Should my Facebook ads be in Urdu, Roman Urdu or English?

Look at your WhatsApp inbox before you look at a style guide. If customers write 'price kya hai' and 'delivery G-13 mein hogi?', an ad in polished formal English sounds like someone else's brand. If they write in full English sentences about a corporate training or a dental implant, Roman Urdu might sound too casual. The language of the enquiries is the best evidence you have of the language of the buyers.

There is no rule that an ad must use one language. A common pattern that reads naturally on Pakistani feeds is an English headline or product name with a Roman Urdu line underneath ('Lawn collection 2026 — sirf 3 din ke liye COD free'), or a Reel where the owner speaks Urdu with English captions. On video, the spoken language matters most; the captions should match it or translate it, because many people watch with the sound off.

Urdu script has a place too. It stands out in a feed full of Latin text and reaches viewers who are more comfortable reading it, often older family decision-makers. It needs care with fonts and line breaks, especially inside images, so the text does not render badly on some phones. Meta also lets you supply ads in multiple languages within one ad, shown according to the viewer's language setting.

The honest answer is to test. Run the same offer with the same image in two languages in one ad set and compare cost per conversation, and more importantly the quality of those conversations, after a week or two. Then keep the winner and test it against a new idea.