u/BruTeve

If you've been running Facebook ads for a while, you've probably copied a campaign or ad setup from a YouTube video exactly. They showed a 4x ROAS while you got a 1x in your ad account.

Or you've been told that Advantage+ is all anyone needs now. So you tried it and watched your results decline.

And at some point someone told you retargeting is dead, right before someone else said it's the most profitable campaign they run.

Most people figure they missed a step somewhere. Usually they didn’t, and neither did the person giving the advice. Their ad account just responds to things differently than yours does.

I’ve been running Facebook ads since 2015 (which is why sometimes I call it Facebook, sometimes Meta), and this is something I call “ad account behavior.”

What ad account behavior actually is

Ad account behavior is how a specific account reacts to the decisions you make in it. Budget changes, campaign types, audiences, creative, all of it. Two accounts can get the exact same change and move in opposite directions.

That's why it's the first thing I figure out with every account, before I start optimizing anything.

The clearest example I've seen of this was with a supplement brand. Their ad account kept getting shut down, so we set up a second ad account as a backup and ran both at the same time.

Both accounts had the same pixel, the same ads, the same campaign structure, the same targeting, and the same budgets.

One account performed best with small budgets on retargeting audiences. The other performed best spending on large cold audiences. Everything we could control was identical, and the two accounts still responded to completely different things.

Where I start in a new account

I know "every account is different" can sound like you're supposed to test every possible setting and hope something sticks. In practice it's a lot more organized than that.

Meta gives you an almost endless number of things you can change. Bidding, placements, audiences, campaign types, ad formats, number of ads per ad set, dynamic creative. But when an account isn’t working, the fix almost always ends up coming from the same five or so areas. I’ve seen the same handful come up over and over, so I know where to look first.

Think about a mechanic when a car comes in that won't start. It could be 20 different things. A good mechanic checks the battery first, then the starter, then the alternator, because after a few hundred cars, that's usually where the answer is. He doesn't pull the engine apart on day one.

Ad accounts work the same way. The common answers get tested first, and the less common ones only come up if those don’t hold up.

The mechanic still has to test the battery before he replaces it, even if he's pretty sure. Same thing here. My experience decides the order I test things in, and the account's results decide the answer.

Most of the common questions that get asked about Facebook ads, like how to scale or whether to use interests or Advantage+, have the same answer: it depends on your ad account behavior.

Once I’ve worked through the five areas below, those questions pretty much answer themselves for that account.

Here's what each one is and where I start with it.

1. Best source of cold traffic

There's no shortage of advice out there saying interest targeting is dead and Advantage+ is the only thing worth running anymore.

In some of the accounts I manage, that's accurate. Advantage+ beats everything, including newer accounts selling niche products where you'd expect to need specific interests. In other accounts, interest targeting wins by a wide margin.

When I take on a new client, I launch interest targeting and Advantage+ at the same time with the same ads, so the targeting is the only real difference. Both get 5 to 7 days, sometimes 14 days, before I judge either one.

If both perform well, I keep both running. Having more than one campaign type working protects the account when one of them drops off.

After Andromeda rolled out, Meta's recommendation was pretty much to put everything into Advantage+. I tested it this way for one client and interest targeting clearly won, mostly because their product appeals to a specific type of buyer. With interest campaigns carrying the cold traffic, that account got to a 4.22x ROAS over the next 6 weeks.

2. Whether retargeting works at all

"Retargeting is dead" and "retargeting is my best campaign" both get posted on here all the time, and both people are usually telling the truth about their own account.

Retargeting is close to a yes or no thing. In some accounts it works and becomes one of the most dependable campaigns running. In others it barely produces anything, no matter how it's set up.

Most of that comes down to who ends up in the retargeting audience. Some accounts build audiences full of people who were close to buying. Others fill up with visitors who were never very likely to buy in the first place.

Retargeting runs from day one in every new account I take on, and it's the quickest of the five to get an answer on. If it works, it stays and gets its share of the budget. If it doesn't, that's the answer for that account, and the budget goes toward what's working which would be cold targeting campaigns.

3. Creative type

You've probably heard that video always beats images, or that UGC is the only creative that works anymore.

Some accounts will run on the same three videos for months. Others need more variety just to keep results steady.

My usual starting order is videos first, then images, then sometimes carousel ads or UGC videos. That order shifts depending on the account's history and the industry, but it's where most accounts start.

In one account, results dipped for a stretch around Andromeda. Going from 3 video ads to 3 videos plus 4 images was enough to get things back on track.

4. Ad spend per campaign per day

How much a campaign needs to spend per day comes up on here constantly, and the answers are all over the place.

Some accounts do their best work with a lean campaign and a few ads. Others perform better with more budget spread across more ad sets. Spreading the budget too thin hurts in every account, but where "too thin" starts is different from one account to the next.

I usually start with one campaign at $60/day with 3 ads in it. From there, I'll test whether $100/day with the same 3 ads holds up, or whether $100/day split across 4 ad sets with 3 to 5 ads in each performs better. Then I’ll test the same setup with $150/day or $200.

Those tests usually tell me pretty quickly whether the account likes its budget concentrated or spread out.

5. Scaling method

The common scaling method is to increase budget on the campaign/ad set level every couple of days, no more than 20% at a time. I believe that is a safe approach for most ad accounts I’ve worked with.

Some ad accounts I’ve seen handle 40% or 50% increases just fine. And other ad accounts I’ve seen campaigns die just from a small increase of 10%.

Duplication is my default when it comes to scaling campaigns. If I want to test a direct budget increase, I do it on a duplicate and keep the original running. That way, if the account doesn't like the increase, the campaign that was already making sales is still there.

The answer can even change within the same account. In one account I worked on, retargeting handled direct budget increases well, while the interest campaigns only scaled cleanly through duplication. That went into my notes for the account as "Scale retargeting with direct budget increases. Duplicate interest campaigns."

Warp up

Once you have an account’s behavior figured out, you stop guessing as much and start making decisions with more confidence. Questions like what creatives to add next, what cold targeting to use for a new product line, or what campaign structure to launch for a temporary sale all get answered by how that account has behaved so far.

It also prepares you for any time you need to open a new ad account. Assume that you’ll need to learn its behavior from scratch, even if it’s the same business with the same pixel and the same ads.

Hope this was helpful. Thanks for reading and good luck!

If you've been running Facebook ads for any real length of time, you've tested a lot. Different copy, different creatives, new headlines, more interests.

I've been running Facebook ads since 2015 and I've run countless split tests across a few hundred ad accounts, everything from $50/day up to a few thousand. What I've landed on after all of that is that the split tests worth running are the ones capable of a big swing. Most of the testing I see happening is on items too small to change anything, and that's the slowest way I know to figure out an ad account.

This post is the list of high impact split tests I focus on.

Some accounts get through all 10 well inside 90 days. Others take longer than that, and it usually comes down to daily ad spend. There are only so many tests you can have running at once before the budget is spread too thin to read any of them.

Before I go into the split tests, I want to explain a few things about macro testing and ad account behavior.

Micro tests vs. macro tests

Most split testing I see falls into what I'd call micro testing. Splitting two hooks on the same video. Emoji in the headline vs no emoji. Logo bottom left vs bottom right. Changing "Elevate Your Style - The Cozy Sweater" to "Elevate Your Style With The Cozy Sweater."

Tests like that can move results a fraction of a percent. That's the ceiling on them.

A macro test is one that can move results 10% to 40% or more in either direction. Switching an account from interest targeting to Advantage+ is a macro test. I've seen cost per acquisition move as much as 50% off that one change.

The filter I use is simple. Imagine the test working perfectly and ask what actually changes. If the honest answer is a fraction of a percent, the test can't tell you anything useful even when it wins.

The bigger cost of small testing is time. Weeks or months of it can go by while every structural question about the account stays open.

When I'm trying to figure out why something works in one account and not another, the answer usually isn't the brand, the target demographic, or the price of the product. It's ad account behavior, which is just the way a specific ad account responds when you make a change to it. I've had two ad accounts set up for the same brand, running the same ads to the same audiences, and the results came out different. Same product, same creative, same targeting. Different account.

That's also where the 40% and 10% thing comes in. I've had accounts absorb a 40% budget increase without any wobble at all, and I've had others fall off from a 10% increase.

Micro tests produce almost nothing here. The macro tests are what build that picture, and once you have it, most of the questions people ask about their ads have an answer sitting in it. How to scale. What campaign type to launch next. What to do when a campaign that was working starts to slow down.

It's also the reason so much Facebook ads advice conflicts. Someone shares a tactic that worked for them, and their account is why it worked. It fails for the next person and their account is why again.

With that out of the way, here's the list.

Number 1 - Cold targeting: interest targeting vs. broad/Advantage+

The point of this one is figuring out where the account's most profitable cold traffic comes from.

If you watch enough YouTube videos on Facebook ads advice, you'll come away thinking Advantage+ is the only remaining answer for targeting. That hasn't held up in my accounts. Interest targeting still comes out ahead in a good portion of them.

It also loses in a good portion of them. Nothing about it is consistent across accounts, and that inconsistency is the argument for testing rather than assuming.

How I build it: one interest per ad set so I can see each interest on its own, with an Advantage+ targeting campaign running beside it. Same ads and same budget.

Number 2 - Retargeting audiences

The setup I find most often when I perform account audits or do consultation is all retargeting audiences stacked into one ad set.

Say that campaign produces 5 sales. There's no way to know which retargeting audience produced them.

Another problem with stacking retargeting audiences is that some of the larger retargeting audiences can be full of low quality data, and lumped in with the good ones they drag the overall results down by a lot without ever showing themselves.

So the test is one audience per ad set. 

1 - Website visitors

2 - Video viewers

3 - Instagram page engagers

4 - Facebook page engagers

Each one gets its own ad set so it can be accurately read.

What you come out of it with is knowing which warm pool actually converts and how the retargeting budget should be divided.

Another factor that is being split tested here (you could call this number 2.5 on the list) is determining how impulsive your target audience is. Sometimes it is a waste of ad spend to do any retargeting for target audiences who buy after their first encounter with an ad.

Number 3 - Image vs. video creatives

Most of the creative testing people do stays at the small level. Changing a hook is worth doing sometimes, but a lot of it goes into changes too small to read.

I've had plenty of accounts where a carefully edited, genuinely good video got heavily outperformed by a product photo on a plain white background.

The same thing happens with UGC. People will spend weeks sourcing creators, paying for the content, waiting on revisions, and then editing everything together. Then a plain image ad that took ten minutes to put together beats all of it. All that time and money went into finding out something a much simpler test would have answered in a week.

More effort in a creative doesn't always mean better results. Some accounts just respond better to a straightforward product photo, and there's no way to know that about an account until you run the comparison.

The format itself is often the bigger variable in the account, and most people never leave the format they started with.

Number 4 - Catalog ad format

A catalog ad pulls products straight from your product feed and Facebook decides which ones to show each person. There's no ad to build in the usual sense. You connect the feed and the ad assembles itself.

They tend to work well for stores with a real product range, especially anything with multiple styles, colors, or sizes. Part of it is convenience. Someone sees four or five products in a single ad and picks the one they want, instead of landing on your site and scrolling through pages to find it. That shortcut is worth more than people expect.

A client came to me after their relationship with an agency ended. That agency had produced a lot of UGC style videos and a stack of image ads. None of it performed, and the client eventually parted ways with them.

Then the client put together a catalog ad on their own. About as plain as an ad gets. Zero ad copy on it, just products pulled straight out of the feed.

It outperformed everything the agency had made.

I've had the same thing happen with my own work. I'll make a well edited video and a basic catalog ad still beats it.

Some ad accounts are just like that, and there's no way to see it in advance. You put it up and read what comes back.

One practical note before you try this one. Catalog sales campaigns need a product feed connected to the account, so there's a bit of setup involved first.

Number 5 - Dynamic/flexible creative vs. single ad setup

Take the ads already running in the account. Same creatives, same audience, same copy. Put them into dynamic creative instead of a single ad setup. It's called flexible creative in most ad accounts now.

Nothing about the creative changed, so on paper the numbers should sit right where they were.

They frequently don't. The way a campaign is put together produces an effect of its own, which is what makes this one of the cleanest looks you'll get at how a specific account behaves.

It also requires nothing to be produced. No new ads, no new copy, no new creative.

Number 6 - Stacked audiences vs. single audience per ad set

This split test runs once there's a collection of proven audiences in the account, cold or retargeting.

One audience per ad set is the starting structure and it's what made those winners identifiable in the first place. Now the test is taking them and stacking them into a single ad set so the spend consolidates.

The version I run into most often looks like this. A campaign with 5 interest audiences where 3 are hitting 4x ROAS and 2 are sitting around 1.5x. Build a new campaign that puts those 3 winners into one stacked ad set.

Both outcomes happen regularly. I've had it settle at 2x ROAS, which tells you the separated structure was doing more work. I've had it climb to 4.5x or 5x ROAS. Nothing in the account tells you which one is coming.

Number 7 - Budget scaling method: aggressive vs. incremental

Incremental is the default approach. 10% to 20% increases, one to three times across about a two week span.

Aggressive means 50% or more in a single move. Higher risk and higher reward, and it's worth running when you're willing to sacrifice that campaign to get the answer.

My go-to sits between the two. I duplicate the campaign rather than raising the budget on the original. The duplicate can keep the same daily spend, or you can set it higher to see how that same campaign performs with more money behind it. Either way the original keeps running untouched.

The reason duplication is the safer version is that a campaign spending efficiently has found its rhythm. Changing the budget on it directly can disrupt delivery and reset that optimization.

Number 8 - # of ads per ad set

I usually start new campaigns with around 3 ads in each ad set.

As this test runs and the client sends over new creatives, I add 2 to 3 at a time and read performance at 5 ads, then 8, then 10. For most of the campaigns I manage the sweet spot lands somewhere between 3 and 10, before the budget starts spreading too thin to matter.

Here's the part that catches people off guard. I've had a campaign holding the 3 best performing ads in the account get outperformed by a campaign running 8 ads that mixed strong and weak performers. On paper the second campaign was running worse ads and it still came out ahead.

Most people have already seen a version of this happen. You take your one winning ad, pull it into its own ad set so every dollar goes behind it, and it performs worse than it was doing sitting next to everything else.

Number 9 - Manual bidding vs. lowest cost

Lowest cost is what Facebook puts you on by default. You hand over the budget and the algorithm spends it however it wants to. Manual bidding is where you set a ceiling or a target, and Facebook has to work inside it. The tradeoff is that the constraint can make an account more stable and easier to scale, or it can choke delivery to the point where the campaign barely spends.

Before running this split test, you want a collection of strong performing ads, the best performing audiences, the winning creative type, and the right number of ads per ad set all settled. Everything above this on the list.

Then you put all of that into one campaign so it has the best possible chance of performing right out of the gate.

Here's what that sequencing buys you. When you read the results of a manual bid campaign built that way, you're not sitting there questioning the ads or the targeting, because those were already tested and you know they work. If it doesn't perform, it's either the wrong bid type for this account or the bid amount needs adjusting.

What you adjust is the goal type (cost per result goal, ROAS goal, bid cap) and the bid level itself, higher or lower.

Work through a few combinations of both. If none of them produce, that's a failed test and the account stays on automated bidding.

One specific failure mode worth naming. Some accounts produce a high ROAS on manual bid but will only spend $10 a day on a campaign set to $100. Sometimes it's fine to leave that running for the occasional sale it picks up. Sometimes it's just taking up room in the account and that budget does more elsewhere.

Number 10 - Creative diversity per ad set

Creative diversity just means what mix of creative types is sitting inside a single ad set. An ad set running four videos has no diversity. An ad set running two videos, an image, and a carousel has a lot of it. That's the whole test.

The format test earlier asked which one performs better. This one asks whether they can run in the same ad set.

Keeping them separated was the standard for years. Media buyers built campaigns named things like "Retargeting - Image Ads" and "Retargeting - Videos Only." The reason was practical at the time, because video would take nearly all the budget and the image ads would barely spend if you put them together.

I don't run into that anymore. It's one of the changes that's been working more often for me over the last couple of years.

Here's another one that shouldn't work on paper. Two ad sets running separately, one image only and one video only, both sitting around 2x ROAS. Combine every one of those ads into a single ad set and it can come out at 4x.

An ad set locked into one format can only do so much. Giving it variety lets the algorithm put the right format in front of the right person.

Wrapping up

And that's going to wrap things up.

That's the list of tests I run in the first 90 days after taking over an account, though depending on budget limitations it can take longer than a quarter to work through all of them.

If a few of these look like something you haven't tried in your own account, they're worth running. I've got other posts up covering more of how I approach the strategy side if that's useful.

Hope this was insightful and thanks for reading.

One time I took over an ad account for an established business who wanted to scale with Facebook ads, which they had not run for a while. They were getting all of their sales through organic and wanted to take their revenue to the next level.

As we were building out the campaign structure, they told me to leave retargeting out of the build entirely. Their reasoning was "don't do retargeting because it has been a long time since we've run Facebook ads."

I pushed back and built it anyway. First 2 weeks it was the best performing campaign in the account by a wide margin. They had years of purchasers, organic video viewers and site visitors sitting in those audiences and had talked themselves into believing no future customers were in there.

That's the pattern with established brands. The business has been growing for years and the ad account is still being run on decisions that were made in month one.

Most Facebook ads advice was written for one specific situation and never says which one. Some strategies exist to figure out whether people want the product at all. Others do nothing until you already know they do, and running them too early produces numbers too thin to read.

I wanted to share some of the Facebook ads strategies that I implement specifically for my clients with established brands that are already making sales and want to make more.

Quick note on who this is for. If you sell a product, software or a service where you can handle multiple purchases or inquiries a week, this applies to you. Low to mid-tier price point, short buying cycle, and doubling sales next month wouldn't break anything on your end.

When I say established, I mean somewhere around 1 to 2 sales a day or $5k to $10k a month, with enough spend through the ad account to have real data behind it. There's grey area in that. Being at $4.5k instead of $5k doesn't disqualify you and neither does going a couple days without a sale. The point is that you already know the demand is real.

Let’s get into it.

1 - Focus ad spend on top sellers

A brand that sold dozens of different product types and variations came to me running their own ads. Around 30 ads in each campaign, spend pointed at every product they made, budget cut so thin that nothing could get going.

I asked which 3 to 5 products actually sold the most so that we could focus ad spend a bit more on elements that have a higher chance of succeeding.

We built campaigns around those, tested targeting and retargeting until the right combination showed up, then moved everything else into catalog campaigns at a lower spend. That account ran at a 5.60x ROAS.

As we scaled up the ad account, I would build campaigns for more products over time. The most logical process with this is to start with the top 3 to 5 products, then launch a campaign for the 6th top selling product, then 7th, 8th and so on and so forth. Maybe products 3, 5 and 6 don’t work well on Facebook ads for whatever reason so just turn those campaigns off instead of forcing them to work. 

On a new account, spreading across a few products can be the right move so you can figure out which product will sell the best with Facebook ads. You don't know which one takes off yet and the spend is what tells you. 

2 - Scale winning elements instead of testing

There is a lot of gray area when it comes to this strategy and nuances to point out.

What I find business owners do too often is spread the budget too thin testing out new hooks and creatives. Eventually the output quality becomes very low quality where nothing they test works.

Now this doesn’t mean never test new creatives never test new audiences, or whatever.

When it comes to scaling and increasing ad spend, the obvious objective is to use that extra ad spend towards things that are most likely to bring you the best results.

If you have an established brand, you know your best selling product, you might already know your best performing creatives, campaign structures, and know your ad account behavior, then you should already have a strong idea what to put extra ad spend towards that will bring you the best results.

To give an example, if I was running an ad account at $500/day and the client wanted to add an additional $300/day I would not spend all $300/day on testing new hooks, new creatives, new targeting. I’m more likely to use all of that on winning creative, winning audiences, winning campaign structures, going towards winning products. It’s the safer option.

For one nuance with this type of situation, one must consider how good the overall results are and how much you are willing to put towards more risky elements (new creatives, hooks, etc. etc.).

If an ad account is getting ROAS much higher than our target and we wanted to scale up by $300/day I am much more likely to take $50 or $100/day of that into testing new things.

If an ad account is performing at target ROAS, then that is a situation where I want to be safe with the scale.

3 - Use your own data instead of Facebook’s as much as you can

Every account I start runs 70 to 90% of ad spend toward cold traffic and 10 to 30% towards retargeting. If you launched recently, run it exactly like that. Retargeting at $10 to $30/day depending on total budget, launched the same day as the cold campaigns. Video view and page engagement audiences start filling within hours. The volume is just small early on.

As the account grows and custom audiences are filled with high quality data, I move to 70% cold, 30% retargeting, then in some cases it can go toward 50% cold 50% retargeting, then further as those audiences grow.

Just a heads up, this varies from ad account to ad account and from business to business. Some businesses no matter how big they become are able to successfully turn a profit from retargeting campaigns. 

Think of it as using two different sources of data/traffic/people
1 - Facebook’s data
2 - The businesses’ data

With all marketing in general for established brands, it is more cost effective for businesses to advertise towards their own past customers, people who have already shown interest, etc. This is why subscription models and yearly upgrade business models work so well.

New brands don’t have their own data to leverage yet.

When it comes to Facebook ads, think of the different audience types and sizes you can target. Let’s say there is an interest targeting in Facebook that has 500,000 people in it that most likely has your target audience in it. But alternatively you have 200,000 followers on Instagram where the quality of that audience is much higher than Facebook’s data. 

For a more exaggerated example to explain a point, let’s say you were running a promotion or launching a new product. If you had the option to target 3,000,000 people with a broad Facebook audience or to target 3,000,000 of your past customers (exaggerated example) which one would most likely perform best?

4 - Stack the social proof

Something established brands have that new ones don’t is satisfied customers (assuming you have a quality product or service). From my experience, when it comes to utilizing customer reviews for advertising I find that social engagement on ads has a more positive impact than reviews left on a website (can easily be faked) or just putting quotes in your ad copy. And whenever you stack your social proof and reuse post IDs across multiple campaigns you end up with ads that have dozens of comments from happy customers.

Same post ID on the ads across every campaign and ad set, so the likes, comments and shares all stack up.

For newer brands, this is still a good strategy to implement. I would say it is somewhat optional, but for established brands it is essential in my opinion if you want to maximize results.

One ad account I started managing a few weeks ago that does a million dollars in sales a month, I launched a lot of new campaigns to test out some cold targeting and retargeting but only launched 3 new ads within all of those campaigns.

Within a few days, every ad had tons of comments with past customers sharing their positive experience with the product, pictures of their product, and tagging friends.

This also makes it to where ads get better over time, and it has allowed me in a lot of ad accounts that I manage to keep ads alive for months and sometimes even years. 

5 - Higher quality winning creative and creative types

A men's apparel brand came to me at about $40k a month, running content that had been made for TikTok and pushed into Facebook. It worked well enough to keep the lights on, which is exactly the trap.

We replaced it with video ads actually made for Facebook, built around the angles their sales history already proved people cared about. That account got to $200k a month.

On a new account, cheap and fast creative is correct. You're buying information about which angle people respond to and you don't want to spend three weeks and real money making one video before you know.

Once you've been selling for a couple years, you already have the answer. You know which objection kills the sale and which benefit closes it. That's the point where production quality starts paying you back, because every improvement gets multiplied by the spend behind it.

This also applies to the creative types. As you run different types of creative types (static images, videos, UGC, carousel) you start to learn which ones perform the best for your business and for your ad account.

Let’s say your baseline of effort in all of your creative types produces 70% of your potential quality. It’s enough effort to know that if the results are good, then it’s worth putting in extra effort to lean towards 80 to 90% and if the results are poor then you just turn those off and put more effort into the winning creative types. 

For instance, if a low-cost UGC creator produces a video that, despite its average quality, outperforms every other asset in your account, it is a clear indicator that you should invest in higher-quality production for your next creator engagement.

6 - Different campaign types in the ad account

Interest targeting, Advantage+, retargeting, catalog and manual bid, all alive at the same time.

This is also good for established brands that might have 3 to 6 winning products, each product could be its own campaign, maybe each product has its own retargeting campaign, etc. 

One ad account I was managing had retargeting stop producing for a period of time with no clear reason. Frequency was normal, audiences were healthy, it just went cold. Advantage+ was working well at the time, so we ran zero retargeting for that period and put the budget and the fresh creative there instead. Retargeting came back weeks later on its own.

That option only existed because something else was already running. One campaign type in the account and that stretch turns into a lost month.

Final thoughts

Since 2015 I've managed millions in ad spend across accounts at every stage, and the established ones are the most fun to work on. All the hard parts are done. The product sells, the offer converts, the data is there. What's left is a mix of settings nobody has revisited in a year and advantages the business didn't have when it started.

I post here regularly with strategies like this from accounts I manage. If this was useful for you there's more in my post history.

If you've got an established brand and you're not doing most of these, pick one and get it running this week. Thanks for reading.

I audited an ad account a few weeks ago for a guy who had been running his own Facebook campaigns. Decent products, solid website, real customer demand. He couldn't figure out why his results had been getting worse over the last year or so.

When I got into the account I saw that he was still running Facebook ads the way that could have gotten you success many years ago. One campaign with tons of ad sets with " - copy" and "- copy copy 5" for every new ad or audience he tested, and no proper audience segmentation. The biggest problem with sticking to this approach for so long is that he never truly tested his ad account behavior to find the most profitable campaign structure.

The level of skill needed to run profitable Facebook campaigns went up significantly in recent years. Those who recognized that and built real expertise kept getting results. Everyone else started falling behind and blaming the platform or switched to TikTok.

When I think of how I was running Facebook ads when I first started back in 2015 I realize that the platform was very beginner friendly. A few years later, I had to really step up my skill level to keep seeing results. Thankfully I kept my focus on Facebook ads when things got harder instead of running to TikTok ads like so many did.

Below is what I'm actually doing inside client accounts right now.

1 - Macro tests instead of 0.01% changes

I've taken over accounts from agencies and freelancers and in-house teams. Within 5 minutes of looking at the change history, I can tell you whether the previous manager had genuine expertise or was just staying busy.

A change history full of headline tweaks, emoji swaps, and minor interest adjustments tells me everything. Those are 0.01% changes. They create the appearance of active management without actually moving anything. You could run those kinds of tests for a full year and never learn a single useful thing about what works for that account.

Contrast that with macro testing. Testing Advantage+ against interest targeting. Video against image. CBO against ABO. These are tests where the outcome can move performance by 10% to 50% in either direction. Each one produces a real answer to a real question about how the account operates.

When I start working with a new client, I push to run as many of these as the budget allows in the first 2 to 3 weeks. Speed matters here.

Going back to the guy whose account I audited, he had been running the same campaign type for years and never once tested an alternative. He had no idea whether Advantage+ would beat his interest targeting because he had never tried it. It did. Cost per purchase came in about 40% lower.

2 - The ad account behavior blueprint

I keep coming back to this concept across everything I write and talk about because it is the thing. If you only take one idea from this post, this is the one worth keeping.

Every ad account behaves differently. I'm not talking about minor variations, I mean genuinely different responses to identical inputs.

Increase budget 40% on a performing campaign. On one of my client's accounts, results hold perfectly. On another, a 10% increase tanks performance for days while the algorithm resets. One account produces strong results on Advantage+ month after month. The next client's account has never produced a profitable result from Advantage+ in any test I've ever run, but interest targeting works consistently. One account scales smoothly through duplication. Another collapses unless I use slow, incremental budget increases.

You can't look at any of this from the outside and predict it. You have to test it and you have to write it down.

From day one with a new client, I document every change and every response. And I mean the specifics, not a general sense of whether it went well. My notes look like this: increased budget by 20% on the interest campaign on Monday, ROAS dipped from 3.2 to 2.1 over the next 3 days, stabilized back to 2.9 by day 6. That level of detail is what gives me something real to work with later.

After a few weeks of this, I have a behavior profile for that account that answers the big questions.

How does this account scale? Duplication. We tested direct increases and the algorithm reset.

Which campaign type does this account prefer? Interest targeting. Advantage+ has underperformed in 3 separate tests.

How long does this account need after a structural change? About 6 days. Anything evaluated before that is unreliable.

What frequency level signals retargeting fatigue here? Around 4. Past that, ROAS starts dropping and I need to make a move.

When we want to launch a temporary sale, what is the most profitable ad type, audience targeting and campaign structure to make the most of this sale.

Those answers are specific to one account. They came from documented tests on that account. And they're worth more than every piece of general Facebook ads advice combined because they actually apply to the situation I'm making decisions in.

When people ask me on calls how I know what to do in a given situation, the honest answer is that the behavior profile tells me. I'm not guessing, I'm referencing real data from real tests on this specific account.

3 - Every account has a meta and it shifts

I've been managing Facebook ads since 2015 and this pattern has shown up in every account I've ever worked on without exception. Campaign types cycle in and out of performing well. I think of it like the "meta" in competitive games where certain strategies dominate for a while and then the whole thing shifts.

Interest targeting runs hot for 2 or 3 months at 4 to 5x ROAS. Then it starts cooling off with no trigger and no change made inside the account. Advantage+ starts gaining momentum at the same time. Months later, interest targeting comes back and the rotation continues.

Most people see their top campaign type decline and go into problem-solving mode. They start adjusting audiences, tinkering with budgets, throwing in new creative. They treat it like something broke. Nothing broke. The cycle just turned. And all the time they spend fighting the cycle is time and budget wasted.

A client called me a few months into our engagement and said "catalog was our best performer and it just had its worst week. What do I need to fix?" I told him nothing needed fixing. The cycle turned. I paused catalog and redirected the spend to Advantage+ with video ads which had been quietly improving over the past few weeks. Within about 2 weeks we had recovered the lost revenue at a better cost per purchase. A couple months later I turned catalog back on and it produced as if nothing had happened.

I didn't hesitate on that call because I've seen this exact scenario play out too many times to count. And I had somewhere to put the budget because I always keep multiple campaign types live. Interest targeting, Advantage+, retargeting. Catalog when it fits. When one goes cold, the others absorb the spend. Running multiple campaign types at all times is the core of how I structure an account, not an optional extra. Your account should never live or die on a single campaign type.

4 - The trend tells you what today's numbers can't

A new client messaged me not even 48 hours into his first campaigns. "I think this is burning money. Should we pull the plug?" I told him to wait. Day 3 and day 4 that same campaign came in at a 4x ROAS. The algorithm spends the first couple of days calibrating delivery. The numbers during that window are noise.

But this isn't just about launch patience, it's about learning to read the 7 to 10 day trend as the primary tool for making decisions.

Two campaigns can show you the same number today and be in completely opposite situations. One has been climbing steadily for a week and is on the verge of breaking through. The other posted a bounce day in the middle of a 7-day decline. Today's snapshot can't tell them apart. The trend can.

I've seen people panic and shut down a campaign on day 2 that would have been their best performer. And I've seen people leave a campaign running through 3 weeks of steady decline because someone told them "you just need patience." Both mistakes come from the same place. The person doesn't know how to read the trend and doesn't have documented experience with what recovery actually looks like in their account.

If the 7-day trend has been consistently declining and there's no sign of the pattern that showed up before past recoveries in this account, waiting isn't patience anymore, it's avoidance.

5 - Logging in every day isn't the same as knowing what to look for

The people I see posting in this sub about declining results often mention how frequently they check the account, as if that should be producing better results. "I'm in there every day and things keep getting worse." I hear the same thing on calls.

The issue is never attendance. I've taken over accounts where the previous manager logged in daily and missed obvious problems for weeks. Retargeting frequency sitting at 7 or 8 and nobody noticed because they didn't know frequency mattered. A country breakdown showing one country dragging the blended ROAS down and nobody caught it because they never looked past the top-level number. A rough afternoon triggering a pause that kicked the campaign out of the learning phase right when it was about to stabilize.

I pair frequency with ROAS because those two numbers together tell me the specific next move for retargeting. Frequency under 2 and ROAS strong means there's room to scale into that audience. Frequency past 4 and ROAS softening means saturation is setting in and I need to act. What I do depends on the account. Redirect spend to cold campaigns to grow the audience feeding retargeting. Rotate fresh creative in to extend the current audience. Expand the retargeting window from 30-day to 180-day visitors.

The right call comes from the behavior profile. I've been here before with this account and I know what worked. That's what separates a decision from a guess.

6 - Most tactical advice is anecdotal

"Interest targeting is the answer." "No, Advantage+." "Scale with budget increases." "No, duplicate." "CBO." "No, ABO." If you've spent any time in this sub, you've seen every position argued with equal confidence.

They're all right. About their account.

Each person tested something, saw it work, and shared it as the strategy. They had real results behind their recommendation. They're not making it up. But they're presenting one account's behavior as a rule for all accounts. And it isn't. Because every account behaves differently.

That's the behavior profile concept proving itself right in front of you. The contradicting advice is actually a menu of things to test. Try interest targeting on your account. Try Advantage+. Try both scaling methods. Document what works and what doesn't. Keep what your account responds to and discard what it doesn't.

Over time you build something that matters a lot more than a collection of tactics you picked up from other people. You end up with a documented, tested, evidence-based understanding of exactly how your account works and exactly what to do in every situation you've encountered before. That's expertise. And it's worth more than any single post on this sub, including this one.

I'll be honest about what that takes though. Building a real behavior profile takes months of disciplined testing and documentation on a single account, and most people running their own ads never stick with it long enough to get there. I can move fast inside a new client's account because I've been running this same process across hundreds of accounts since 2015. That's the difference between an expert and someone who has read a lot of posts.

Final thoughts

The guy whose account I audited is a good example of what happens when the platform gets harder and the person running the account stays the same. His products were fine, his website was fine, and the customer demand was real the whole time his results were getting worse. Nothing about his business declined. The skill level required to run his ad account went up and the way the account was being run never changed with it. The first couple of macro tests we ran taught us more about how that account works than years of " - copy" ad sets ever did.

That's the story of Facebook ads over the last few years. The skill floor moved up and it's not coming back down. The people who built real expertise as the platform got harder are still producing strong, consistent results. Everyone else is falling behind and blaming the platform.

If you found this post helpful, you'd probably like my other ones too.

That's all for now - thanks for reading.

I was on a consultation call a few weeks ago and the client told me they were about to hire a video production company because their Facebook ad results had been down for about 10 days. Before they spent the money, I looked at the account and found a placement issue that took me 30 seconds to fix. Results improved within a couple of days. The creative was fine the entire time.

This happens constantly. Someone sees their numbers dip, and the first thing they think about is new creative. New photoshoot, new video, maybe bring someone in to redo the whole set. And I get it. Making new content feels like a big, visible move. It feels productive. But a new shoot costs money, takes days or weeks to coordinate, and still might not fix anything if the creative was never the problem. Meanwhile there are a handful of things sitting right there in Ads Manager that take a few minutes to check and cost nothing.

I've been managing Facebook ads since 2015 across a lot of different ecommerce accounts, and I can tell you that the quick Ads Manager fix solves the problem more often than the multi-week content production cycle. 

To be honest, most of my clients have been running the same creatives for many months and some for multiple years that are still producing good results.

Here's what I actually check before anyone spends money on new content.

Check the placement breakdown first

This is where I start almost every time. Break down results by placement and look for anything eating budget without producing conversions. Takes less than a minute.

Reels and Audience Network are the ones that come up the most. I had an account earlier this year where Reels was taking a huge portion of the daily budget, pulling in a ton of impressions, and producing basically zero sales. The ads were converting fine on Feed and Stories the whole time. It wasn't a creative problem. The ads were just being shown in a placement that doesn't convert for that product. Removed Reels, results improved almost immediately.

That's a 30 second fix. No new content needed. But if you had looked at the campaign level number and assumed creative fatigue, you would have gone out and spent money on a shoot that wouldn't have changed anything.

Stop looking at the blended number

This is one of the biggest reasons people misdiagnose creative fatigue. They look at the campaign level ROAS and see it's down, so they assume the whole thing is broken. But campaign ROAS is just an average. And averages hide a lot.

One ad set could be taking 70% of the budget and converting poorly while the others are doing fine. One country in your targeting could be pulling the entire account average down. I had a retargeting campaign for a client that was sitting at about a 3x ROAS blended, which looked okay but not great. When I broke it down by country, Canada was doing 7 to 9x on its own. The US was what was dragging the number down. That's not a creative problem. That's a budget allocation issue.

Same thing at the ad level. If you're running $40/day across 8 ads, each ad is only getting around $5 in daily spend. You don't have enough data on any individual ad at that level to actually know if it's working or not. The number you're looking at is a blend of things that are probably performing very differently from each other. Pull it apart before you decide what needs to change.

Relaunch the campaign before you reshoot anything

This one sounds like it shouldn't work, but I've done it so many times at this point that I don't even question it anymore.

Duplicate the campaign. Same ads, same budget, same targeting. Turn off the original. If the new version starts performing, the creative was never the problem.

Campaigns pick up a kind of baggage over time. Every edit, every budget change, every time you turn an ad on or off, every targeting adjustment. All of that history affects how Facebook delivers the campaign going forward. A clean duplicate resets that delivery without changing a single thing about the ads.

I had a client last year who was ready to commit to a full video reshoot because results had been down for about 10 days. Before they spent the money, I duplicated the campaign with the exact same creative and relaunched it. Results came back within a few days. That client would have spent weeks on production and thousands of dollars on a problem that took me 2 minutes to fix.

For video ads, swap the thumbnail first

If you're running video ads and you think the creative might be done, duplicate the ad and change the thumbnail before you do anything else. It resets delivery in a way that's similar to putting up a new creative, without the production timeline or cost. Takes about 30 seconds.

If results come back, you just saved yourself a reshoot. If they don't, you ruled it out for free before committing real money to new production.

Sometimes the campaign type is the thing that's done, not the creative

This is something I see constantly across the accounts I manage and it's one of the things that causes people to waste the most money on unnecessary creative.

Interest targeting is your best performer for a few months, then it slows down and Advantage+ starts doing better. Or retargeting carries the account for a while and then a catalog campaign takes over. The same exact ads that stopped working in one campaign type can start performing well again the moment you move them into a different setup.

If you blame the creative when this happens, you go spend money on new content when the actual fix was just putting the same ads somewhere else. The creative didn't stop working. The environment around it changed.

Good ads last a lot longer than most people think

There's a common belief that all creative has a shelf life and at some point it just stops working because people have seen it too many times. Frequency matters, but the idea that every ad is on a timer is not accurate in my experience.

New potential customers enter the market all the time. Someone who scrolled past your ad 3 months ago might be in a completely different situation today. Different financial situation, different season, different need. If the ad is well made and the message is still relevant to the product, there's no reason it has to stop performing just because it's been running for a while.

The assumption that all creative expires is one of the more expensive beliefs I see people hold onto. It leads to unnecessary production spend and pulls attention away from the things that actually need fixing in the account.

Hope you found this useful and thanks for reading.

I was on a consultation call a few weeks ago and the client told me they were about to hire a video production company because their results had been down for about 10 days. Before they spent the money, I looked at the account and found a placement issue that took me 30 seconds to fix. Results improved within a couple of days. The creative was fine the entire time.

This happens constantly. Someone sees their numbers dip, and the first thing they think about is new creative. New photoshoot, new video, maybe bring someone in to redo the whole set. And I get it. Making new content feels like a big, visible move. It feels productive. But a new shoot costs money, takes days or weeks to coordinate, and still might not fix anything if the creative was never the problem. Meanwhile there are a handful of things sitting right there in Ads Manager that take a few minutes to check and cost nothing.

I've been managing Facebook ads since 2015 across a lot of different ecommerce accounts, and I can tell you that the quick Ads Manager fix solves the problem more often than the multi-week content production cycle. 

To be honest, most of my clients have been running the same creatives for many months and some for multiple years that are still producing good results.

Here's what I actually check before anyone spends money on new content.

Check the placement breakdown first

This is where I start almost every time. Break down results by placement and look for anything eating budget without producing conversions. Takes less than a minute.

Reels and Audience Network are the ones that come up the most. I had an account earlier this year where Reels was taking a huge portion of the daily budget, pulling in a ton of impressions, and producing basically zero sales. The ads were converting fine on Feed and Stories the whole time. It wasn't a creative problem. The ads were just being shown in a placement that doesn't convert for that product. Removed Reels, results improved almost immediately.

That's a 30 second fix. No new content needed. But if you had looked at the campaign level number and assumed creative fatigue, you would have gone out and spent money on a shoot that wouldn't have changed anything.

Stop looking at the blended number

This is one of the biggest reasons people misdiagnose creative fatigue. They look at the campaign level ROAS and see it's down, so they assume the whole thing is broken. But campaign ROAS is just an average. And averages hide a lot.

One ad set could be taking 70% of the budget and converting poorly while the others are doing fine. One country in your targeting could be pulling the entire account average down. I had a retargeting campaign for a client that was sitting at about a 3x ROAS blended, which looked okay but not great. When I broke it down by country, Canada was doing 7 to 9x on its own. The US was what was dragging the number down. That's not a creative problem. That's a budget allocation issue.

Same thing at the ad level. If you're running $40/day across 8 ads, each ad is only getting around $5 in daily spend. You don't have enough data on any individual ad at that level to actually know if it's working or not. The number you're looking at is a blend of things that are probably performing very differently from each other. Pull it apart before you decide what needs to change.

Relaunch the campaign before you reshoot anything

This one sounds like it shouldn't work, but I've done it so many times at this point that I don't even question it anymore.

Duplicate the campaign. Same ads, same budget, same targeting. Turn off the original. If the new version starts performing, the creative was never the problem.

Campaigns pick up a kind of baggage over time. Every edit, every budget change, every time you turn an ad on or off, every targeting adjustment. All of that history affects how Facebook delivers the campaign going forward. A clean duplicate resets that delivery without changing a single thing about the ads.

I had a client last year who was ready to commit to a full video reshoot because results had been down for about 10 days. Before they spent the money, I duplicated the campaign with the exact same creative and relaunched it. Results came back within a few days. That client would have spent weeks on production and thousands of dollars on a problem that took me 2 minutes to fix.

For video ads, swap the thumbnail first

If you're running video ads and you think the creative might be done, duplicate the ad and change the thumbnail before you do anything else. It resets delivery in a way that's similar to putting up a new creative, without the production timeline or cost. Takes about 30 seconds.

If results come back, you just saved yourself a reshoot. If they don't, you ruled it out for free before committing real money to new production.

Sometimes the campaign type is the thing that's done, not the creative

This is something I see constantly across the accounts I manage and it's one of the things that causes people to waste the most money on unnecessary creative.

Interest targeting is your best performer for a few months, then it slows down and Advantage+ starts doing better. Or retargeting carries the account for a while and then a catalog campaign takes over. The same exact ads that stopped working in one campaign type can start performing well again the moment you move them into a different setup.

If you blame the creative when this happens, you go spend money on new content when the actual fix was just putting the same ads somewhere else. The creative didn't stop working. The environment around it changed.

Good ads last a lot longer than most people think

There's a common belief that all creative has a shelf life and at some point it just stops working because people have seen it too many times. Frequency matters, but the idea that every ad is on a timer is not accurate in my experience.

New potential customers enter the market all the time. Someone who scrolled past your ad 3 months ago might be in a completely different situation today. Different financial situation, different season, different need. If the ad is well made and the message is still relevant to the product, there's no reason it has to stop performing just because it's been running for a while.

The assumption that all creative expires is one of the more expensive beliefs I see people hold onto. It leads to unnecessary production spend and pulls attention away from the things that actually need fixing in the account.

Hope you found this useful and thanks for reading.

With most things in life as you get better at something, you tend to add more things to the list of things that you do for that skillset.

That's not really how it went for me with Facebook ads. Most of my improvements in Facebook ads came from things I stopped doing instead of doing more things. Habits I had in the early days that I assumed were correct, that I eventually learned from trial and error that they were a waste of time. 

By the way, most of my experience has been with ecommerce ads and DTC businesses where getting sales and customers is the main objective. 

Here's what I stopped doing and why.

Number 1 - Splitting images and videos into separate campaigns by default

This was something I picked up early from some course I took and stuck with for a long time. Image ads in one campaign, video ads in another. The logic was that it kept budget distribution cleaner and made creative performance easier to read.

After the Andromeda update I started questioning it and ran some tests with combined creative campaigns. In several accounts I saw more even delivery and stronger overall results than I was getting with the separated structure. It didn't hold in every account, but it held in enough of them that I stopped treating separation as the default.

Now I test it rather than assume. The ad account usually tells you pretty quickly which approach it prefers.

Number 2 - Optimizing based on a single metric

When I first started running Facebook ads, I would only look at one metric like CTR or CPC to determine a winning ad. If an ad had a high CTR it was working. If it didn't, it wasn't. Simple to track and easy to act on.

The issue is that CTR alone doesn't tell you whether the ad is driving purchases, which is the ultimate goal. I've seen that play out with clients where the ad with the best CTR in a campaign was also the one with the worst cost per purchase. The audience it was attracting was just not the buying type.

Same goes for CPM. A low CPM looks efficient on paper but if those impressions aren't converting, the cost per result is still going to be bad. I now look at CTR, CPM, conversion rate, cost per purchase, and ROAS together before making any creative decisions.

Number 3 - Making multiple changes at once when results dipped

When I would see results decline, I would make multiple changes right away in hopes of solving the problem faster. Swap the ads, adjust the targeting, change the budget, all at the same time. Sometimes it worked. But I never actually knew what fixed it.

One change at a time is the only way to build real knowledge about an account. It's slower, and there's a period where you have to sit with uncertainty while you wait for data. But after a few months of operating that way you start to understand the account at a level you just can't reach if you're constantly changing multiple things at once.

Number 4 - Only testing micro-level changes

Weeks spent testing one word in a headline. A slightly different image crop. Two versions of copy where the only difference was a single sentence. I did a lot of this early on and kept expecting the data to show me something. These are what I call micro-level changes because they are so small and insignificant.

The kinds of changes that move results are bigger that I call macro-level testing. Different creative formats. Different campaign types. Testing a manual bidding strategy against automatic. Those tests produce outcomes you can actually see in the numbers.

Number 5 - Ignoring how each ad account behaves differently

I had a structure that worked well and I brought it into every new account. Same campaign types, same setup, same approach to scaling. It made sense at the time. Why wouldn't something that worked keep working?

The reality is that every ad account has its own behavior profile. How it handles budget increases. Which campaign types it responds to. How aggressive you can be with scaling before performance drops. Some accounts absorb changes easily. Others are sensitive to anything you touch.

I stopped assuming accounts would behave the same way and started treating the first few weeks with any new client as a learning period. Figure out how the account operates, then work from that. It changed how reliable my decisions were from that point forward.

That’s going to wrap things up.

As I am going through this, I realize I could have added a few more things but I didn’t want to make the post too long. I hope you found it helpful and if you did, I’ve written a lot of other posts that you can check out on my profile. Thanks for reading.