SMB Marketing Behaviors & Needs
A cross-platform study into how small businesses actually juggle Meta, Google, and TikTok ad tools side by side, and where Meta's own experience fell short by comparison.
Small businesses weren’t just using Meta. They were comparing it.
Meta had plenty of usage data on small-business advertisers inside its own tools, but almost none on how those same advertisers used Meta alongside everything else, Google Ads, TikTok, their own website. The Core Ads team needed to know not just what people did inside Meta Business Suite, but how Meta’s experience actually stacked up against the tools sitting right next to it on the same person’s desktop.
Eight advertisers, deliberately spread across budget and platform mix
I recruited 8 small-business advertisers who personally managed their own ad accounts, spent between $200 and $2,000 a month on digital marketing, and had created at least 5 ads in the past 3 months, spanning a phone repair shop, a dance studio, an advertising agency, a management-software startup, a travel agent, a dive shop, an addiction-therapy center, and a boarding school. Each did a moderated 1:1 remote interview covering their goals, their ad-creation workflow, and where they got stuck across whichever platforms they actually used, not just Meta’s.
Meta was central to their strategy and still the hardest one to use well
- 01Meta's own tools didn't talk to each other.
7 of 8 participants pointed to a lack of integration between Ads Manager, Business Suite, and Facebook/Instagram directly: saved audiences built in Ads Manager didn't show up in Business Suite, and content already posted to Facebook sometimes didn't appear at all. 5 of 8 said ads rendered distorted or cropped once they crossed between FB and IG through Business Suite.
- 02Optimization was the single most confusing part of the job.
6 of 8 said figuring out how to optimize an ad's performance took the most time and caused the most confusion, and 5 of 8 said Google's guided optimization score made the same job easier by comparison, something Meta had no direct equivalent for.
- 03More features made the tool harder to learn, not easier.
6 of 8 said the growing feature set steepened Meta's learning curve, and 5 of 7 felt Meta compared unfavorably to Amazon Ads and TikTok Ads on plain ease of use.
Meta occupied a strange position in participants' budgets: 6 of 8 called it the most expensive platform they advertised on, but 4 of 8 said it was also the one that reliably delivered results, and 3 of 8 said they trusted Meta campaigns more than TikTok or Twitter ads. Cost and confidence pulled in opposite directions for the same platform.
A separate, larger read on advertiser goals (98 respondents to a supporting survey) reinforced the same gap from a different angle: 18 of 98 said they didn’t have a clear business objective to measure ads against in the first place, and 7 of 98 explicitly asked for a better reporting tool to help make the case for investing more in social ads at all.
Recommendations aimed at closing the gap with the competition
Because the friction was relative to what advertisers already used elsewhere, the recommendations were too: a content-suggestion tool closer to what Google Ads already offered, consistent terminology and behavior across Meta’s own surfaces instead of three slightly different experiences, and a split between primary and secondary features so the growing feature set stopped working against ease of use. This became one of the inputs the Core Ads team used to benchmark its own roadmap against the competitive landscape advertisers were actually living in.