The 7-Point
Ad Checklist.

The objective — are you telling Facebook to get you customers, or claps?

Facebook is ruthlessly obedient. It finds you exactly the people you asked for — so if you asked for engagement, it goes and finds the people who engage with things. There is a whole population of serial likers and commenters who will never buy anything, and Boost Post hands them your budget. The likes roll in, your phone stays quiet, and it looks like “Facebook doesn’t work for my business.” It worked perfectly. You just ordered the wrong thing.

The radius — are you paying to reach people who can’t reach you?

A car wash advertising to a whole province burns budget on people who’ll never drive in. It gets worse: Facebook spends where impressions are cheapest, and the cheapest attention is usually the furthest away and the least interested. So a wide radius doesn’t just waste money — it actively drags your spend toward the people least likely to ever walk in.

Think in minutes, not kilometres. Nobody drives 40 minutes past three competitors to get to you.

The offer — would you stop scrolling for it?

“Best salon in town” is not an offer. It’s a description. “Full colour + cut, R450, this week only, 6 slots left” is an offer — because it answers the three questions every scroller asks without realising: what exactly do I get, what does it cost me, and why should I do it now instead of never?

Most ads answer none of them. They talk about the business, not the customer’s decision. And a weak offer cannot be rescued by a bigger budget — you just pay more to be ignored.

The form — how many hoops before someone becomes a lead?

Every extra field loses submissions. Someone half-interested at a robot will not fill in eight boxes. But there’s a catch nobody mentions: a form that’s too frictionless fills your phone with people who tapped by accident. Cheap leads that never answer are not a win — you’ve just moved the cost from your ad account to your day.

The sweet spot is the bare minimum plus one question that only a real buyer bothers to answer. That one question does more filtering than any amount of targeting.

The follow-up speed — this is where most of the money is lost.

This is the one. If you fix nothing else on this list, fix this.

A lead goes cold in about five minutes. Not five hours. MIT’s research found you’re roughly 21× more likely to qualify a lead if you reach it within 5 minutes versus 30 — and 78% of people buy from whoever responds first, not whoever is best or cheapest. Meanwhile Harvard Business Review clocked 2,241 companies at an average first response of 47 hours.

Sit with that gap. The window is five minutes and the industry shows up two days late. Your competitor isn’t beating you on quality or price — he’s beating you because he replied while your lead was still holding the phone. You already paid for that lead. Someone else closed it.

The numbers — do you know your cost per lead and your close rate?

Cost per lead on its own is a vanity number, and chasing it will make you poorer. A R20 lead that never closes is infinitely more expensive than a R200 lead that books. The only number that decides whether you’re winning is cost per customer — and almost nobody running their own ads can tell you theirs.

The maths is primary school, which is what makes it embarrassing to skip:

The creative — does the first second stop the scroll?

People decide in about a second and a half. A polished ad with a weak first line loses to a rough phone video with a strong hook — every single time. Production value has never been the thing. Attention is the thing.

And your logo is not a hook. Nobody has ever stopped scrolling to admire a logo. The first frame and the first line have exactly one job: earn the second second.