The short version: most beginners don’t need a stack of Facebook advertising apps, they need three or four free ones, a small test budget, and the patience to read their own results before buying anything else. Meta’s own Ads Manager, Canva, and a decent tracking habit will take you further in the first three months than any paid tool will. The apps worth paying for come later, once you have data to feed them.
Start with the app you already have
Everyone asks me which Facebook advertising app they should download first, and the answer is one they’ve already got: Ads Manager. It’s free, it’s the actual platform every ad on Facebook and Instagram runs through, and it does things no third party tool can copy because Meta owns the data. You build the campaign, pick the objective, choose the audience, and set the budget, all inside it.
I remember my first proper campaign for a small hotel client in the Cotswolds. We had £100, no fancy software, just Ads Manager. I set £10 a day for 10 days, targeted UK women aged 35 to 55 with an interest in weekend breaks and country pubs, and used one photo of the hotel garden. We got 34 leads at a cost of £2.94 each. No app helped with that. What helped was a tight audience, one clear photo, and a budget small enough that a mistake wouldn’t hurt.
Meta Business Suite, the free companion app, is where you schedule posts, reply to Messenger and Instagram DMs, and check basic insights in one place. If you’re new to running ads on both Facebook and Instagram at once, it’s worth pairing this with a look at 101 Best Instagram Tools and Apps since so many beginner campaigns run across both platforms without the person realising it.
Canva, but use it for ad specs
Canva’s free plan is enough for most beginners in the first few months. The bit people miss is the ad size templates: Facebook feed ads work best at a 1:1 square (1080 by 1080 pixels) or 4:5 vertical, and Canva has both built in under its “Facebook Ad” template category. Stories and Reels ads want 9:16. Get this wrong and Meta crops your image awkwardly or leaves ugly bars on either side, which quietly drags your click-through rate down before you’ve even started testing copy.
Canva’s paid Magic Resize feature (part of the Pro plan) lets you take one design and reshape it across all these formats in seconds, which is worth the upgrade once you’re running more than one or two ads a week. Before that, the free plan does the job.
The tracking apps beginners skip, and then regret
This is where I see the most money wasted. People will happily spend on a spy tool or a scheduler but skip installing the Meta Pixel, which is free and takes ten minutes. Without it, you can’t tell Facebook what a “conversion” looks like on your site, and the algorithm ends up optimising for clicks instead of sales or leads, because that’s all it can see.
Set up the Pixel through Business Suite, add UTM parameters to every link you run in an ad (Google’s free Campaign URL Builder does this), and connect Google Analytics 4 or a privacy-friendly option like Fathom Analytics so you can see what happens after the click, not just the click itself. I wrote a full walkthrough on this in How to Track Your Advertising Campaign Success Online, and it’s worth reading before you spend a penny on ads, not after.
Here’s the uncomfortable bit nobody wants to hear: most beginners can’t tell you their return on ad spend a month into running Facebook ads, because they never set up tracking in week one. They just look at Ads Manager’s “results” column and hope it lines up with real sales. Sometimes it doesn’t, because a Pixel that isn’t firing on the thank you page will show zero conversions even when the sales came in through a different device or browser. Fix the tracking before you touch the budget.
Ad research apps: useful, but not urgent
Once you’ve run your first campaign or two, tools like Foreplay, AdSpy or BigSpy let you see what competitors are running and how long an ad has been live (a good proxy for whether it’s working, since Meta pulls losing ads fast). These can shortcut your creative research.
But here’s the part most articles on this topic avoid saying out loud: Meta’s own Ad Library is free, public, and gives you 90% of the same insight. Search any competitor’s page name and you’ll see every active ad they’re running, in every country, right now. I’ve spent whole afternoons scrolling it with a client before we write a single line of ad copy, and it costs nothing. Paying £40 to £80 a month for a spy tool in your first month, before you’ve even confirmed your offer converts, is money that should be going into ad spend instead.
Chatbot and lead apps come after, not before
ManyChat and similar Messenger automation apps are brilliant once you’ve got traffic and want to qualify leads or answer questions automatically. But they solve a problem you don’t have yet in week one, which is too many enquiries to answer by hand. Install these once you’re getting real volume, not before.
The subscription trap I see constantly
A client of mine, a jewellery maker in Tunbridge Wells, came to me having spent £147 a month across three different Facebook ad apps: a scheduler, a reporting dashboard, and an ad spy tool. She hadn’t run a single ad yet. That’s £147 gone before she’d tested a single audience or written a single headline. We cancelled two of the three, kept the reporting one because it made her weekly check-ins faster once she had data to look at, and put the rest of that money into a £15 a day test budget instead.
That’s the pattern I see over and over. New advertisers buy tools to feel prepared, when the actual preparation is a small test budget and a willingness to look at your own numbers honestly. If you want a wider view of what’s worth paying for once you’re past the beginner stage, 10 Facebook Ad Tools that Improve your ROI covers the next tier up.
A simple first 30 days, step by step
- Day 1: install the Meta Pixel via Business Suite and confirm it’s firing using Meta’s Pixel Helper browser extension
- Day 2: build one campaign with one objective (leads or sales, not “engagement”, which rarely pays the bills)
- Day 3: create three ad sets, same creative and copy, three different audiences, £5 to £7 a day each
- Days 4 to 10: leave it alone. Meta’s own documentation says an ad set needs roughly 50 optimisation events within a seven day window to exit the “learning phase”, and constant edits reset that clock
- Day 11: check cost per result across the three ad sets, pause the two weakest
- Days 12 to 30: scale the winner by 15 to 20 percent every three or four days, not by doubling the budget overnight, which tends to spike your cost per result
That’s the whole beginner playbook. No app in the world replaces those steps, though a good tracking setup makes step 11 far less painful than squinting at a spreadsheet.
Don’t forget where people land
Over 98% of Facebook users access the platform through a phone, which means whatever page your ad points to has to load fast and work with a thumb, not a mouse. If you’re sending traffic to an app rather than a website, the fixes are often small but the impact is large; I go through this in How To Increase The Conversion Rate Of Your Mobile Apps. I’ve seen a client’s cost per lead drop by nearly a third simply from cutting a five-field form down to two fields on mobile.
When to widen the toolkit
Once you’ve run a few campaigns, have working tracking, and know your rough cost per lead or sale, that’s the point to look at the wider ecosystem: creative testing tools, deeper reporting dashboards, dynamic product ad apps for ecommerce. My full breakdown of what’s out there is in 101 Best Facebook Tools of 2026, and if you’re still working out how Facebook ads fit alongside everything else you’re doing on social, Social Media Advertising: A Complete Guide for Beginners is the wider map worth reading alongside this.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to pay for any apps to start advertising on Facebook?
No. Meta Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite, and Canva’s free plan cover everything a beginner needs for the first month or two. Paid apps become worth considering once you’ve run a few campaigns and know your numbers.
What’s the minimum budget I should test with?
£5 to £10 a day per ad set for at least five to seven days is enough to see whether an audience or creative is working, without risking much if it doesn’t. My first hotel campaign ran on £10 a day and produced usable results within ten days.
Is the Meta Pixel really necessary for a small budget?
Yes, and it costs nothing. Without it, Facebook can’t tell what counts as a sale or lead on your site, so it optimises for clicks instead, which usually means a higher cost per result and worse quality traffic than tracked campaigns.
Are ad spy tools like AdSpy or Foreplay worth it for beginners?
Not in month one. Meta’s free Ad Library shows you every ad a competitor is currently running, which gives most of the same research value for nothing. Paid spy tools become more useful once you’re running enough ads to need faster, filtered research at scale.
Useful references
Related reading: What Hashtags Help Your TikTok Videos Go Viral in 2026 and How Do You Increase Engagement on Instagram Organically?.
