Meta advertising means running paid ads across Meta Platforms, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network. You create one campaign in Ads Manager and Meta distributes it across placements based on your settings and its algorithm. The same creative can run as a Facebook feed post, an Instagram Reel, a Messenger inbox ad, or inside third-party apps via the Audience Network.
That reach is why Meta is still the dominant paid social channel for most DTC brands. Over 3 billion people use at least one Meta product every day.
How the ad auction works
Meta runs an auction every time it has an opportunity to show someone an ad. The winner is not simply the highest bidder. Meta scores each competing ad on three factors: your bid, the estimated probability that the person will take your desired action, and the quality and relevance of the ad itself.
Advertisers with lower bids but highly relevant ads routinely beat higher bidders. That is the lever most brands underestimate. Better creative is cheaper reach. The auction rewards ads that people actually engage with, not just ads from brands with the biggest budgets.
Ad formats
Meta offers more ad formats than almost any other platform. Single images are fast to produce and still perform well in retargeting. Single videos have the highest reach potential for cold audiences. Carousels let you show up to ten images or videos in one ad, which works well for product ranges. Collection ads are an immersive shopping experience that pulls directly from your product catalogue.
Stories and Reels are vertical and full-screen. They feel the most native to how people actually use the apps, which is why they tend to outperform feed placements for cold traffic when the creative is good.
The format matters less than the creative. A mediocre static image will not outperform a strong video just because you chose the right placement. Test both. The data will tell you what works for your specific audience and offer.
Targeting
Meta's targeting used to be its biggest selling point. Detailed interest stacks, lookalike audiences built from your customer list, precise custom audiences from site visitors. Advertisers spent years learning to build tight audience segments.
Since iOS 14 and ongoing signal loss, that approach has gotten less reliable. Meta has been pushing advertisers toward broader targeting, with fewer restrictions and more signals left to the algorithm. The playbook shifted. Creative does the targeting now.
A video that speaks directly to new moms will find new moms, regardless of the interest settings. Meta's algorithm figures it out. The audiences that still matter most are custom audiences (people who visited your site or bought from you) and retargeting (people who showed intent but did not convert). For cold traffic, broad targeting with strong creative often outperforms narrow interest stacks.
Why Meta is still dominant for DTC brands
Every year someone declares Meta advertising dead. Every year DTC brands keep spending on it.
The reason is purchase intent at scale. Meta has billions of users who have shown financial behavior through what they follow, engage with, and buy. No other platform has that combination at that scale. TikTok has attention. Google has explicit search intent. Meta has behavioral purchase signals across the broadest possible audience.
For most DTC brands, Meta is still the highest-ROAS channel when the creative is right. The creative is the variable most brands underinvest in relative to targeting and budget.
How to actually win on Meta
The fastest way to improve your Meta ads is to study what is already working for other brands. Meta maintains a public Ad Library where you can see every active ad from any advertiser. It is the only major ad platform that offers that level of transparency.
The brands that consistently win on Meta are not guessing at creatives. They watch what competitors run, note which ads stay live for weeks or months (longevity is a profitability signal), analyze the hooks and offer structures that keep appearing, and brief their creative teams against real examples rather than abstract frameworks.
The advantage is not budget. It is creative velocity built on actual market intelligence.