What does the Boost button leave out?
The parts of Ads Manager that make an ad pay. A boost offers goals such as more engagement, more messages, more profile visits or more website visits. It does not offer a sales objective with a purchase event, so Meta cannot look for buyers; it looks for people who react, comment or click, which is a different crowd. The audience choices are a short list: people who like your page, their friends, or people you choose by age, location and interest. A customer list, a lookalike, a retargeting audience built from your website and exclusions of past buyers are all Ads Manager tools. Placements are decided for you. There is no A/B test, no schedule by hour, no separate ad sets.
Meta's own comparison (Meta Business Help Centre, "The difference between boosted posts and Facebook ads") puts it plainly: boosts are for engagement and reach, Ads Manager is for everything else.
When is a boost the right call?
When the job is the one the button was built for. A post that announces something your followers want to know, a new opening time, a market stall this Saturday, the return of a product, reaches a fraction of your followers unpaid, and $20 behind it reaches most of them and their friends. The result you want is that they see it, and a boost is built to be seen.
A boost also suits a business with no website to send people to and no Pixel to measure with. A dog walker who takes bookings by message can boost a post with the goal of messages and get real enquiries from it, because there is nothing downstream for an ad to track anyway.
What does the same $150 do each way? (example figures)
A Wollongong bakery wants pre-orders for its Christmas hampers, which are sold on its website.
| Boosted post | Sales campaign in Ads Manager | |
|---|---|---|
| Set up | Boost the hamper photo, goal: website visits, people within 15 km aged 25 to 65, $150 over 10 days | Sales objective, purchase event from the Pixel, a lookalike of past online buyers within 15 km, past buyers excluded, $15 a day for 10 days |
| What Meta looked for | People likely to click | People likely to buy |
| Result | 640 clicks, 3 hamper orders | 190 clicks, 14 hamper orders |
| Cost per order | $50 | $10.70 |
The boost looked better in every number except the one that paid the flour bill. It had more reach and more clicks, and the bakery would have called it a success if it had not run the second version alongside it. The difference is the objective, and the Boost button does not offer the right one for a sale.
How do you tell which you are looking at?
Open Ads Manager. Every boost appears there as its own campaign, named after the post, with an engagement or awareness objective. If an account's campaign list is a column of boosted posts and the business wants sales, that is the diagnosis in one screen, and the fix is one properly built sales campaign with the same budget.
What does Cora do with a boosted post?
CoraVision reads your Meta campaigns every night once Meta is connected, and a boost shows up like any other campaign with its spend, clicks and results, so a column of boosts with no sales beside them is visible in the numbers. During a session, Mira, the Meta Ads specialist, can see the campaign list on your screen and talk you through building the sales campaign instead, step by step, with the Pixel's purchase event as the goal. You click every button yourself; CoraVision never creates or changes a campaign.
Questions
Is boosting a post a waste of money?
Only when the job is sales or enquiries. For reaching the people who already follow you with news they want, a $20 boost is cheap and quick. For getting strangers to buy, the same $20 in a sales campaign in Ads Manager does more, because it can aim at a purchase.
Can I see a boosted post in Ads Manager?
Yes. Every boost becomes a campaign there, usually with an engagement or awareness objective and the name of the post, and you can read its spend and results beside your other campaigns.
Why does the Boost button offer different goals from Ads Manager?
It offers the goals a post can serve well: engagement, messages, profile visits, website visits. It does not offer sales with a purchase event, because a feed post was not built as an ad and Meta would rather you build one.