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Published 1 Nov 2026
“Should we be running ads?” is the question we hear most from founders who have just raised, and from growth leads under pressure to show numbers this quarter. Paid social looks like the fastest lever in the building. Sometimes it is. Often it is the fastest way to spend a budget and learn nothing.
The honest answer: it depends on three things
Paid social is a multiplier. It takes whatever you already have and puts it in front of more people, quickly. If what you have is strong, the result is growth. If what you have is unclear, the result is a larger audience that is just as confused as the small one was.
So the question is not “is paid social worth it?” but “are we ready for it?”. Three things decide that.
01 Is the brand clear? Can you say who this is for and why they should choose you in a sentence? Does the ad, the landing page and the product all say the same thing in the same voice?
02 Is the offer ready? Is there something specific to respond to: a product, a price, a clear next step? Or are you asking strangers to “learn more” about an idea?
03 Can you measure what happens next? When someone clicks, do you know what they did, and will you know a month later whether they became a customer?
Three yeses and paid social is probably worth testing. Any no, and the money is better spent fixing the no.
When it works: a clear brand, a ready offer, a site that converts
When paid social works, it tends to look the same across sectors. The brand is distinctive enough that the ad is recognisable before the logo appears. The message is one idea, repeated across every piece of creative, so that each impression builds on the last. The offer is concrete: this product, this event, this guide, this first step. And the page behind the ad is built for the person who clicked, not a generic homepage that makes them start again.
The last point is where most small brands lose. The ad does its job, the click arrives, and the landing page is slow, vague, or asks for too much too soon. Every pound of media spend is then paying for the page’s weaknesses. Before you buy traffic, make sure the page deserves it. Our Digital Design team spends a good deal of time on exactly this.
When it doesn’t: what to fix first
Paid social is not worth it, yet, in a few recognisable situations.
The positioning is still moving. If the team is still debating what the brand is, every ad is a guess, and you cannot learn from a test when the thing being tested changes each week. Settle the strategy first. Why strategy without imagination fails explains what a finished strategy looks like.
There is nothing to buy. Pre-launch, or for a service with a long, personal sales cycle, cold paid social often produces attention with nowhere to go. Build the list, publish the content, prove the offer with a smaller audience first.
The site is not ready. Slow, unclear, no obvious action, no tracking. Fix it before you send people to it.
You cannot afford to learn. Paid social needs enough budget and time to show a pattern. A tiny spend for a week tells you almost nothing and is usually read as “ads don’t work for us”. If the budget only stretches to that, spend it on content or email instead.
Brand building and activation on social
Paid social can do two different jobs, and confusing them is the commonest mistake. Activation ads ask for a response now: buy, book, sign up. Brand ads build familiarity and memory with people who are not ready yet, so that when they are, you are the name they think of.
The research the IPA published with Les Binet and Peter Field argued that both are needed, and that businesses which run only activation see returns decline over time as they exhaust the people ready to buy. The precise balance depends on your stage and category. The principle holds for a founder-led brand: if every ad is a discount code, you are harvesting demand you never planted.
In practice, keep some of the budget on creative that simply makes the brand memorable to a broad, relevant audience, and judge it on reach and recall rather than immediate sales. Keep the rest on activation aimed at people closer to buying, judged on what they do. Report them separately, because they will look very different, and that is the point.
Why creative matters more than targeting
The platforms now do most of the targeting themselves. What still varies enormously is the creative. The ad is where the brand either shows up or does not. Stop-worthy creative, a clear idea, a distinctive look and a line people remember, outperforms a precise audience with a forgettable ad, and it keeps working as the audience broadens. Treat creative as the main investment. Make several versions of one idea rather than several different ideas, test them, keep the winners, and feed what you learn back into the brand.
The rules: labelling ads, influencer posts and tracking consent
UK rules on paid social are clear, and breaking them is both avoidable and public.
Ads must be recognisable as ads. The CAP Code, enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority, requires that marketing is obviously identifiable. Claims must be honest and substantiated. If an ad says it, you must be able to prove it.
Influencer content must be labelled. If you pay an influencer, or give them something in return for a post, that post is an ad and must be clearly labelled as one. The ASA and CAP publish a plain guide for influencers on making this clear. “Ad” at the start of the post is the safe standard. Vague hashtags buried at the end are not.
Tracking needs consent. The pixels that make paid social measurable store or access information on the visitor’s device, and in the UK that needs the visitor’s consent before it happens, with narrow exceptions for what is strictly necessary. The ICO’s guidance on storage and access technologies, updated in 2026, applies to pixels as much as cookies. In practice: a consent banner that defaults to off, pixels that fire only after a yes, and an acceptance that your reported numbers will be incomplete. Build that into how you read the results, rather than pretending the gap is not there.
Run a small test before a big budget
If the three conditions are met, do not launch a campaign. Run a test.
Pick one offer and one audience. Make three or four versions of one creative idea. Set a fixed budget you can afford to lose and a fixed period long enough to see a pattern. Decide before you start what success looks like, in outcomes: enquiries, sales, sign-ups, not clicks. Send every click to a page built for it, with tracking that works.
At the end, you will know four things: whether the audience responds at all, which creative they respond to, what a result costs, and whether the page is holding up its end. That is enough to decide whether to scale, change something, or stop. Most of the value of the first test is in what it tells you about the brand and the site, not in the sales it makes. If the numbers say go, scale carefully, and keep some of the spend on the brand.
Our Growth Marketing page sets out how we run paid media alongside the rest, and Work shows the kind of brands we do it for. If you would like a view on whether you are ready, book a growth call.
Paid social multiplies what you already have. Make sure what you have is clear, ready and measurable before you pay to make it louder.
