Social media advertising where the creative does the work
RX runs social media advertising for companies in Egypt and MENA — enough creative to actually test, in Arabic and English, reported on delivered revenue rather than orders placed.
The targeting is fine.
You are running out of ads.
Three patterns behind almost every social media advertising account that has stopped performing.
One Ad, Then Fatigue
The campaign launches with two assets. Week three the cost per result climbs, and there is nothing new to rotate in because the design queue is four weeks long.
The Dashboard Is Lying to You
With cash on delivery, orders placed and orders paid are different numbers. Judging social media advertising on the first makes every campaign look better than it is.
English Ads With Arabic Subtitles
The copy was written in English and translated. It reads like translation, so it converts like translation, in the language most of your market buys in.
Enough social media advertising creative
to run a real test every month
Social media advertising results
that speak for themselves
Aggregate results across the social media advertising accounts we have run over the last twelve months.
Layali Modest Wear
An online clothing retailer reporting a 6x return that collapsed to under 2x once refused cash-on-delivery parcels were counted. We rebuilt the account around delivered orders and raised creative output from four assets a month to thirty.
Why social media advertising in Egypt is measured wrong
Creative is the last variable you still control
Automated placement, broad targeting and value-based bidding have moved most delivery decisions inside the platform. What remains yours is the offer, the hook and how many versions of each you can put in front of an audience before fatigue sets in. A social media advertising program that ships four assets a month cannot test; one that ships thirty can. That is a production question, not a media-buying question, which is why our ad creative sits in the same team as the campaign management rather than behind a separate request queue.
Cash on delivery breaks the standard ROAS calculation
Between 55% and 70% of Egyptian online shoppers still pay cash on delivery. An order placed is not revenue — it is an intention, and a meaningful share of those parcels come back refused, with the shipping paid in both directions. Any social media advertising report that stops at the platform dashboard is therefore overstating performance, sometimes badly. We reconcile monthly against delivered orders, which occasionally makes our own numbers look worse and always makes the decisions better. Optimizing toward placed orders quietly trains the algorithm to find the customers least likely to pay.
Write in the language people buy in
Egypt has a very large Facebook and Messenger population and a fast-growing TikTok audience, and the majority of that attention is Arabic-first and mobile. Translated ad copy underperforms because idiom, humor and objection-handling do not survive the trip. We write Arabic ads as originals and English ads as originals, then test them separately rather than assuming one is a version of the other. In a bilingual market there are two creative pipelines, not one with a translation step at the end.
Where paid social stops and search begins
Social media advertising creates demand — it reaches people who were not looking for you. Search captures demand that already exists. Accounts that miss this run paid social against bottom-funnel targets and conclude the channel does not work. If your category has real search volume, the honest answer is usually a split, and we will say so even though the search budget sits in a different service line.
Why social media ads stall long before the targeting does
When performance drops, the instinct is to change the audience. It is almost never the audience. Modern delivery systems find the buyers on their own if you feed them enough to work with; what runs out is creative. Social media ads fatigue within one to three weeks in a warm audience, and after that you are paying more for the same impressions.
The fix is uncomfortable but simple: produce enough new concepts every month that the account always has something fresh entering the auction. Most accounts we audit are running four assets and wondering why paid ads on social media stopped working in week three.
How social media ad campaigns should be structured
Good social media advertising campaigns separate three jobs so each can be measured. Prospecting reaches people who have never heard of you and is judged on cost per qualified click and new-customer acquisition. Retargeting works the people who visited but did not act, and should be cheap. Retention and upsell work existing customers. Collapsing all three into one campaign makes the blended numbers look fine while the prospecting quietly loses money. Social ad campaigns also need the tracking settled first — server and browser events reconciled — or you will optimise against numbers the platform invented.
What paid ads on social media should cost you per result
There is no universal benchmark, and anyone quoting one has not looked at your business. What matters is the relationship between three numbers: cost per result, the rate at which those results become customers, and what a customer is worth over their lifetime. Once you know all three you can decide what a lead is allowed to cost, and social media advertising becomes a purchasing decision rather than a gamble. We set those three up in the first month, which is usually the first time a client has seen them together.
Where paid social sits next to search
Search captures demand that already exists; paid social creates it. A business that only runs search campaigns is limited to the number of people typing the query each month. Paid social reaches people before they search, which grows the pool that search can later convert. Run together, the pattern is consistent: paid social lifts branded search volume, and branded search is the cheapest paid traffic there is. The creative that powers all of it comes from the same design and production pipeline rather than being commissioned separately.
How to tell whether social media advertising is actually working
Platform dashboards report the results they can see, which is not the same as the results you got. Two numbers settle it. First, does the platform's reported conversion count roughly agree with your own record of enquiries and orders for the same period? A large gap means the tracking is wrong and every optimisation decision on top of it is noise.
Second, when you pause social media advertising for a week, what happens to total sales — not to platform-attributed sales? That test is uncomfortable and it is the only honest read on incrementality most businesses will ever get. Any agency unwilling to run it is managing the dashboard rather than the business.
Get a free social media advertising audit
Read-only access, one week, and a written review of your account structure, your creative supply rate, and what your reported ROAS is actually measuring.
Services that work
alongside social media advertising
What clients say about
our social media advertising
Social media advertising questions answered
Social media advertising is paid placement inside social platforms — Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snap and others — where you pay for reach and the platform decides delivery based on your objective, budget and creative. It differs from organic social because reach is bought rather than earned, and from search advertising because it reaches people who were not actively looking.
Enough that the platform can exit the learning phase and enough to run more than one creative concept at once — below that, results are noise. We will tell you the realistic floor for your category rather than accepting a budget we know cannot produce a readable test.
Meta still carries the largest reach in Egypt by a wide margin, and most budgets here are right to start there. TikTok is growing fastest and now reaches roughly half the internet user base. LinkedIn matters for B2B and almost nothing else here. We would rather run one platform properly than four thinly.
We reconcile platform-reported conversions against delivered and paid orders monthly. It is the single biggest correction most accounts need in this market, because a refused parcel costs you shipping in both directions and appears in the dashboard as a success.
We produce it — static, motion and short-form video, in Arabic and English. That is deliberate. Performance is capped by how many concepts you can test, and separating creative from media buying is what puts most accounts on a four-week design queue.
You do. We work inside your Business Manager and your ad accounts, with your pixel and your historical data. If the relationship ends, everything stays with you — including the creative files.
Enough for the platform to exit the learning phase on each campaign, which in practice means a floor rather than a target. Below that, results are noise. We work out the floor for your objective and market during the free audit, then scale only once the cost per result holds steady.
More than most brands run. A prospecting campaign needs several distinct concepts, not colour variants, entering rotation every month. That is why we scope paid creative as a production line rather than a one-off, and why creative volume is usually the cheapest lever available.
Both, and they need different creative. Meta rewards a strong first frame and clear offer; TikTok rewards native, unpolished formats that look like the feed around them. Repurposing one into the other without reshooting is the fastest way to waste a budget.
Yes. We audit the account structure, the tracking and the creative library first, then tell you what to keep. Very often the targeting is fine and the problem is that the account has been running the same four assets since launch.
A campaign needs enough conversions to exit the learning phase, which usually takes one to two weeks at a sensible budget. Judging performance before that point leads to the most common mistake in paid social: changing things while the algorithm is still calibrating.
Both. Copy, static design and short-form video are produced in-house as sets of variants so a campaign has something to test. Where a shoot is needed we plan it alongside the campaign rather than commissioning creative after the media plan is signed.
You do. We work inside your Business Manager and your ad account, so the pixel history, the custom audiences and the creative library stay with you. Those audiences are an asset that took months to build and they should never sit in an agency account.
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