Indian Meta clicks are cheap, and that is exactly what makes waste easy to hide here. A campaign delivering ₹6 clicks looks healthy on any dashboard while producing nothing. These are the five things worth testing, all of which you can verify before paying, with real numbers from campaigns we run.
1. Is targeting read from Meta, or shipped inside the product?
The difference that never appears on a feature list and shows up directly in results — and the one we got wrong ourselves, so it is worth explaining properly.
Meta exposes its targeting catalogue through the API — roughly 284 behaviours currently. It returns the same catalogue regardless of the country you ask about. There is no separate India list or UAE list; the country-specific entries sit inside one shared catalogue.
A tool shipping a hardcoded shortlist silently drops everything outside it. In our own product a hand-maintained list of fifteen behaviours was filtering the model's selections, and 161 of 177 chosen behaviours were being discarded for having no matching ID. The list had been written for India — so Indian campaigns looked fine and every foreign campaign was running without the buyer-value signals that exist for it. Nothing errored. Nothing in any report showed it.
💡 Ask the vendor directly: is targeting fetched from Meta at build time, or included in the product? It is a factual question with a factual answer, and it tells you more about how the tool was built than any feature page.
2. Does it pick the right objective?
This is worth more than everything else on this list combined, and the evidence is stark. Three campaigns we run, same account, same period:
₹6.31
Traffic objective, 5.65% click-through.
₹9.39
Click-to-WhatsApp objective, 0.89% click-through — and a real conversation.
₹33.13
Awareness objective, 0.12% click-through.
Five times the cost per click, decided by objective alone. A tool that defaults to awareness because reach numbers look impressive in a report is costing you real money. A good one asks what outcome you want and picks accordingly — and for an Indian service business that is usually a chat, not a click.
3. Does it handle WhatsApp properly?
For a large share of Indian businesses the conversion is a conversation. Three specific failures kill these campaigns silently:
- 1The leading zero. 098765 43210 must become +91 98765 43210. Keep the zero after the country code and every tap lands on a number that does not exist. The ad runs, nobody complains, the campaign produces zero conversations.
- 2The Facebook Page must have a WhatsApp number connected in Page settings, or the launch fails with error 2446886 — which reads like a permissions problem and sends people hunting in the ad account.
- 3A WhatsApp call-to-action on a video creative cannot carry a link parameter. Meta returns code 105, subcode 1815630, described only as "number of parameters exceeded". An image creative accepts the same value, so it stays invisible until the first video ad. This blocked a paying customer sixteen times across two nights.
4. Does it validate before launching?
Meta accepts a validate-only flag on ad set creation: it checks a payload against the live API and returns real errors without creating anything or spending anything. Ask whether the vendor uses it.
💡 Running every payload combination through validation found a launch-breaking bug in our own product that code review and more than a hundred real-data comparisons had both missed — a sales objective with link-click optimisation and a page promoted object is rejected outright, while the identical combination is accepted under a traffic objective. It only broke for someone choosing sales with a website and no working pixel, so nobody would have found it until a customer did.
5. Does it stop touching the campaign?
Counter-intuitive and expensive. Every edit to a live ad set restarts Meta's evaluation of it. An ad set adjusted several times across one morning can stop delivering for the rest of the day, on an account that is serving normally elsewhere. Nothing in the interface indicates why.
So treat "continuous AI optimisation" as a claim needing evidence. Adjustment on real signal after a learning period is valuable; constant rewriting of live ad sets is interference wearing a better word. And two timing facts so you do not chase a phantom fault: a new click or conversion ad set typically takes four to five hours before its first impression, and a flat zero delivery curve on a brand-new ad set means nothing at all.
A sixth thing: placements
Meta publishes guidance to let its system choose placements rather than pinning them, and reports better cost per result for campaigns that do. Three legitimate reasons exist to pin — per-placement creative, brand fit, brand safety — and almost no Indian small business meets any. A tool pinning placements by default is overriding the platform's optimisation and charging you for it.
Targeting read from Meta, not baked into the product
Adyft builds Meta campaigns from Meta's live targeting catalogue, validates every payload before launch, and picks the objective for the outcome you asked for. From ₹1,999/month.
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