Core Ads Foundational Study

Nobody had asked small business advertisers what they were actually doing

Meta Business Suite’s Core Ads team had plenty of usage data on small-business advertisers, but usage data tells you what people clicked. It doesn’t tell you what they were trying to do or where they got stuck. This was the team’s first deep dive into that gap: understand the actual ad-creation journey for small business owners, and turn that into a shared, evidence-based starting point for the roadmap.

Seven advertisers, 60 minutes each, deliberately picked for range

I led the study end to end: recruitment criteria, interview guide, moderation, synthesis, and the recommendations that came out of it. Rather than recruit a convenience sample, I deliberately spread the seven participants across both advertising experience and campaign goal, from people who’d run paid campaigns for years to people who’d barely started, brand awareness versus direct sales, and across genuinely different small businesses: a government communications role, a nonprofit educator, a local food business, a family farm, an artisanal goods shop, and others. Each did a 60-minute moderated remote interview walking through how they actually built and ran a campaign.

Most weren’t following a strategy so much as repeating what worked last time

Three findings mattered more than the rest:

1. 01
   No deliberate strategy.

   6 of 7 participants relied on trial-and-error, repeating whatever had worked in a previous campaign, with no real sense of why it had worked.

2. 02
   The tool outpaced the user.

   5 of 7 started with almost no working knowledge of advertising itself, and wanted structured education rather than another feature to learn.

3. 03
   Discoverability was the real gap.

   6 of 7 preferred building ad creative in outside tools like Canva or Adobe, and a related 5 of 7 almost never opened the app's own Home page at all.

"If we didn't experiment with our content, we never would have known about this." Participant, small business advertiser

Alongside the three strategic themes, the sessions also surfaced smaller, concrete usability issues worth fixing on their own terms:

• Performance metrics that go up or down with no explanation of why3 of 7
• A Home page participants routinely skipped past to reach Planner, Scheduler, or Insights directly3 of 7
• Audience creation taking noticeably longer without the automated targeting option3 of 7
• Ad-preview lag that read as a bug rather than a loading state2 of 7

Recommendations aimed at the moment people felt lost

The recommendations followed the evidence: contextual, tooltip-level guidance tied to the specific point in the flow where people hesitated, an in-product onboarding path aimed at the discoverability gap specifically since the missing features already existed and didn’t need to be rebuilt, and a case for structured ads education, responding directly to how many participants said they’d learned everything through trial-and-error. This study became one of the foundational inputs the Core Ads team used to prioritize what shipped next.