Why Our Spanish-Language Ads Are Outperforming English in Florida and Texas

On the first day of a live Meta Ads campaign targeting Florida and Texas, the Spanish-language version of the same ad received 62% of total impressions — nearly double the English version — on identical budgets, identical targeting, and identical landing pages. Click-through rate told a more mixed story. Delivery didn't: Meta's own algorithm chose to show the Spanish creative far more often, in both states.

Here's the actual data, what it does and doesn't prove yet, and what it means if you're marketing to a Florida or Texas audience.

The setup: same ad, same budget, two languages

We ran a single campaign — same targeting (age 28-60, small business owners), same budget ($17/day per ad set), the same five-card carousel, the same landing page — split only by language. Each ad set (Florida, Texas) ran an English version and a Spanish version at the same time, so any performance difference came from language alone, not audience or budget differences.

This campaign is deliberately built as a first-touch, top-of-funnel step — it's optimized for landing page views, not for leads directly, with a retargeting stage planned once enough people have visited. That structure matters here: at this stage we're not yet measuring which language closes more deals, only which one earns cheaper, more willing attention in the first place. That's still a real, useful signal on its own, and it's the one the data below actually shows.

The numbers, day one

Combined, English ads received 2,536 impressions; Spanish ads received 4,164 — 62% of total delivery going to the Spanish version, without either version being manually weighted or given extra budget.

What this does and doesn't tell us yet

This is one day of data from one campaign, not a controlled study — worth saying plainly instead of dressing it up. Click-through rate is mixed, not uniformly better in Spanish: Florida's Spanish ad clearly won on CTR (1.70% vs. 1.03%), but in Texas the English ad actually had the higher CTR (2.11% vs. 1.51%). What's consistent across both states is delivery volume. Meta's algorithm allocated significantly more impressions to the Spanish creative in both markets — that's the platform's own signal about where it's finding cheaper, more efficient engagement, independent of what either ad's click rate says on its own.

Why this isn't surprising, even this early

Florida and Texas are two of the states with the largest Hispanic and Latino populations in the country. Hispanic and Latino residents make up 28.7% of Florida's population and 39.8% of Texas's population, per the US Census Bureau — Texas crossed into Hispanic-plurality territory in 2022, meaning Hispanic residents now outnumber any other single ethnic group in the state. A meaningful share of small business owners and decision-makers in both states search, scroll, and buy in Spanish, or move between both languages depending on context and platform. Most marketing aimed at this segment still defaults to English-only, treating Spanish as an afterthought instead of a real distribution channel with its own economics.

Ad platforms don't need a business to declare a bilingual strategy to notice this. Meta's delivery system is built to find whichever version of an ad earns engagement most efficiently and shift budget toward it automatically — it doesn't care which language a business assumed would perform better going in. When a Spanish-language version of the exact same offer draws almost twice the delivery on day one, that's the algorithm reporting back on real engagement patterns most English-only campaigns never get to see, simply because they never gave it a Spanish option to compare against.

The landing page has to match the ad

Running a Spanish ad that sends someone to an English-only page just moves the mismatch downstream instead of fixing it — the click looks like a win, then the visitor lands somewhere that doesn't speak to them and leaves anyway. The Florida landing page behind this campaign is fully bilingual by default, same as the rest of the site, specifically so the language match holds all the way from the ad to the page to the booking form.

What this means if you market to Florida or Texas

If your current campaigns run English-only, you're very likely leaving a meaningfully cheaper, more receptive audience segment untouched — not because Spanish speakers can't read English, but because ad platforms increasingly reward creative that matches how people actually search and scroll, and reward it with cheaper delivery. The test is simple:

1. Duplicate your best-performing ad in Spanish, no other changes.
2. Run both versions, same budget, same targeting, for at least a week.
3. Compare delivery volume and cost per result, not just click-through rate alone — as this data shows, the platform's own allocation is often the earlier, clearer signal, before click data has enough volume to be reliable.

What we're watching next

This post will get a follow-up once the campaign has run long enough to compare cost per lead by language instead of just top-of-funnel clicks and impressions. We're also watching whether the Spanish/English split holds steady as volume grows, or whether it was a first-day fluke — one day of data earns a "here's what happened," not a permanent rule, and we'll say so either way once there's more of it.

Want to know if a bilingual approach would move the needle on your own campaigns? Book a free ads audit — we'll look at your account and tell you honestly whether this applies to your audience.