What Is LINE Ads, and How Is It Different from LINE OA? Read This Before Your First Ad

Think of a big market for a moment. In the morning, the market's loudspeaker announces which stalls have good goods and which are on sale. Anyone who wants their shop name announced pays the person running the mic. But the seasoned shop owners have something else that money can't buy: a small notebook with the phone numbers of their regular customers. Whenever new stock arrives, they can just call, and they don't pay anyone for it.

These two work in different ways. The loudspeaker brings strangers walking to your stall, while the notebook pulls back people who already know you to buy again. Shops that really sell well usually use both together, and they know how many new names in the notebook the money paid to the mic operator should turn into.

The LINE app has these same two things. The notebook is your LINE OA, and the loudspeaker is LINE Ads, paid ads that appear on various pages of the LINE app so people who don't yet know your shop can see you. Many people still search for it as LINE Ads Platform, while the official LINE Thailand website now calls it LINE Ads. In this article I'll explain what it is, how it differs from sending messages to the friends of your OA, what to prepare before spending your first baht, and which numbers to watch to tell whether it pays off.

A few quick questions to ask yourself first

This takes under five minutes. If a stranger taps to add your LINE OA as a friend today, what is the first thing they see? Is there a welcome message that says what the shop sells, and a menu at the bottom they can tap to go further?

And if an ad sends people to a website, does the page they land on talk about the same thing as the ad, or does it drop them on a homepage where they have to search all over again?

One more question many shops can't yet answer: do you know how many people blocked your OA last month, and which channel most of them came from?

If you can answer all of these, you're more ready than you think. If you can't yet, that's perfectly fine. All of this is what this article will help you prepare.

What LINE Ads is, in shop-owner language

The LINE Ads page on the LINE for Business website describes it as a tool for creating ads on the LINE platform that are bought by auction (Bidding), where you set the objective, the audience, and the budget yourself. Simply put, you tell the system what you want, who you want to see it, and how much you're willing to pay, and the system competes on price against other shops that want the same group of people.

The one sentence I'd like you to remember: LINE Ads brings new people to you. Whether you keep those people is the job of your OA and your website.

How precisely can you choose who sees it?

This is where small shops benefit more than they expect. The same LINE page says you can choose the area from region, province, district, and sub-district, all the way down to postal code, and set a radius from 1 to 50 kilometers around a point. You can also separate people who live there, people who work there, and people who recently passed through the area. A coffee shop in an office district can therefore target only people who work near the shop, without paying for people on the other side of the city.

Beyond location, you can also choose gender, age from 20 and up, interests, and behavior across various LINE services. If you have your own customer data, you can build custom audiences, such as people who have visited your website, a list of phone numbers or emails you upload, or the friends of your LINE OA, where LINE lets you choose between friends who haven't blocked you and friends who have.

Where do the ads appear in the LINE app?

LINE's Thai page lists seven placements (I looked on October 1, 2026): Home Tab, Chat List (the main chat page), LINE TODAY, Wallet Tab, LINE OpenChat, LINE Album, and LINE Note. It also says the system picks the most effective placements for you based on your objective and audience. The figures LINE itself announces on the same page are that Chat List reaches more than 56 million users, Home Tab more than 45 million, and LINE TODAY more than 40 million. These numbers are disclosed by LINE itself, not from an outside measurement body.

There's a small detail I found while checking. LINE Thailand's English page on the same day didn't match the Thai page exactly in its list of placements. It included LINE VOOM and didn't include LINE Note. So I'd treat this list as a rough picture. The real placements your ad gets can be seen in the reports in your ad account after you run it.

If you've come across news that LINE Ads is shutting down, that news is about Japan. LY Corporation announced on its Japanese business site that it is merging LINE Ads into LY Ads and will stop delivering LINE Ads there around the end of October 2026. As of the day I wrote this article, the Thai LINE for Business site still allows creating LINE Ads accounts as usual.

When does your money get charged?

LINE Ads charges according to the objective you choose. If you choose adding friends, it is billed as CPF, meaning you pay per friend gained. If you choose sending people to a website, it is billed as CPC per click or CPM per thousand impressions. Video campaigns also have CPV. This matters more than many people think, because it decides what the first number you should watch is.

On payment, the LINE Ads user manual says you can pay only with a credit card or coupons. It accepts VISA, Mastercard, JCB, and TPN, but prepaid cards can't be used (information as of March 31, 2021, as that page states), and you must have a LINE Official Account before you can publish ads. On ad review, the same manual says the team will review within 48 hours. Many parts of this manual are dated from 2020 to 2021, so check the settings page in your account again before you start.

How LINE Ads differs from broadcasting to friends in LINE OA

A broadcast opens the notebook and sends a message to people who are already friends with us. It's a channel we own. The cost is tied to the OA's package and message quota, which I explain in detail in the article on LINE OA package prices for 2026 with a formula for calculating your message quota.

LINE Ads works on the other side. It reaches for people who are not yet in the notebook. Every baht you pay is a temporary rental of attention. When the budget runs out, the ad disappears. What truly stays with the shop is just two things: new names in the contact list, and people who saw your website and got back in touch.

That's why I like to see these two channels as one team. LINE Ads brings people in, and the OA takes care of keeping them. If your OA still sends messages so often that people tap block, the money you spent on ads leaks out that way.

And the add-friend ads in the OA Manager page? Are they the same thing?

This question comes up a lot. The answer is that they're different channels. LINE's Gain Friends Ads page has a clear comparison table. Gain Friends Ads bought through LINE OA can be used only by blue-shield verified accounts, offer basic audience targeting, namely gender, age, interests, and area, have a budget in the range of 1,000 to 30,000 baht per month, and LINE says they suit beginners. That page doesn't say whether this figure includes VAT. If you plan to set a budget from it, check on the payment page first.

LINE Ads can be used with ordinary accounts without a shield, blue-shield verified accounts, and green-shield premium accounts. The budget is unlimited and you can use custom audiences, such as uploading customers' phone numbers or emails, people who have visited your website, or lookalike groups (Lookalike). LINE says it suits those who already have a customer database. Both put ads in the same set of placements. The differences are how finely you can choose people and the budget ceiling.

Do you want more friends, or more website visits?

LINE's product page groups objectives into three: brand awareness, increasing sales, and growing your customer base. For the small shops I talk with, most circle around just two options: "add friends" and "website traffic."

Adding friends suits businesses that already close sales in chat, such as a dessert shop, a florist, or a clinic that takes appointments via LINE. A person sees the ad, taps add friend, and can keep talking right away. The upside is gaining new names in the notebook that you can message many more times. The caution is that friends gained easily also block easily.

Website traffic suits businesses whose customers need to read information before deciding, such as services with several packages, products with specs to review, or a factory that takes corporate clients. The people who click get to read the page we wrote in full, then message when they're ready. This option requires the LINE Tag to be installed on your website so the system can measure what each person does after clicking.

There's another objective called website conversion, which has the system find people likely to buy or sign up. LINE's own Learning Hub page says you need 100 or more past conversions to optimize well (viewed October 1, 2026). A shop just starting out usually hasn't reached that point, so starting with the first two is easier.

"I already run Facebook ads, so why do I need LINE too?"

If your Facebook ads already bring in customers, that works for real, and I won't argue. There's no reason to stop something that's working well.

What LINE Ads adds is a different place where people are. Some customer groups barely scroll their feed but have LINE open all day chatting with family and colleagues. The other thing is the shortcut from ad to chat. A person who taps add friend from a LINE ad is in the same app where they'll message the shop, with nowhere else to switch to.

I suggest trying it small first. Set a budget you can lose without it hurting, run it for two to four weeks, and compare it with Facebook using the same number: how many people actually messaged or contacted you per baht spent. Then shift the budget toward whichever channel does better.

Why preparing your home first pays off more and more

Every friend you gain today is someone you can message again next month and the month after, without paying for ads again. The sooner you start collecting, the thicker the notebook gets, and the cost per sale slowly comes down.

Your website accumulates too. The LINE Ads page says you can build an audience from people who have visited your website, using data from the LINE Tag. That means this group will have people in it only if the tag is already installed. A shop that installs the tag today will, in three months, have a list of people who showed interest to run ads to again. A shop that installs it the day it wants to advertise has to start counting from one.

Data doesn't go back in time for anyone.

Another thing that saves money is excluding people who are already friends. LINE's Learning Hub page recommends Exclude OA Audience in add-friend campaigns, so the ads don't show to people already in your contact list. The thicker your notebook gets, the more this setting helps every baht reach genuinely new people.

The minimum to have before your first baht

Start with a LINE OA that is ready to receive guests: a welcome message that says what the shop does, and a Rich Menu that a stranger can tap to go further right away, such as viewing products, asking about prices, or seeing the shop map. If you don't have one yet, read how to design a LINE OA Rich Menu that gets lots of taps first, because the Rich Menu is the storefront a new friend sees first.

Next is a destination page that matches the ad. If the ad talks about birthday cakes, the page people land on should be about birthday cakes, with a message button that's easy to see.

If you're going to send people to your website, you need the LINE Tag installed on the site, and you need to have checked that it really fires on the live website customers see. Hearing "it's been installed for you" is not enough.

On the money side, you need a credit card registered in the ad account and a trial budget you've decided in your head how much to spend. LINE's manual says daily budgets can be set down to the satang (information as of October 19, 2020), and LINE's Learning Hub page gives an example Daily Budget for an add-friend campaign of 300 to 500 baht, without stating whether it includes VAT (viewed October 1, 2026). That figure is an example from LINE, not a rule or a minimum. The budget that genuinely suits your shop depends on how much one customer is worth to you.

Real examples LINE itself tells

On LINE for Business's success stories page there are two stories I think small shop owners can get ideas from. A note first: both were written by LINE to promote its services. The numbers in them are numbers LINE reports, and I haven't verified them myself.

The first is a beauty-queen brand of salted-fish chili paste, which used the add-friend objective. What I like is that they didn't stop at gaining friends. They set up a welcome message that pops up the moment someone adds the shop, giving full product details and promotions, like having a staff member greeting at all times. LINE writes that sales grew as much as 10 times in just 2 months.

The other is pumi by COOLLiving, a brand of pillows, mattresses, and dust-mite spray that sold in stores for over 20 years before moving online. LINE reports that monthly followers rose from the hundreds to 5,000 a month. The lesson the brand owner shared is more interesting than the numbers: content should talk about the customer's problem first, then explain how the product helps solve it.

A true story from our own website

I'll tell this one straight from the TumWebSME website. After we rebuilt our own site in 2026, the Google Ads conversion tag went up along with the site, but it was placed in the wrong spot, so it wasn't working on the live site for about a week after the campaign started. Clicks came in normally, but conversions were zero every day. Judging from the numbers alone, anyone would conclude the ads didn't work, when in fact the tag had never fired even once.

You can run into the same thing with the LINE Tag. Before running ads that are measured by a tag, open the real website and check that the tag works, not just in the settings page.

The other thing we do every day is have our sales team write down every customer who calls or messages on LINE, with "where did you find us, and what did you search for?" Because ad platforms' measurement tools can't see the messages exchanged in chat. If you run add-friend ads and customers close the sale in chat, this notebook is the only evidence that tells you how many baht of ad spend became actual sales. The technique of coding links so they follow customers from your website to LINE is in my article checking whether the LINE links on your website can really be tracked.

A 5-step plan you can start this week

1. Open your LINE OA and look at it through a stranger's eyes. Get the welcome message and Rich Menu ready.

2. Pick just one objective to begin: add friends if you close sales in chat, or website visits if customers need to read information first.

3. If you choose website visits, install the LINE Tag, check on the live site that it works, and prepare a destination page that matches the ad.

4. Create an ad account, register a credit card, and set a trial budget you can afford to lose. Run for two to four weeks.

5. Record your numbers every week in one table: spend, number of friends or clicks, number of blocks, and number of people who actually contacted you.

How to measure whether it pays off

If you run add-friend ads, the first number the system gives is the cost per friend. It looks good, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Open the LINE OA help center to see how to read friend statistics. On the insights page there's a "friend acquisition channels" tab that shows both friend additions and blocks by channel. If half of the friends from ads block you within a single month, your cost per friend who actually stayed has doubled.

There's one limitation small shops should know. The help center says channel-level numbers won't be shown if friend additions are under 20 per day, for privacy reasons. In the early period when you spend little, you may see incomplete numbers. So the sales team's notebook becomes even more important.

If you run website-traffic ads, look at what the people who clicked do next: tap the message button, fill in a form, or call. Tagging your ad links with UTM helps your web analytics tool separate people from LINE Ads from other channels. I wrote how to do it in the UTM article on tagging links so you know which channel customers came from.

The last number, which I weigh most heavily, is the number of people who actually contacted you per baht spent, whether by chat, phone, or a form on the website. If this number keeps getting better, you needn't worry when the other numbers go up and down.

Back to the loudspeaker in the market

The loudspeaker really does get strangers to walk to your stall, but what makes them come back to buy again is what's on the stall and the name written in that small notebook. LINE Ads works that way. It brings people in, while a well-set-up OA and a website that talks about the same thing as the ad decide whether the money you paid becomes customers.

If you're about to build a new website that's ready to receive people from ads, with the destination page, the LINE message button, and measurement tags in place from day one, take a look at what the TumWebSME website packages deliver, then message us and tell us about your business.

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