You've decided to advertise. Here's how not to waste the first month.

Assalamu alaikum.

You've decided to advertise on HalalSpark. Good. Most advertisers skip the same step, and pay for it later: getting the setup right before the campaign goes live, not after it's already running.

None of this is complicated. But it's the difference between a campaign that reaches five placement types across dozens of publisher sites, and one that ends up reaching only a fraction of that because of a single image upload decision made in the first ten minutes.

Here's what to get right.

Upload one image, unlock one placement

The single most common mistake we see is an advertiser uploading one image, usually a rectangle, and calling the campaign done. That image becomes eligible for inline placements. That's it. It won't show in a header, a footer, a banner, or a sidebar, because those placements need a different shape of image entirely, not a resized version of the same one.

HalalSpark matches ads to placements by aspect ratio, not by a single fixed size. A wide image, roughly 2.2:1 or wider, is eligible for banner, header, and footer placements. A tall image, roughly 0.65:1 or narrower, is eligible for sidebar. A balanced image in between those two ratios is eligible for inline. Between the three shapes, you cover all five placement types.

Horizontal2.2 to 12.0 ratioHeader, banner, footer

Rectangle0.65 to 2.2 ratioInline

Vertical0.20 to 0.65 ratioSidebar

The fix doesn't require running separate campaigns. One campaign can hold multiple creatives, each one activated independently. Upload one horizontal image, one vertical image, and one rectangle image into the same campaign, and you're eligible across all five manual placement types at once, on the same budget and the same targeting.

If you've only ever uploaded a single rectangle, this is probably worth more to your reach than anything else in this post.

Then get the resolution right too

Once the shape is right, resolution is a smaller decision, but worth doing properly while you're there. The upload tool checks your ratio and, when it's correct, suggests uploading at twice the pixel dimensions: same ratio, double the resolution, so the image stays sharp on higher-density screens instead of looking soft once it's scaled up.

Ratio first, resolution secondGet the shape right before you worry about pixels. The upload tool only suggests doubling resolution once your aspect ratio already checks out.

Every manual ad placement renders in a mode that never crops or stretches the image to fit its container. An image with the right ratio for its shape renders cleanly: full image, no distortion. One with the wrong ratio for its shape will letterbox instead, black or blank space padding it out rather than filling the frame. Neither looks broken exactly, but only one of them is the crisp, full-frame result you were probably after. Getting the ratio right at upload is what actually decides how the ad looks. HalalSpark won't crop or stretch it into shape for you either way.

CPM or CPC, and when each one makes sense

HalalSpark runs on two pricing tiers, standard and premium. Neither is an auction. The rate is the rate, whichever tier you're on:

CPM · per 1,000 impressions

£4standard

£6 on premium, overwhelmingly Muslim-audience inventory

Best for awareness: getting your name in front of people repeatedly until it registers.

CPC · per click

60pstandard

90p on premium, overwhelmingly Muslim-audience inventory

Best for a specific offer: you only pay when someone actually acts.

From 21 October 2026, prices depend on which country each visitor is in. Every country's price is on the pricing page.

CPM, cost per thousand impressions, suits awareness. You're paying to get your name in front of people repeatedly until it registers, rather than chasing an immediate click. It's also the more predictable of the two: you know exactly what a given budget buys in terms of reach.

CPC, cost per click, suits a specific offer or landing page, somewhere you'd rather not pay for impressions that nobody actually engages with. You trade some of that predictability for the reassurance that you're only paying when someone acts.

Neither is better on its own. A new brand trying to become recognisable leans towards CPM. A campaign pointing at one product page leans towards CPC. Plenty of advertisers run both, in separate campaigns, and let the results decide which one their audience prefers.

Category first, geography second, everything else only if you need it

HalalSpark's targeting has a clear order of importance, and it helps to know it before you touch any of the settings.

Category, the strongest lever, by a wide margin
Target up to three categories per campaign. An ad that closely matches a publisher's content category is far more likely to appear there than one that doesn't. If you're only going to set one thing carefully, make it this.
Geography, which decides where your ad can run at all
Category only changes how often your ad is picked. Geography is a hard limit: if a visitor's country falls outside your targeting, your ad simply isn't in the running for that impression at all.
Language and device, only when the ad needs them
These are hard limits too. Pick languages and your ad only runs on websites whose readers read one of them. Pick mobile or desktop, or iPhone or Android, and it only shows on those devices. Use them when the creative genuinely calls for it: stack every dimension at once (category, country, language, and device) and each one shrinks your eligible audience a little further.

Why a new campaign looks dead in its first few daysUsually it's this: the advertiser targeted one country tightly, inventory in that exact country turned out to be thin, and the campaign had nowhere left to serve. Adding a few nearby countries, or a whole region with one of the quick-add buttons, usually fixes this without giving up the original geographic intent.

Fund it properly and let it run

None of the above matters much if the campaign never gets a fair chance to prove anything. Loading a few pounds in to see what happens tells you very little, because a budget that thin barely produces enough impressions to judge.

There's no minimum campaign spend beyond the £4 wallet top-up, and that number is deliberately low, but low and sufficient aren't the same thing. If the goal is to actually find out whether HalalSpark works for your business, fund the wallet properly, get the creative shapes right using everything above, set targeting that isn't so narrow it starves the campaign, and give it long enough to produce a real read.

A fair budget and a correct setup from day one will tell you more in a week than a cautious trickle will tell you in a month.

Ready to set up your first campaign properly?£4 CPM, 60p CPC, no auction. Fund your wallet and go.

Start advertising →

Most of what decides whether a first campaign performs well happens before it ever goes live: the shapes you upload, the resolution you upload them at, the pricing model that actually fits what you're trying to do, and targeting tight enough to stay relevant without starving itself.

Get those right at the start, and the rest of the campaign mostly looks after itself.

Insha'Allah it goes well from here.