three creatives, and leave it untouched for seven days.

Should I use Advantage+ or manual campaigns in India?

Manual, below roughly $150–200 per day. Advantage+ underperforms manual setup by 30–40% at small budgets and tends to remain stuck in the learning phase.

Why should I use Click-to-WhatsApp ads in India?

They typically produce a cheaper result than lead forms, and a user contacting you through one opens a 72-hour window during which your messages to them are free.

How long before I judge a Facebook campaign?

Seven days without edits, with a checkpoint on day four or five against your budget divided by 7.14. Editing mid-flight restarts the learning phase.

How to Run Facebook Ads in India

This is the setup I use for a first campaign for an Indian business. It is deliberately small, because the goal of campaign one is information, not profit.

Before you open Ads Manager

Three things need to exist or the campaign is wasted money.

A page for the traffic to land on, with one action available. An offer you can describe in a sentence. And a way to respond to an enquiry within the hour, because the fastest way to waste ad spend is to generate leads nobody answers.

Step 1: the business account

Create the ad account inside Meta Business Manager under your own business, not a personal profile and not an agency’s account. You want to own the account, the pixel and the audiences permanently. Give an agency partner access rather than handing over ownership.

Step 2: the pixel, before anything runs

Install the Meta pixel and confirm it fires before you spend a rupee. A campaign that runs for a week without tracking has taught you nothing you can use.

Also set up the Conversions API if your platform supports it. Browser-only tracking loses a meaningful share of events to blockers and iOS settings.

Step 3: the objective

For most Indian small businesses starting out, choose Messages or Leads rather than Sales. Not because sales do not matter, but because a purchase event is expensive and you will not generate enough of them at a small budget for Meta to learn.

Click-to-WhatsApp deserves special mention here. In India it usually produces a cheaper result than a form, and it opens a 72-hour window in which your messages to that person are free.

Step 4: budget, and the number that matters

Start at ₹700 to ₹1,000 a day on one ad set. Meta needs roughly 50 conversion events in 7 days to optimise, which is about 7.14 a day, so your daily budget divided by 7.14 is the most expensive result it can sustain.

At ₹700 a day that is about ₹98 per result. Messages and cheap leads fit. A purchase for most offers does not. Match the objective to the budget or the ad set will never leave learning.

Step 5: targeting, and why I go manual

At small budgets I use manual placements and manual targeting rather than Advantage+. Below roughly 150 to 200 dollars a day, Advantage+ underperforms manual by 30 to 40 percent in my accounts and tends to stay stuck in learning.

Keep the audience broad enough to be reachable. In India a single city plus a wide interest is usually enough to start. Stacking five interests and three exclusions on a ₹700 budget starves the ad set.

Step 6: creatives

Two or three ads in the one ad set, no more. Different hooks, same offer. Speak to the specific problem in the first line, because that is all most people read.

Step 7: leave it alone

Seven days, no edits. Changing budget, audience, creative or the optimisation event resets the learning phase, so a campaign edited on day three has effectively never run.

On day four or five, check cost per result against your divided-by-7.14 number. Above it and something needs to change. Below it and you have something worth scaling.

What to expect

Roughly nine out of ten brand new cold audiences do not work. That is the normal outcome, not a failure. The discipline that compounds is running the cycle properly and letting the numbers decide, rather than reacting on day two.

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