What this guide does: Explains how Sprid thinks about paid ads on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok: when to spend, how a promotion runs from draft to result, and which numbers to believe along the way.
Ads don’t rescue a post nobody wanted. They amplify, and they amplify whatever you give them, including a weak idea. So the order Sprid follows is organic first: publish, see which posts people actually watched and saved, and put money behind the one that already beat your normal. That post has passed the hardest test for free.
What we believe
Promote proof, not hope. A post that did twice your median has evidence behind it. A brand-new creative has only an opinion. Start with the post, and make new creatives once you know what the winning one had.
Nothing spends without you. Everything Sprid or your agent prepares is paused. Exactly one step starts spending, and it waits for your yes, showing what will run, what it costs a day and for how long. An agent never moves a budget between reads on its own.
Keep the words, vary the picture. We read 3,549 live ads across five markets. Among advertisers running eight or more, the median was 2.9 ads per line of copy, and the largest wellness advertiser ran 109 ads on essentially one line. The ad library counts placements separately, so the exact ratio overstates, but the shape holds: the people who keep paying hold the copy and change the creative. A new version changes one thing, or the result teaches nothing.
Give it time to be readable. Meta’s delivery settles after roughly 50 optimisation events in a week, and Google and TikTok need a similar learning period. Before that, a result is noise, and the most common way to waste money on ads is to stop an ad set before it has said anything, then decide the idea doesn’t work. Sprid says whether a result is readable before it says whether it worked.
Judge by what happens in your product. Cost per install or subscriber comes first and impressions come last, because the order a report puts numbers in is the order people believe them in. When your app reports who became a paying customer, that outranks anything the platform can see.
Two ways to start
Promote a post. Pick a post already live, set a daily budget and an end date, and confirm. The ad runs only where that post lives, through the network behind it:
| Post live on | Runs as | Paid by |
|---|---|---|
| a Meta ad on Instagram only | your Meta ad account | |
| a Meta ad on Facebook only | your Meta ad account | |
| YouTube | a Google Ads video campaign (YouTube, Shorts, Discover, Gmail) | your Google Ads account |
| TikTok | a Spark Ad on TikTok | your TikTok ad account |
Instagram needs one more thing: the Instagram account has to be linked to the Facebook Page your Meta ad account runs as, because that is how Meta runs an Instagram ad. Until it is, the Ads page shows Instagram as Not linked, and tapping it says what to do.
Sprid checks the ad account can pay before you choose a budget, the network reviews the ad, and you get an email when it goes live, is rejected (with the network’s reason) or ends (with what the money bought). The budget and end date can change while it runs, from Sprid. A TikTok post also needs the creator’s permission for that one post: a code the TikTok app makes under the post’s Ad settings, pasted into Sprid.
Run a test. For finding out what to say, not just saying it louder. Tests run on Meta. Every creative is built from a named shape, such as the screen that shows the app’s verdict about the reader, two columns where the reader does the arithmetic, or one sourced number. The shape is what makes a result transferable: “showing the verdict beat listing features” is something you can build again, “ad 7 beat ad 3” is not.
The checks before money moves
- The copy check. Banned words, your own never-say list, invented urgency, and openings that name an identity (“for anxious people”) instead of a moment (“you reread the message four times”). Warnings pass, errors block the launch.
- Regulated categories. Housing, credit, employment and political ads must be declared. An undeclared one isn’t quietly rejected, it’s pulled with the ad account attached. Anything about where people live, what they can borrow or who gets hired counts, even when the product doesn’t look like it.
- The payment method, before a budget is chosen rather than after Meta has accepted the campaign and refused the ad.
Reading the result
Ask for an ad set’s verdict once a week and it answers three questions: did it work, why, and what next. When a test ends, it writes down what the hypothesis was, what happened and which shape carried it, so the next test starts from that instead of from zero. A losing set is data: close it and say what it ruled out.
Two rules for the numbers. A campaign’s totals and its ad sets’ totals are separate readings of the same money, never added together. And a period that ends today and one that ended last week are two different readings, so every number says which window it covers.
What competitors can and can’t tell you
Meta’s Ad Library shows every active ad: the creative, the copy and the date it started. It shows no spend, no clicks and no results. Days live means somebody keeps paying, not that it works, so a competitor’s ad is “longest-running”, never “best-performing”. Sprid’s scout research reads the library for your own market, which is where the shapes above came from.
You need
- An ad account with a card on it, connected to Sprid, for the network behind the post: Meta Ads for Instagram and Facebook, Google Ads for YouTube, TikTok Ads for TikTok.
- A published post to promote, or, on Meta, an image or video to build a creative from.
- For an agent to launch anything, a token that holds the
ads:spendpermission. It’s granted deliberately, on a token made for it.