Honza Bartos on Meta ads: over 2 billion crowns spent, what works

Social media advertising specialist Honza Bartos has helped companies invest more than two billion crowns in Facebook and Instagram ads. His main advice to online store owners: the success of campaigns has long depended not only on the settings in Meta's ad account but on the health of the whole business.

Bartos has worked with Meta social media campaigns for more than fourteen years. Today he and his team of fifteen specialists manage seventy clients and about 150 ad accounts in Europe, Asia and the Americas. He himself works 250 hours a month or more. “When a month has 160 hours, it's almost a vacation month. I couldn't work like this if I didn't have an understanding wife,” he laughs. His clients include MK lůžkoviny, CS Apparel Group with the Under Armour and GAP brands, the online store Alkohol.cz, the real estate agency Maxima, the Tomas Arsov brand and the Trezor crypto wallet.

When a new client comes to him complaining that ads don't work, the mistake is rarely only in the settings. “Clients ask for prettier creatives or a change of targeting. Other agencies might do that, but it doesn't bring results either: the problem lies elsewhere,” Bartos says. That is why the team looks beyond Meta and analyzes the entire business — from the website and product presentation to strategy, pricing and competitors' moves. It gets involved in website setup, product range and work on raising the average order value.

Advertising as a business amplifier. Bartos reminds us that Meta campaigns are only one part of the marketing mix. If everything works, advertising amplifies success; if there is a problem in the overall picture, it amplifies that too.

As an example, he cites the client inComputer, which sells refurbished electronics. Previous agencies told the company that Facebook was not suitable for advertising. Bartos's team decided otherwise: it launched campaigns aimed directly at sales, sent buyers to the online store and advised how to improve the user experience there. The campaigns are tested, and the overall effect is assessed using the company's own data: sales, ad spend, margin and real profitability are brought together in one place, because not every product deserves the same investment. As a result, inComputer now has record revenue, and the company itself was surprised how quickly results came.

“One of today's illusions is that all the results can be found right in Meta or Google Analytics. But the truth isn't visible there either: because of cookie banners, iOS restrictions and other privacy rules, part of the data simply never gets there. You also won't see separately that large investments in Meta can improve the results of other channels, such as PPC campaigns,” Bartos explains. “The only truth is in the CRM, where real sales, costs and margin are. That's why we don't raise budgets rashly, but increase them gradually and only when the website, the offer and the online store are truly ready for it.”

A similar approach worked for a client from the fashion world — an established online store that usually invests between 500,000 and one million crowns a month in Meta ads. When it needed to quickly catch up with its revenue plan, Bartos's team prepared a flash sale with changes to the website and the offer. In a single day, 185,000 crowns were invested in the campaign.