This NEW Facebook Ads Setting Fixes Creative Testing

Key Takeaways

If you ever tried to test new Facebook ads, but when you launch them in your ad account, they just don't get any spend, and the ads that you've been running with for the longest is the only one that really gets spend, and the new ads that you test just don't really get any chance, then this video is going to be for you because this is essentially a big problem that I've had with clients that I worked with, and I know a lot of other advertisers also have this problem. And luckily, now Meta has launched a new feature that essentially solves this, and it will improve your testing process so much. And this is definitely something that we've started to launch with the clients that we manage ads for. So I'm now inside one of my clients and they're spending more than 10,000 USD per day on ads and they're doing a lot of testing. They're investing heavily in creative volume producing a lot of videos and images and they really want to up the performance. But what tends to happen in the account is that the historic winners are just continually, you know, eating up all of the budget. So as you can see, this is a CBO campaign for the market in Canada that they're targeting. They have multiple other campaigns as well, but I just want to show you this as an example. As you can see here, they're launching a bunch of adsets that have new ads within them. But as you can also see, it's just these top two adets and maybe the third one as well that really get properly tested. You see, it's such a discrepancy between, you know, the top two performing adsets and the new ones that they've launched in this campaign. And even though they're spending a lot of effort and a lot of money on creating new ads to try to improve their performance, it just ends up not getting spent. Now, just to get you up to speed on the best creative testing process that we use for clients and that is working the best with Meta's new machine learning system, Android Meta, you should have an evergreen setup or you have two campaigns. Okay? So, you have one testing campaign and one scaling campaign. And the budget distribution between the two should sometimes be 60 to 80% on scaling if you already have proven winners that are scalable and you already have great momentum on this campaign. And then you should have 20 to 40% allocated to testing. Now, if you're a fresher account and you don't really have those amazing winners yet and you haven't built up momentum on a scaling campaign, then you should have the other way around. So, you should have most of your budget on testing. Now, I want to talk about the testing campaign here because the process is as follows. Every week you should launch a new batch. And a new batch is just essentially a set of new ads within a new ad set that you put into the CBO campaign. CBO stands for campaign budget optimization. And it means that you put the budget on the campaign level and you let Meta prioritize where to spend that money. Now, the problem is as you launch new batches and new adsets within here, very often the new batches just don't get to spend and it takes weeks and sometimes multiple weeks before Meta starts to allocate any spend to it and that just slows down the testing process for you. And if you're in a time period where you know you're going to have better performance overall because there's more demand for what you're selling and you want to speed up the creative testing process, then that is not going to be possible with the setup unless you use the feature that I'm about to show you in a bit. Because when you find winners, what you want to do is you want to move the winning ad within the batch into the scaling campaign. And that scaling campaign is going to be an advantage plus sales campaign. So, as you can see here, it's just one broad ad set. And you can have up to 50 active ads in here. And over time, this is going to be built out. you're going to have more winners and way more creative diversity within this campaign. But again, that might take a long time for you unless you're able to find these winners with the testing campaign. So, here's how we can solve this. So, I'm going to show you this inside this example ad account. And essentially, what this method does is that it makes sure that every time you launch a new batch, those historic best performing batches will not take 100% of the spend. You will always have a certain percentage of spend that goes into these new batches that you launch within the testing campaign. So, let me show you here. You set up a new campaign here. We're going to set up a sales campaign. Click continue. Then, we're going to set the daily budget on the campaign level. So, it's a CBO campaign. Then, you go to the adset level. And under budget and schedule, you will see that it says adset spending limits. If you click this one, we can set a minimum or maximum spend limit for this adset. So, let's say I want to avoid the situation where an adset takes 100% of the spend. Then essentially what I can do is I can put 80% on daily maximum. So that means within this campaign, this specific adset can only use a maximum of 80% of that budget. So if we have a daily budget for the campaign at $1,000, then this one can only use 800 of that. The other 200 would have to be spread on the other adsets that are active within this campaign. So when we're testing new batches, those 200 will be allocated across those new batches. Now, for the next batches that we launch within this CBO campaign, if you don't set a daily maximum, then of course it can end up taking all of your budget. So you need to make sure that you continue to put daily maximum of 80% for all of those new adsets. Now in this example, I chose a percentage, but as you can see, you can also put a dollar amount. Now, we definitely want to keep it at the percentage because as we increase the daily budget for the campaign, we want to make sure that we keep this principle of allocating a similar percentage onto those new batches that we launch within the campaign. So I wouldn't set a dollar amount just because we might scale this campaign over time and we want to make sure that we keep the same principle going as we scale up and increase in spend. Now, regarding the daily minimum here, I would keep this empty. Reason for that is as we scale up, we don't want to force spend into new batches. Meta is not just looking at conversion data when it tries to figure out if it should allocate more spend to it or not and if that will support, you know, getting you more conversions or getting you more sales. So, if we put a daily minimum percentage and we're essentially telling Meta to force some of the budget from the campaign into this adset, then that could really hurt your performance. And as you can see in this article from Meta, they also say that regarding using adset spending limits, you have to be very careful using both maximum and minimum within the same adset because that will make it harder for Meta to fully utilize the algorithm. And you know, there's the balance between like trusting Meta 100% and just letting it do its thing and doing some manual work. But in general, you want to be very careful when you start doing these manual adjustments. Very often, what Meta decides to put budget behind is what's going to give you the better results. This is a very mature advertising platform. It has so much data, more than we can comprehend as advertisers. And that is also why I would recommend not putting a minimum as a percentage. But what you can do is switch over to a dollar amount and then you could put a minimum of let's say your average order value. And when you're launching this test, you need to keep an eye on it. Like if it doesn't give you results over, you know, a 7-day period, you should probably turn it off. But you can essentially force a daily minimum into this adset so that you know that it gets tested before you make a decision. So let's say we have an average order value of 10 bucks. Okay? And let's say we really want to speed up the testing on a new batch that we've launched. So let's say we put 30. So we put 3x the average order value into this adset. Again, we need to keep a very close eye on it and turn it off if it doesn't work because we don't want to waste money into this campaign. But essentially now every day there will be some budget going into this adset. And that is how you can force money into a test. And that could be very important. Let's say you've been really working hard on sourcing some new creatives and you've been putting in a lot of effort and work on creating something that you think is very likely going to outperform. It just needs to build up some momentum. Then you can definitely do it this way. But be very careful using both maximum and minimum at the same time. Now, another very important thing about using this feature is that you have to be careful if you're using a cost control bid strategy. So either cost per sold goal, rorowass goal, or a bit cap. If you're using that together with the minimum spend limits, as you see, meta states that that may constrain delivery and potentially making minimum spend limits unachievable. So again, be very careful when using this and don't do too much at once. I would run a test on this and I would be very mindful of all of the manual changes that you're doing and making sure that you don't do too many of them at the same time. So don't start using adset spending limits and your new bid strategy and other stuff at the same time. If you really want to test this, do this test without too many other changes going on at the same time and see if it over time improves performance. Now, on the short term, it's very likely that it will hurt performance because you're essentially forcing money into things that Meta, the algorithm, based off all the data points it has, thinks doesn't deserve budget. So, you're kind of doing a bet against meta. And if you decide to do that, you have to be very intentional about doing so. All that being said, for the advertisers that have, you know, a top-notch creative testing process, they're sourcing amazing creatives. They're doing the creative research and really figuring out what type of video ads and static images that could work really well for them. And they want to put more money behind these tests because they really truly believe in them. And they're also backing that belief by doing a lot of research and really understanding what could perform for them based on maybe competitors or other successful businesses in their industry. for those businesses that could be a gamecher for you because you're now able to speed up the testing process. And sure, it might cost you money short term because some of the tests that you launch doesn't work as you intend them to. But even if they don't work, that's still data points for you. Now, you don't need to continue to test those things because you know for a fact that it didn't work and you have data to back that. So, this is very exciting stuff. We're definitely starting to roll this out for our portfolio and testing this out to see if we can improve performance by using this feature. Now, if you've already started testing this, please let me know what you found in the comments down below. And if you have any questions to anything that I discussed in this video, please let me know. I answer all the comments from my subscribers first. Also, if you want to level up your creative production process and really find good ideas to execute on to create great video ads and static ads, I've built out a creative strategist that has multiple different ad formats built into it where it helps you ideulate and find good creative concepts that you can then execute. So, if you want to get that for free, just click the link in the description of this video and I'll send that to your email. And also, if you're looking to take your business to the next level, feel free to book in a call with me using the link in the top of the description below. We still have a couple of slots open for Q4 this year. So, if you're looking to scale and take things to the next level, click the link below and see how you can work with me directly. Now, all that being said, thank you so much for watching this video, and I look forward to seeing you in the next