
I can’t say that I expect 2025 to be a paradigm shift for advertising on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), but I do think there are lots of things advertisers will need to pay attention to and test if they want to see success and stay ahead of the competition.
While there are plenty of long-lived strategies that will still do well this year, holding onto legacy tactics without expanding into new ones will likely cause pain in the future as Meta moves into a more fully automated platform. So with that said, here are the main Facebook advertising trends I think you need to prepare for in 2025.
Here are this year’s top Facebook ad trends and how you can act on them in your account.
Facebook and Instagram are extremely visual platforms. Whether it’s a static image or short-form video, the quality of your ad creative is going to matter more and more as time goes on. Users are more savvy than ever and expect a level of quality that’s continuously increasing.
So what does that mean for you?
While this is still one of the heaviest lifts in social media advertising, there are tons of tools out there ready and eager to help you make beautiful creative with much less time and, maybe more importantly, less design talent.
Facebook already offers many tools to optimize your creatives for each placement across the network as well as generative AI features to create new images for you based on your existing assets. It can even write your ad copy text for you based on some simple inputs.
There are also plenty of creative tools outside of the Meta ecosystem designed to make ad creation extremely simple.
Personally, I love Canva. The platform is extremely user-friendly and operates in a drag-and-drop fashion, so no high-level technical know-how is needed. They have an entire library of templates ready for you to customize with your brand’s message or you can create something completely from scratch.
If you’re stuck and still can’t think of ideas, leverage the Meta Ads Library to see what your competitors, partner brands, or aspirational brands are doing and take a page from their book. You can learn how to use the Facebook Ad Library here.
Takeaways for this 2025 Facebook ad trend:
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With some of the tools I mentioned above, it’s incredibly easy to develop new image ads for Facebook and Instagram campaigns, but moving into 2025, it’s becoming more and more important for businesses to expand into other types of creatives. For example, Facebook video ads should be a priority for your business this year.
Video assets have been a hot topic for the last few years with the rise of TikTok and shorter-form videos. (Sorry Vine, you were just too early.) That type of content is also great to leverage in your marketing campaigns.
Here are a few stats about video marketing from our post at the beginning of 2024 that I think are still highly relevant today:
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Facebook has many ad formats that let brands customize the experience so much that sending the user to their landing page is almost unnecessary. These ad formats can contain an entire brand experience, customizable to your brand guidelines, and create a seamless experience for the customer.
Lead gen forms are continuing to get more sophisticated. You can now leverage the conditional logic setting and map out entire intake flows with potential customers.
In the image below, you can see a multiple-choice question that has two separate answers: yes or no. Based on the answer the user gives, the Logic column dictates what happens. For yes, the person is sent to the lead thank you page, and the information is submitted to the company. For no, the user is taken to a Non-Lead Page and the information is not submitted.
But you could go one step further. The Logic setting for each answer lets you send a user to a final page, either submitting or not submitting your information, or there’s an option for follow-up questions. Depending on how your sales team normally does customer intake, you could use lead generation forms to gather that information before they even submit their form.
If your website is slow or if you’re not seeing strong conversion rates on the landing page, you could try Instant Experiences to curate a pseudo-mini site to engage with potential customers.
You can select a template or create your own Instant Experience ad from scratch.
From there, you get to add text, images, videos, calls to action, and more to customize the experience. You can even tie this into a product catalog and let users shop directly on Facebook.
Takeaways for 2025:
With increasingly more machine learning making its way into Facebook ads, it’s important to remember a simple principle: good data in, good data out.
The language might not be a 100% perfect match, but the theory holds when trying to get the most from a machine. The better inputs you give, the better outputs you’ll get.
When it comes to Facebook ads, the main way I see this impacting advertisers is by not having enough conversion data in place to see good results.
The learning phase is the period of time between when an ad creative was launched and when it has gathered enough conversion actions to be fully optimized. Many times, I see accounts stuck in the learning phase because they simply can’t gain enough conversion actions to see success.
For a general rule, I like to stick with 30 conversions in 30 days, or averaging 1 conversion per day to exit the learning phase and give Meta’s algorithms enough to go on, but in some instances, as you see above, that still might not be enough.
Takeaways for 2025:
If you’re stuck in the learning phase or you’re not gaining enough conversions for the action you want, here are some things to think about:
Whether we like it or not, Facebook is getting pretty good at knowing who our audience is without us needing to tell them too much. This insight can really take your advertising to the next level if you, again, feed the machine properly.
For those of you holding on tightly to the old way of targeting psychographics, it might be time to make a change.
Takeaways for 2025:
In 2025, I think we’re best served by leveraging the machines and advertiser inputs for the best results.
Here are a handful of targeting tactics I suggest you test out in 2025:
When you use Meta Advantage+ audiences, Facebook gives you the option to add a suggested audience to target. This will open the same builder it would for you when you create your audience manually.
The algorithm will then start to target your suggested audience first, then reach out beyond once it sees decent results or has exhausted your list. Personally, this is the tactic I use for accounts with a low-to-medium amount of conversion volume as my inputs help Facebook figure out who we should be reaching, then give them the option to reach beyond that as needed.
Lookalike audiences have always been a great targeting option on Facebook, but the account strategy we used to use where each lookalike audience is assigned to its own ad group is getting less efficient over time.
If you’re seeing diminishing returns from lookalikes, test adding multiple lookalike audiences to the same ad set and see how they do in combination with each other.
Facebook ads has been seeing lots of change over the last few years and won’t slow down in 2025. These Facebook ad trends indicate that to continue to see strong performance from your campaigns, you’ll need to expand your usage of the platform’s automation and test new creative and audience solutions.
As Meta continues to refine its advertising tools and features, businesses that prioritize personalization, authenticity, and meaningful engagement will be best positioned for success. If you want help succeeding at just that, see how our solutions can position your brand ahead of the competition on Facebook and maximize your campaign performance.