What this is: A simple explainer of how Facebook and Instagram ads changed, and what it means for your pest control business.
Who it’s for: Pest control owners and operators who are already running Meta ads, or about to start.
Why you should care: The thing that decides whether your ads get results, and whether they even get shown at all, has changed. Most pest control companies are still building ads the old way and quietly losing money because of it. This explains what to do instead.
If you’ve been running Facebook or Instagram ads for your pest control business and they’ve started feeling unpredictable, with spend jumping around, some ads getting no traction, and good weeks followed by dead weeks for no clear reason, you’re not losing your mind. The system underneath changed, and the old playbook doesn’t fit it anymore.
The good news: once you understand what actually drives results now, it gets a lot simpler. Here’s what matters, in plain terms. (Paid ads are just one piece of a bigger picture — the complete pest control marketing guide covers how they fit alongside local search, reviews, and referrals.)
(Where this comes from: a senior Meta executive named Matt Steiner, one of the people who actually builds the systems that decide which ads get shown, recently explained these changes in an interview. What follows is what his explanation means for a pest control company, in plain language.)
Your ads’ images and videos now matter more than your targeting
For years, the game was targeting: pick the right zip codes, the right ages, the right interests, and you’d win. That’s no longer where the leverage is.
Today, the system looks at your actual creative, your images and videos, and uses that to figure out who to show your ad to. In plain terms: your creative is now the thing that decides whether your ad even gets delivered. If your ad looks like every other pest control ad, the system has no reason to push it. Weak creative doesn’t just convert poorly anymore. It can quietly stop your ad from being shown at all. (More on how that sameness hands your leads to companies no better than you — and what to put on screen instead — in why your ads lose to companies that aren’t better than you.)
This is the single biggest shift, and it’s why “good enough” ads that worked two years ago are sputtering now.
Making different versions still works, but only if they’re actually different
There’s a myth going around that the algorithm changed, so making variations of your ads doesn’t work. That’s backwards. Variety still wins. The catch is what “variety” means.
The system is smart enough to take several versions of your ad and figure out which one fits which person. One homeowner responds to a clean, reassuring image. Another responds to a straight-talk “stop wasting money on sprays that don’t work” message. Show it a genuinely varied set, and it matches the right one to the right person automatically.
But “varied” does not mean cranking out fifty nearly identical posts with different captions. It means a handful of genuinely different angles aimed at the different kinds of customers you actually serve. For pest control, that looks like:
- The new homeowner who wants a fresh, clean start
- The parent worried about their kids and pets around chemicals
- The value angle: recurring protection that costs less than one emergency call
- The seasonal trigger: ants in spring, rodents when it gets cold
- The “I tried DIY and it failed” customer who’s ready for a pro
Five real angles for five real people beats fifty versions of the same dead-bug photo every time.
It’s normal for some of your ads to get no spend
This one trips up a lot of operators. You upload several ads, and the system pours money into one or two while the rest get almost nothing. That feels broken. It isn’t. It’s the system doing its job.
It quietly tests your ads against real people, finds the ones pulling the best results, and moves your budget toward them. The ones that don’t get spend usually aren’t bad. They just didn’t perform as well, and you wouldn’t want your money on the weaker ones anyway. The testing that used to cost you weeks and wasted ad dollars now happens fast and mostly up front. Seeing some ads go quiet is the optimization working, not failing.
Why your results swing from great to dead for no reason
Steiner was asked directly about the thing everyone’s feeling: ads getting volatile, spend shifting, campaigns that feel unstable even when you changed nothing. His answer is worth understanding.
The ad auction works a bit like the stock market. Every second, huge numbers of advertisers are bidding, and they’re constantly adjusting based on new information about customers. When everyone’s reacting in real time, the whole marketplace moves, and your results move with it, even on days you did nothing.
Here’s the part that actually helps you: the more you spend and the more sales you drive, the steadier it gets. When you’re driving real volume, the system is confident and your results hold steady. When you’re spending lightly, a few thousand a month like a lot of local pest control companies, you have to expect more swing. The system won’t keep dumping your limited budget on people who’ve already left the buying window.
So if your ads feel hot one week and cold the next, it’s usually not something you broke. It’s a busy auction plus a smaller budget. Knowing that saves you from “fixing” things that were never broken.
The one thing the machine still can’t do
The natural worry is: if the machine is this smart, where does that leave you? Do you just hand it a pile of ads and disappear?
Not quite. Steiner was clear that the machine will always beat humans at the math: moving budgets, reacting to prices, optimizing delivery. Don’t try to out-optimize it. You’ll lose.
But there are two things the machine can’t do, and they’re the whole ballgame: coming up with the ideas, and understanding why people actually buy. A computer can’t look at your market and know that a worried mom and a frustrated landlord need to hear two completely different things. It can’t reason about why one message lands and another flops. That judgment, knowing your customer and what makes them say yes, is the human part, and it’s exactly the part most pest control ads are missing.
The bottom line
Here’s the whole thing in four sentences:
- Your creative is the lever now. It decides whether your ads work and whether they even get shown.
- A few genuinely different angles beat a pile of look-alikes.
- Don’t panic when some ads get no spend. That’s the system testing for you.
- The edge that’s left is knowing why people buy, and building your ads around that.
That last point is where most pest control companies are leaving money on the table. The machine is incredible at optimizing, but it can only work with the creative you hand it. And most pest control ads are made either by someone who knows the trade but not why people buy, or by someone who knows ads in general but has never worked a route in their life. That gap is exactly why we built The Pest Post the way we did — here’s the full thinking behind it.
Want a free set of eyes on your ads?
Send me whatever you’re running right now and I’ll point out the obvious mistakes that are costing you, no charge and no obligation. Email me at the-pest-post@mantiscorp.ai or message @thepestpost on Instagram, and I’ll take a look.
Sources: based on a published interview with Matt Steiner, a Meta executive who supports the company’s ad ranking and foundational AI systems, cross-referenced with Meta’s own published engineering material on its ad system. Written and applied to pest control by The Pest Post.