We open your ad account, not a demo one
Paid social media training for teams already spending money and not sure it is working. Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and Pinterest, worked live in your own ad manager on your own campaigns. Half day £1,200, full day £1,800 for up to six people, excluding VAT, at your office or online.
What is paid social media training?
It is training on buying advertising inside social platforms, as opposed to search advertising or organic posting. Campaign structure, audience targeting, creative, budget and measurement across Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and Pinterest. Done properly it is the difference between spending a budget and investing one.
Our version has one distinguishing feature. We open your ad account on the day and work in it. Most paid social courses use a sandbox or screenshots, which is fine for understanding the buttons and useless for understanding why your cost per lead doubled in June.
Why is your paid social not working?
In nearly every account we open, it is one of five things, and usually more than one.
The campaign structure is fighting itself, with audiences overlapping so your own campaigns bid against each other. The objective is wrong, chosen for the metric that looks best rather than the outcome that matters. The creative volume is too low, so the algorithm has nothing to optimise between. The budget is spread so thin that nothing exits the learning phase. Or the measurement is broken and nobody has noticed, so the numbers being reported upwards are fiction.
None of those are fixed by learning the interface better. That is why the day starts in your account rather than on a slide.
Which platforms does the training cover?
Whichever ones you are buying, or thinking about. The day is built around your account rather than a fixed curriculum.
Meta, Facebook and Instagram
Advantage+ against manual campaigns, audience overlap, creative testing and what the attribution settings are actually telling you.
The expensive one, and the one most B2B teams waste. See LinkedIn ads training for the deeper session.
TikTok
Creative led buying, Spark Ads and why the same creative approach as Meta usually fails here. See TikTok training.
Underused by most UK brands, and unusually cheap for the right category. Retail, food, interiors and weddings.
Creative for paid
What to make, how many versions, and why the winning ad is rarely the one the room liked most.
Measurement
Conversions API, attribution windows and building a report that survives a finance director reading it.
What does a day look like?
| Time | Block | What comes out of it |
|---|---|---|
| 09:30 | Your account, opened and audited live | A written list of what is broken, in priority order |
| 10:30 | Objectives and campaign structure | A rebuilt structure that stops campaigns competing |
| 11:30 | Audiences and targeting | Your audience set cleaned up, overlap removed |
| 13:30 | Creative and testing | A testing plan with enough variants to be meaningful |
| 14:45 | Budget, bidding and the learning phase | A budget split that lets campaigns actually optimise |
| 15:45 | Measurement and reporting | A report format and the numbers worth putting in it |
Half days keep the audit, the structure work and the budget block, which is where most of the wasted money sits.
How much should you be spending before this is worth it?
There is no minimum we insist on, but there is an honest threshold. Below roughly £1,000 a month across all platforms, the training will pay for itself slowly, because there is not enough spend for structural improvements to compound.
Between £1,000 and £10,000 a month is where a day of this typically pays for itself within a quarter, because that is the range where accounts are big enough to be badly structured and small enough that nobody has audited them. Above that you probably have an agency, and the useful version of this day becomes teaching your team to hold that agency to account.
Who runs the day?
I am Chris Norton and I run most of these sessions. I founded Prohibition, the PR, social and content agency behind this site, I have worked in public relations for more than twenty years, and I have been running training since 2009. I co-authored Share This Too, the social media handbook published by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.
For paid social specifically, a working buyer from the agency comes with me rather than being described in the third person. We spend client money on these platforms every week, which is the only reason we can open an account and know within ten minutes where the waste is.
Who is it for?
Teams already spending
You have campaigns running, the numbers move around and nobody is certain why. The most common booking.
Teams about to start
Budget approved, nothing built yet. A day here prevents six months of expensive learning.
Teams managing an agency
You want to read the reports properly and ask better questions. Different day, same account.
No certification is assumed. Platform certifications teach the interface, which is the easy part and the part that changes every six months anyway.
Paid social training questions we get asked
How much does paid social media training cost?
Half day £1,200 and full day £1,800 for up to six people, excluding VAT, priced by the group. That is around £200 to £300 a head. Open paid social courses in the UK commonly run £400 to £700 per person, so for a team private training costs less and uses your own account.
Do we need to give you access to our ad account?
Yes, ideally a few days before so we can look properly rather than fumbling on the day. Read only access is enough for the audit. If your policy does not allow that, we can work with screen sharing instead.
Is this the same as Meta Blueprint or LinkedIn’s own certification?
No. Those are free, platform written and teach you the interface, and they are worth doing. They cannot tell you why your account specifically is underperforming, because they have never seen it.
Do you cover Google Ads or PPC?
No. We do paid social only, because that is what we buy. For search advertising you want a PPC specialist and we will say so rather than take the booking.
What if our spend is small?
Below roughly £1,000 a month the training pays back slowly, and we will tell you that on the scoping call rather than after the invoice. Between £1,000 and £10,000 a month is where a day typically pays for itself within a quarter.
Can you train us on LinkedIn ads specifically?
Yes, and there is a dedicated day for it because B2B buying works differently and costs considerably more per click. See LinkedIn ads training.
Will you just run our ads for us instead?
We can, as the agency, but that is a separate conversation and not what this page is selling. Plenty of teams book the training precisely so they do not have to outsource it.
How many people can attend?
Six works best because everybody needs to be able to see the account on screen. We will run up to twelve but the hands on value drops.
What do we take away?
A written audit of the account, the rebuilt structure, a creative testing plan and a reporting format. The audit alone is usually the thing people quote back to us afterwards.
Where does this sit with our other training?
You are here
Paid social media training. Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and Pinterest, in your own account.
LinkedIn ads
The B2B specialist day. See LinkedIn ads training.
Measurement
Reporting across organic and paid. See social media measurement training.
Bring us your account and your numbers
Half day £1,200, full day £1,800, up to six people, excluding VAT. Delivered UK wide or online.
Part of every social media course we run, delivered in Leeds, Manchester, London and UK wide. Last reviewed August 2026.
