The Question Under Your Ad That Nobody Answered

A school owner wrote this in a Reddit thread about trying to contact schools:

"If you get a response within a few days that is a good response time."

In the same comment he said the thing every owner will recognise: most people ring during class hours, because class hours are also after work hours. He's right about that, and a missed call is gone the moment it stops ringing. Nobody else ever knows it happened.

A comment under your ad is not like that. It doesn't ring out. It sits there in public, with nothing underneath it, and every other parent who sees the ad reads it too.

Should I reply to comments on my Facebook ads?

Yes. All of them, the same day.

Treat the comments as part of the campaign, not as weather happening to it. Read them on every live ad, every day.

Then look at who types them. Picture a mum at half past nine at night, who has read your ad twice, worked out that her son is the right age, and still has one thing she wants to know. She doesn't fill in the form. She asks in the comments, because that is quicker.

So the comment is an enquiry. It arrived in the wrong place, in public, where the same slow reply that kills a phone enquiry does its damage twice: once to her, and once to everyone else still deciding, who now know what happens when you ask this school a question.

That second group is the part you can't see from behind your own desk. You see one awkward question. They see whether anybody answered it.

What do I send to someone who asks about classes?

A private message first, then a public reply. The order matters, and neither step takes long.

Send the message, because that is where the real conversation goes and it stays in one place. Then go back to the ad, reply under her comment, tag her by name, and say you have just sent her a message. Don't skip the tag. Without it she has no reason to go looking for a message she never expected.

Then be quick about it. Answer while she still has the phone in her hand, tonight rather than tomorrow morning, because your competitors are one search away.

Should I hide the comment or delete it?

Hide it, almost always.

The two buttons do very different things, and most owners reach for the wrong one because the wrong one feels more final.

Hide. The comment stays visible to the person who wrote it and to their friends, and it is hidden from everyone else. They are not told that you hid it. Their comment looks normal when they check.

Delete. The comment is erased and nobody can see it. The person is not notified, but they will know it has gone if they go back to look at it.

A hidden comment ends quietly. A deleted one can be checked, and the person who notices tends to come back angrier, in a place you control even less, like your reviews.

So hide the spam, the competitor dropping a link, the man who wants to argue about which style is better. Those are worth hiding early, too. Rubbish sitting under a live ad drags on the results while you are paying for every impression.

What you never hide is a real question, especially a blunt one. "How much is it?" isn't a negative comment. It's a buying signal with no manners, and hiding it is the most expensive click you'll make this month.

Can I just turn the comments off?

It's a fair question, especially after a bad week in the comments. You mostly can't, and you wouldn't want to.

Meta does not give advertisers a simple switch to turn comments off on ads. A native comment control was introduced in 2024, but it is still rolling out to a limited number of businesses and only covers certain ad formats. Go looking for it in Ads Manager and you may well find nothing there. The controls on a normal Page post are real, but they don't carry over once that post runs as an ad.

One advertiser wrote up the hunt on a marketing forum: asked their Meta rep and got nothing, found a Meta help page that looked out of date or unavailable in their region, then heard about a beta that switches comments off at the ad set level and wasn't in it.

Leaving them on is better for you anyway. A hidden comment still counts as engagement, and Meta reads comments as a sign your ad is working. Switch the section off and that signal goes with it, which can push your costs up. Hiding cleans up what people see and keeps everything that helps you.

It also keeps the comments you want. Someone tagging their sister, a mum saying her daughter loves it, a white belt answering a stranger's question better than you could. That is free proof sitting on a paid ad, and you cannot buy it back once you have switched the section off.

Someone asked the price in the comments

Answer them. In public, briefly, and then take it to a message.

You don't owe a stranger your full fee sheet under an ad, and we don't advise putting one there. What you owe them is an answer that isn't a dodge, because a parent who feels handled gets harder to enrol, not easier. Something like: "Depends which programme she joins, so let me message you the options. [Name your trial offer here.] Come and have a look first, then we can talk about the rest."

The person reading over her shoulder now knows you reply and that there's a way in. The numbers then happen in a conversation where you can talk about what the child actually gets, which is where they belong.

The people who reacted and never typed anything

Underneath your ad there is a row of reactions. Those are people who saw an ad for a martial arts school, in your town, and pressed a button.

You can invite the ones who don't already follow you, one by one. Click the reaction count under the post, and next to each name there is an Invite button for anyone who isn't following yet. There is no invite-all button, so it is manual, and it takes a couple of minutes while the kettle boils.

Worth the couple of minutes, because a parent who follows you is one more person who might see next term's grading photos or the camp you've just added. Pair it with your Google listing being worth looking at and you have made the look-you-up stage work in your favour instead of against you.

Where we sit in this

This one is yours, and we'd rather say so.

We find the families, get them booked, and remind them to come. You run the class and enrol them. The comments sit in between, on an ad we built, in an account you own, and the person best placed to answer "is she too young for this?" is the man who teaches the class.

What we can do is tell you when a comment is worth your attention and keep the ad clean around it. What we can't do is be you in the message. A reply from Dave who teaches the Tuesday class beats a reply from anybody's marketing department, every time, and it is one of the few bits of this where doing it yourself is genuinely better.

What this won't fix

It won't rescue an ad nobody is reacting to. No comments means no comment problem. It means the ad itself needs work.

It won't fill a timetable with no space in it. If your beginners' class is full, every good comment you answer makes the waiting list longer and your week worse.

It won't replace the follow-up. A message sent and then dropped is the same as a comment ignored, two days later.

The thing to do Monday

The short version

A comment under your ad is an enquiry that arrived in public. Answer it in a message, then say so under the comment so the person actually sees it. Hide the rubbish instead of deleting it, and leave the real questions up, because the people still deciding are reading your answers more carefully than they read your ad.

If you'd like more families walking in for that conversation, bring your class times and the number of spaces you can honestly take this month. If we don't think we can fill those spaces, we'll say so on the call.

Keep reading

• "Just Take Free Lesson And Go": Your Trial Isn't Choosing Your Families
• Krav Maga, Kali Or Taekwondo? The Question That Loses You The Booking
• Image Ads Or Video Ads? The Format Isn't The Decision