What is a boost? Paid ads for your missing pet, explained

A boost is a paid advertisement for your missing pet, shown on Facebook and Instagram to people near where your pet went missing. Not to your followers, not to people who already know you: to whoever happens to be inside the area you choose. That one difference is the whole reason boosting works.

When a pet goes missing, almost everyone starts the same way instead: a post on Facebook, asking friends to share. That is the right instinct, and it costs nothing. But a post and a boost do very different jobs, and it is worth knowing which one you are doing before you spend anything.

A post reaches your followers. A boost reaches your neighbours.

Social media decides who sees a post based on who follows you. Your friends, your family, people you went to school with. That list was built by your life, not by your postcode, so most of the people on it live nowhere near the street your pet went missing on.

A boost is a paid advertisement. It is delivered on the opposite basis: people are chosen by where they are, not by whether they know you. The person who finds your cat is usually someone you have never met, three streets away, who happened to look under the right car.

• A post goes to people who follow you, wherever in the world they live. A boost goes to people inside a radius you choose.
• A post travels only if people share it. A boost reaches a stranger without anyone sharing anything.
• A post appears once and slides down the feed within hours. A boost keeps being delivered for as many days as you pay for.
• A post needs an account and a following to do anything. A boost runs from our account, so you need neither.

Why sharing usually isn’t enough on its own

Shares feel like reach, and they do help, but look at where they land. When a friend shares your post, it goes to their followers, who are mostly the same kind of scattered list as yours. A post can be shared two hundred times and still barely be seen by anyone within walking distance of your front door.

What a Lost Pet Alarm is, and where the boost fits

Lost Pet Alarm is the service that runs the boost. You describe your pet in a short chat and we build an alert page for them: the photo, the name, where and when they went missing, and a way for anyone who sees them to reach you. There is nothing to install and no account to create. It all happens in a browser.

That alert page is free. It gets listed on our site, you get a printable poster from it, and you can talk to a real person about the search. What the page cannot do on its own is find the people who need to see it, because nobody nearby knows to go looking for it.

The boost is the paid part, and that is the job it does. It takes the alert page you already have and pushes it into the feeds of people inside a radius you choose around the last-seen location. The ads run from our own Facebook account, so there is nothing for you to set up: you choose the area and the number of days, and we build, launch and report on the campaign.

Alerts that have not been boosted are still listed publicly on our lost and found pages, which is also where a neighbour who has found an animal can check whether anyone is looking for it.

What happens when you boost an alert

• We build the ad from your pet’s profile: the photo, the name, where and when they went missing.
• It is targeted at people inside the radius you choose around the last-seen location.
• Facebook reviews it first, which usually takes anywhere from half an hour to a couple of hours.
• It then runs for the number of days you picked, spread evenly rather than spent all at once.
• Anyone who sees it can reply straight from the ad, with no app and no account, and that message reaches you within seconds.
• You get the real delivery numbers each day, not projections.

Who actually sees it

Neighbours, dog walkers, delivery drivers, parents on the school run: anyone scrolling Facebook or Instagram inside the radius. They are not searching for a lost pet. Your pet’s face simply turns up between posts from their friends, which is precisely why it registers. People remember an animal they saw in their feed that morning when they spot one in a hedge that afternoon.

What the numbers mean

• People reached: how many separate people have seen the alert at least once.
• Times shown: every appearance counted, so it is always higher. The same neighbour scrolling past twice counts twice.
• Clicked through: how many stopped and opened the full alert.
• Frequency: times shown divided by people reached. Once it climbs past roughly two and a half, the ads are circling the same people and the useful move is a wider radius, not more days.

What you control

• The radius around where your pet went missing.
• How many days it runs.
• How much you spend, which is what decides how many people inside that radius are reached.
• Whether to widen or extend part-way through, if the numbers say the area is saturated.
• Stopping it the moment your pet is home. Nothing further is spent and the alert comes down.

When a boost helps most

In the first days after a pet goes missing, when they are usually still close to where they were last seen and the people nearby have not stopped noticing yet. It helps most in places with people in them: a boost across a dense neighbourhood puts the alert in front of far more eyes than the same money spent over empty countryside.

It is not a replacement for the rest of the search. Posters on the street, calls to local shelters and vets, checking that your microchip details are current: those still matter, and they reach people a feed never will. A boost covers the part that posters cannot, which is everyone who never walks past your poster.

If your pet went missing today, start with the checklist for the first 24 hours and decide about boosting once the immediate search is under way.

For the offline half of the search, here is how to make a lost pet poster people actually read.