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.
Contents
- Highly optimized ad creative will be a must
- Businesses will prioritize expanding and diversifying their ad creative formats
- Users will be looking for an experience when interacting with ads
- More data becoming available to advertisers could increase campaign performance
- Audience intelligence will be embraced
Facebook ad trends for 2025 every business should know
Here are this year’s top Facebook ad trends and how you can act on them in your account.
1. Highly optimized ad creative will be a must
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:
- Invest time and energy into beautiful, compelling ad creatives.
- Test AI tools and learn how to write a better AI prompt to get the best results.
- Don’t settle for “good enough.” Leverage all the tools available and set yourself apart.
Learn how to work AI into your Facebook ad strategy with our free guide on powerful ways to use AI in Google and Facebook ads!
2. Businesses will prioritize expanding and diversifying their ad creative formats
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:
- People watch an average of 16 hours of online video per week, which is a 52% increase in the last two years.
- 86% of people would like to see more videos from brands.
- 64% of consumers make a purchase after watching branded social videos.
- 68% of consumers prefer watching videos to learn about new products or services compared to articles, infographics, ebooks, and presentations.
- Facebook video ad conversion rates are highest for videos 16-20 seconds in duration.
Ready to optimize your account according to these Facebook ad trends? Start with a free, instant account audit using our Facebook Ads Grader!
3. Users will be looking for an experience when interacting with Facebook ads
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 generation forms
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.
Instant Experience
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:
- Prioritize creating short, engaging videos that capture attention in the first few seconds. Reels and Stories are ideal formats for this type of content.
- Utilize vertical video formats that are optimized for mobile viewing, ensuring a seamless and immersive user experience.
- Incorporate strong calls-to-action (CTAs) early in videos to drive conversions.
- Leverage Facebook native ad formats like Instant Experiences, lead gen forms, Messenger, and WhatsApp to create customized experiences.
- Create ads that encourage direct interaction—whether that’s answering questions, booking appointments, or offering personalized product recommendations.
4. More data becoming available to advertisers could increase campaign performance
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:
- Test using a conversion action a little further up the funnel. Not getting enough sales? Test Add to Cart. Not getting enough Lead Forms submitted, test using on-page engagement stats instead.
- Expand your audience to reach a wider group of people. We’ll cover more on audience soon, but this can be a limiting factor in getting enough conversion volume. I cover all the latest Facebook ad targeting options you could try here.
- Think about increasing your budget. I know, I hate this advice too, but if you don’t have at least enough ad spend to support two-to-three conversions per day, you’re likely not going to have enough volume to see efficient ad service. You can estimate realistic Facebook ad costs for your industry using our latest Facebook ads benchmarks report.
5. Audience intelligence will be embraced
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:
Advantage+ audience with audience suggestion
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.
Super-lookalike audiences
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.
The future of Facebook ads in 2025
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.