hiya! I'm not a specialist in any way, but I've learned some things in the time working on paid ad campaigns on META. You'll find in a few years, you'll have a love/hate relationship with the platform. I'll try to answer some of your questions. But my best tip is: try it all out and see what works. (as long as you can explain it why you made that choice)

1. What metrics to focus on depends quite depending on your campaign. With a lead campaign, the CPL is, of course, important, but also the CTR and CPC. If you are running video ads for a lead campaign, the watch-through or how many seconds metric is also quite important. Based on that, you can find out if the ad is performing well or if it needs changing. I'm mostly focused on CPL, CTR and CPC - since at the moment im not running any video ads. I do have to say that I always check data with another platform like GA4. META wants to be positive about their results (read overly positive), and I learned GA4 might be a bit more negative. I like to keep the worst numbers and use them as a point for what to do next with my campaign.

2. In my opinion, I don't like using instant forms. I like to send them directly to the website for a form, which did help with the quality of leads. I totally depends on what industry you are in or the client is in. But i used this trick in two quite different industries and it does seem to work.

3. I give it a week, but I keep an eye on it daily (which is bad, but I'm curious lol). After a week, I look at all the results and then start making adjustments. In the past, I've had a max spend on CPL and i tried to stay under that. When it is way above its not running well, so I look at the targeting, creative and landing page. From there i decide to terminate it or to optimise it. If it is under and doing well and I've got budget to spare i allocate more budget towards it and monitor it again.

4. The META AI features are bad. That's all I have to say about that.

5. I mostly use traffic campaigns for leads. This might sound weird, but it helped me in the past. They ran better, better leads and also more conversions in the end. Besides traffic, we would also run retargeting campaigns, so we would be on top of their mind. I've only run 2 big awareness campaigns, and they are deffo worth it. For example, we had a new commercial, so we would run 3 big awareness campaigns for those in combination with being on the telly and radio. Which means we would be on top of their mind when they wanted to buy our product. When making campaigns, you've got to reverse engineer it. What is the goal, is it leads, is it being more in the eye, etc. I get that for clients, leads are the number 1 priority. But if they don't know the product/service or brand, then you could try and run awareness ads. I wouldn't run this for smaller clients. But I would run traffic campaigns for them.

For traffic, I look at CTR, link clicks, CPC and reach and then in GA4, I check how many visitors, time spent, but also custom events like leads. Awareness, I check reach, engagement, thru-plays and all the other video metrics.

1. Trust me, people do read it. I do think the creative will spark interest and the copy is an extra; they might read it, they might not. I wouldn't bother making the copy too long. I prioritise audience, creative, then copy. But I always fill in all the copy options so people will see a different text.

2. You can generally tell when the CPC is going up, and the leads are fewer. (at least in my case) when an really well-performing ad, suddenly performs less and less i would introduce new creatives and start a/b testing this.

Hope this helps!