If you’ve typed “how to advertise my business” into Google, start by working out what a new customer is worth to you, setting up your free listings and deciding on the one thing you want ads to do. Then test one channel, or ask someone who does this every day to run it for you.

Start with Google Ads if people already search for what you sell. Start with Facebook and Instagram ads if they don’t, and your product is easy to show in a picture or a short video. If you’re working out how to advertise a new business, pick one of the two, test it properly and add a second only once the first has earned it.

Google Ads has no set price and no monthly subscription: you choose a daily amount, and each click is priced in an auction. In our November 2026 data, a business can pay up to £0.56 for a click on “restaurants near me” in Belfast and up to £63.60 for “emergency plumber” in London. The right amount for you depends on what a new customer is worth, and you can work that out before you pay Google anything.

An always-on campaign is advertising that keeps running all year, with someone checking and improving it every week. A normal month means small, regular jobs: checking your tracking, blocking wasted searches, testing ad wording and reporting back. Six hours a month can keep one ad platform in good order, but it won’t cover new video, a tracking rebuild or the calls your ads bring in.

A Google Ads audit is a structured check of two things: whether your ad spend is reaching the right people, and whether you can trust the results being reported. You can do a useful one yourself in an afternoon by working through the eight checks below with your own sales records beside you. Change nothing while you look, and write down what you find.

Good website tracking means five things are true: Google Analytics records visits, conversion tracking counts real sales or enquiries, the Meta Pixel sends the right information, your cookie banner controls all of it, and you can explain why your numbers differ. You can test most of this yourself in an hour or so.

To scale Facebook ads safely, check six things before you raise your ad spend: your tracking, your cost per customer, your creative, your audience size, the learning phase and your capacity to handle more enquiries. If all six hold up, raise your ad spend in steps and watch what each new customer costs. If one fails, fix it first, because more ad spend will only make that problem more expensive.

A marketing funnel is the path a person takes from first hearing of you to paying you and coming back. When sales disappoint, one stage of that path is usually losing more people than it should. Count the people at each stage, find the weakest one and fix it before you spend more on ads.

You can test any sales target on one sheet of paper. Start with the sales you want and work backwards to the enquiries, clicks and ad spend it would take. If the answer is more than your team can handle or your bank account can carry, the target is too ambitious. If it barely uses what you’ve got, it’s probably too conservative.

Ads can bring clicks within a day or two of going live, but it usually takes about three months of steady running to judge them fairly. Google and Meta each describe a short learning period, measured in days or weeks. The rest of the time goes on collecting enough real enquiries and sales to tell a pattern from a lucky week. The 90 days is our rule of thumb rather than a platform rule, and nobody can promise what your ads will do, us included.