How do you test and scale creatives when the budget is small?
Running Meta for a small DTC brand, higher priced stuff so people take a while to decide. About $150/day, one CBO campaign, broad targeting. Been going in circles on a few things and figured I'd rather ask than keep guessing.
Main one is getting spend onto a new creative at all. With CBO the algo dumps basically everything into one ad, and anything I add after that gets pennies and never gets a fair read. I tried ABO and it does spend evenly, but then it just burns the budget whether the ad works or not. Do you put a min spend floor on a test adset inside the same campaign, run a separate test campaign, or is there something better I'm missing?
Second thing is what you actually kill on. My top spender has the best CTR and the cheapest CPM in the account and the worst return. It pulls cheap clicks and cheap orders. Feels like the algo is chasing cheap conversions instead of good ones. Do you cut on CPA, on ROAS, or do you look at what size orders a creative brings in? And do you count that in spend or in days?
Third, how do you tell a dead creative from a slow one. I had one sit at zero for two weeks and then it brought my best order of the month. If I'd pulled it on any normal timeline I would have killed a winner.
Fourth, click vs view. A decent chunk of what Meta reports is view through, and when I look at those same orders in my store analytics they show up as search or direct. Do you make your calls on click only numbers or just trust the default window?
Last one, sample size. At this budget I get a handful of purchases a week and never leave learning. How many purchases do you want before you'll act on a comparison between two creatives?
Not asking how to raise the budget, it is what it is for now. Anything that worked for you at this kind of spend would help.