The question is asked as if these were two products. They are not. Instagram and Facebook ads are the same auction, bought through the same Ads Manager, differing by placement.
Which changes the useful question from “which platform” to “which placements, and what creative do they need.”
What actually differs
Audience skew. In India, Instagram indexes younger and more metro, Facebook reaches deeper into tier 2 and tier 3 and older demographics. Neither is better; they are different rooms.
Cost. Placement costs move with competition and season rather than being fixed by platform. Reels inventory has generally been cheaper than feed because supply is large, though that gap narrows as more advertisers move there.
Intent. Both are interruption channels. Nobody on either platform was looking for you, which is the entire reason creative matters more here than on search.
The setting most Indian advertisers get wrong
Letting Meta choose placements automatically at a small budget.
At the budgets most Indian small businesses run, up to about 4,000 rupees a day, manual placement selection consistently outperforms in my accounts. Automatic placement spreads a small budget across 18 possible placements, which means none of them get enough data to learn.
Advantage+ has a similar problem below roughly 150 to 200 dollars a day, where it underperforms manual setup by 30 to 40 percent and tends to stay stuck in learning.
The creative mistake that costs more than the targeting
Uploading one image and letting Meta crop it for every placement.
There are three ratios that matter: 1.91 to 1 for feed, 9 to 16 for stories and reels, and 1 to 1 for square placements. Across 18 placements, one auto-cropped asset produces awkward, text-clipped, badly framed versions in most of them.
Making three properly framed versions of the same creative is an hour of work and it is one of the highest-return hours available in a campaign.
Creative that works on each
Reels and stories need movement in the first frames, captions because most people watch on mute, and a big top heading. Feed tolerates more text and does well with testimonials, price-led images and carousels that teach.
Two details that avoid trouble: never put the Facebook or Instagram logo in your creative, and avoid drawn arrows, mouse cursors and fake play buttons. Both cause disapprovals.
So which should you run
Both, in one ad set, with manual placements chosen deliberately and three creative ratios prepared.
Then read your own placement data after a week and cut what is not working. Your account is the only benchmark that matters, and it will disagree with every article including this one.
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