Facebook & Instagram Ads

This is the complete guide: setting up the ads themselves, connecting them to Passport, and working the guests who arrive. If you have never run a church ad before, start at the top and work down — it takes about an hour, and most of that is waiting for Facebook.

The outcome you are working toward: somebody in your town sees your ad on Instagram, taps it, tells you they are coming on Sunday, and gets a text from your church within the minute — while your team sees them on Sunday's list with their name and how many people they are bringing.

What you need

• Admin access in Passport
• A Facebook Page for your church (not just a personal profile)
• A payment method you are willing to put on a Meta ad account
• Your Plan Your Visit page set up — it is already live, and it is where your ads should send people

:::note Automated texts need Plus Guests will appear in your list on any plan. Automated texts and emails require Plus or Pro. On the basic plan your team still gets a follow-up task for every guest — the reminders just are not sent for you. :::

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Part 1 — Set up the advertising

Step 1: Get a Meta Business account

If your church already runs ads, skip to Step 2.

1. Go to business.facebook.com and select Create account.
2. Enter your church's name, your name, and a church email address.
3. Add your church's Facebook Page under Accounts → Pages → Add.
4. Add an ad account under Accounts → Ad accounts → Add → Create a new ad account.

:::warning Use a church account, not a personal one Whoever creates this owns the access. If that is a volunteer's personal Facebook, your advertising stops the day they leave. Set it up under a Business account and add people to it — you can remove a person without losing anything. :::

Step 2: Decide what you are actually asking for

Before touching the ad builder, decide the ask. There are two, and they behave differently:

The ask	What happens	When to use it
Visit our Plan Your Visit page	They leave Facebook, land on your page, pick a real service time	Almost always. Better information, better guests
Fill in an Instant Form	They stay on Facebook, fill in a short form	When you want the absolute lowest friction, or an agency insists

Recommendation: point at your Plan Your Visit page. People who leave the app and pick a service are more committed than people who tap a pre-filled form, and you learn far more — which service, how many people, how many children and their ages, and anything they wanted to tell you. Instant Forms are easier to fill in, which is exactly why they produce more people who did not mean it.

You can run both. Just know which is which when you read the results.

Step 3: Create the campaign

1. In Ads Manager, select Create.
2. Choose the Leads objective if you are using an Instant Form, or Traffic if you are sending people to your Visit Page.
3. Name the campaign something you will recognise in a report six months from now — Christmas Eve 2026, not Campaign 1. Passport groups your results by this name, so a vague one makes your reporting vague.
4. Set a daily budget. Start small — $10–20/day is enough to learn whether it works.

Step 4: Target the right people

This is where most church ad money is wasted. Three rules:

Draw a radius, not a region. People do not drive 40 minutes to try a church. Set a radius of 5–10 miles around your building. If you are rural, go wider; if you are urban, go narrower.

Do not target "Christians". The people already going to church are already going to a church. Interest targeting on faith reaches the committed, not the searching. Leave interests empty and let the radius do the work — Meta's optimiser is better at finding responsive people than your guesses are.

Age 25–54 is where families are. Widen it if you have a specific ministry in mind, but this is the band where somebody is most likely to be looking for a church for their kids.

Step 5: Write the ad

What works, in order of how much difference it makes:

1. A real photo of real people in your building. Not a stock photo. Not an empty sanctuary. People, mid-conversation, who look like the people you are trying to reach.
2. Name the thing they are worried about. "You can sit at the back. Nobody will make you stand up." beats "Join us this Sunday!" — because the second one answers no question anybody was asking.
3. Say when. "Sundays at 10" in the ad itself. Somebody who cannot find the service time will not go looking.
4. One clear action. Plan your visit. Not "learn more", not "follow us".

Keep the primary text short. Most people read the first line and the image.

Step 6: Build the Instant Form (only if you chose that route)

Under Ad setup → Instant Form → Create form:

1. Form type: choose More volume unless you are getting junk, then switch to Higher intent.
2. Questions: ask for as little as you can bear. Every extra field costs you people.

Passport recognises these automatically:

Ask for	Passport does
Full name (or first + last)	Creates the guest
Phone number	Records it, and can text them
Email	Records it
A date question — "Which Sunday?"	Creates a planned visit, if it is a Sunday you hold a service

Anything else you ask is saved as a note on that guest's record so your team reads it when they follow up — it just will not become a field you can filter or report on. The Ad Platforms tab tells you which of your questions those are.

3. Privacy policy: Meta requires a URL. Use your church's.
4. Completion screen: send them to your Plan Your Visit page. Somebody who just filled in a form is the most willing they will ever be.

Step 7: Publish

Meta reviews ads before they run — usually under an hour, occasionally a day. A rejection is normally the image (too much text) or a claim in the copy. Fix and resubmit; it does not count against you.

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Part 2 — Connect it to Passport

Step 8: Connect your page

1. In Passport, open Admin → Settings.
2. Select the Ad Platforms tab.
3. Select Connect Facebook. Passport sends you to Facebook to sign in and approve access.
4. Approve the permissions and Facebook returns you to Passport.
5. Choose which page your ads run from, then Finish connecting.

That last step matters more than it looks. Passport subscribes to that page's lead forms — until you choose one, nothing arrives however correctly everything else is set up.

While choosing your page you can also pick an ad account. That is optional and only affects spend figures; leads arrive either way.

:::warning Facebook access belongs to a person The access Facebook grants us belongs to the account that approved it. When that person leaves your church or loses admin rights on the page, lead capture stops. Connect as an account that will outlast any one staff member. :::

Step 9: Check it is actually working

The Ad Platforms tab shows a Last lead time. That single line is the honest answer to "is this working?" — you do not need to run a test campaign to find out.

If it says None yet after a day of live ads:

Check	Where
Is the ad actually using an Instant Form?	Ads Manager — a Traffic ad sends people to your Visit Page instead, which is fine but produces no leads
Is the connected page the one your ads run from?	The Page line on the Ad Platforms tab
Has anyone actually submitted?	Ads Manager → Forms Library → your form → Leads

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Part 3 — Using it inside Passport

This is the part that turns advertising into people, and the part most churches skip.

Where your guests appear

People → Visitors. Four tabs:

Today — who is coming to this Sunday's services, with their name, how many people they are bringing, and their children's ages so the kids team can have the right rooms ready. Tap Arrived when you meet them.

Pipeline — everyone in the funnel, from invited through to connected.

Needs attention — the one to work. Guests who missed a visit, went quiet, or that nobody has spoken to. Sorted with the most neglected first.

Insights — what each channel costs and how fast your team is actually reaching people. See Guest Funnel analytics.

What happens automatically

Every lead enters the Before their visit journey: a confirmation, a reminder, and a follow-up task for your team. You can see and change all of it under Admin → Settings → Guest Journeys — see Guest journeys.

Three limits worth knowing on day one, all adjustable under Admin → Settings → Guest Guardrails:

• Nothing sends outside 9:00am–8:30pm in your church's local time. You can narrow that window but never widen it past 8:00am–9:00pm — a text from a church at midnight costs you the guest.
• No more than 4 automated messages to one person in any 7 days.
• No more than 150 automated messages church-wide in a day. This is the junk-lead brake: if your form gets flooded, it does not become a bill. Passport emails you the day you hit it, so a silent ceiling never looks like a broken feature.

The one thing that matters most

Somebody from your church speaking to them, personally, within 48 hours.

Not the automated text. The automated text buys you a day or two of goodwill. The conversation is what brings somebody back, and the Insights tab shows both numbers side by side precisely so you can tell the difference.

If you do one thing with the guests your ads produce, make it this.

Leads that look like junk

Paid forms attract some. When Passport spots one it marks it and says so on the Ad Platforms tab.

It never deletes it. If we are wrong, deleting would mean a real person who asked your church to contact them never hears from anyone, and nobody would ever know. A marked guest is contacted exactly like any other.

If most of your leads look like junk, that is usually the ad rather than Passport — the audience is too broad, or the creative is attracting accidental taps.

Telling Facebook who actually came

Once you have a few weeks of guests, Admin → Settings → Ad Platforms → attendance sharing is worth reading.

Off by default. Switched on, Passport tells Facebook which of the people it sent you actually turned up — so its targeting starts finding more people like the ones who come, rather than more people like the ones who fill in forms.

What leaves: a one-way scrambled version of the email and phone, the ad click ID, and the word "attended" with a date. What never leaves: names, addresses, notes, prayer requests, or anything at all about guests who did not come from an ad. The setting page lists this in full before you agree to it.

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When something is wrong

What the tab says	What it means	What to do
Access removed	Someone revoked Passport's access — usually the person who set this up left or lost page admin	Reconnect, ideally as someone who will stay
Needs reconnecting	The access we were given has lapsed	Reconnect
Something is wrong	We could not reach Facebook	Reconnect; contact support if it persists

Disconnecting

Select Disconnect on the Ad Platforms tab. New leads stop arriving. Guests already in your list, their planned visits and their journeys are unaffected, and Passport deletes the stored access token.

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Next steps

• Catch people who are searching — Google Ads — and the Ad Grant that makes it free for most churches.
• Point them somewhere good — Ads are only as good as the Plan Your Visit page they land on.
• Work the guests who arrive — Everyone lands in the Guests hub.