Meta advertisers, we've got a TESTING problem. Here's the fix...

0:00I bet you've run into this problem with your Meta ads. So you've created a bunch of new ads making sure to include creative diversity, which Meta tells us is really important nowadays. You put those ads into an ad set, and then Meta just spends all of your budget or nearly all of your budget on one [music] ad creative. That's a problem, and then in this video, I'm going to show you how to fix it. So now that the Andromeda update has been rolled out to most Meta ad accounts, we know that we need more ad creative and that we need more creative diversity. What we mean by that is

0:25different types of ad. Meta wants you to create ads using different ad formats like a static image versus video, for example. And then even within your video, they don't just want you to create variations of the same ad. They want you to create ads that have a different feel, a different style. So could be UGC, could be a testimonial base, could be a demonstration of your product or service, could be a founder-led video. So different things to help keep things fresh, but also to take advantage of what Andromeda is able to do, which is identify that for this prospect in your target audience, this type of ad is likely to perform best for

0:56them. With this other prospect, a different type of ad is likely to perform best if we put it in front of them. And Andromeda also allows uh Meta to put people through ad sequences. So maybe we start with a demonstration of how your product or service works, and then after that we use a a UGC-style ad to try and help get the conversion once they're already familiar with how it works uh to be able to sequence in that way. So a lot of advertisers are creating, say, 20 ads in an ad set, and that's something that we certainly recommend. And that all sounds good and does work well when Meta does

1:26actually distribute the budget across your different ad creative to be able to do those sorts of things, but that's obviously not happening when Meta is just putting all or nearly all of your budget into one ad or a couple of ads thinking, "Well, I'm not taking advantage of what Andromeda is able to do." And even more than that, even if that is your best performing ad, it does make sense in the short term for Meta to be putting all your ad spend into that one ad, it's going to fatigue. You are going to see that the performance of that ad inevitably drop off at some point as more and more of your audience

1:54have seen it, and they've either taken action on it or they just got used to it, and now they ignore it going forward. So you absolutely do need Meta to spend money on new ad creatives. Number of different ways that we can address that, and that's what I want to run through in this video. So how do we solve this problem? Well, I think there are four options, four potential solutions, and the one you choose will depend on your circumstances, the type of campaigns you're running. I'll run through what the the four options are and the criteria of when you do and don't want to use each, okay? So option

2:22number one, potential solution number one, is just to do nothing. Just to accept it, which might sound kind of weird given what I've just described about the issues around uh letting Meta spend all your budget on a one one ad creative or a couple of ad creatives. But I think there are scenarios where that is absolutely the best option. So firstly, if you've got a time-sensitive campaign, you're running a Black Friday sale or a Christmas sale or something seasonal, something that you know this campaign is going to come to an end in the short term in in in the near future, you don't really need to worry about

2:51that campaign, that ad fatiguing, performance dropping off over time, testing other ad creatives because the time frame just means actually you probably want to plow all your budget into the best-performing ad creative. It's a short-term thing, let's make the most of it. So in that scenario, I would most likely do nothing. Now, if this is a sale that you regularly run, like you say it's timely, but you know you're going to run it again in a few months and then again and then again, well, maybe in those scenarios it's more important to be able to test to work out to find ad creatives that can perform

3:20well in future iterations. Um so if you're in that scenario, then it'd be I'd be more open to some of the other options, some of the other solutions that we'll go through in a minute. But if you're running a short-term campaign, much less of a of a big deal, right? The other scenario would be if you've got a massive target audience and you're just really unlikely to fatigue for quite a long time. So how quickly do you need to jump on this? Well, if you're really niche, really small audience, you need to refresh your creative more often

3:47because you're going to get ad fatigue. Um you need to penetrate your audience more in terms of the percentage of people that notice your stuff. Different ad creative is going to speak to different people, so that really helps. But if you've got an enormous target audience and genuinely like you sell to most of the population, which some businesses do, well, again, this is much less of an issue. You're going to be

4:06able to run a campaign for much longer. Still probably going to run into issues in the long run, um but uh but that is a consideration. Also, if you're operating with a really small budget at the moment, absolutely fine to just have that have the budget be put into your best-performing creative. That'll get you the best results in the short run. That will allow you to scale, and as you scale, you may well find that Meta does distribute budget more across different ad creatives because you're spending more, looking to reach more people, Meta

4:32has more flexibility. Um and it'll also give you the the it's a reinforcing cycle, right? You get a good return on ad spend, you now have more money to invest in producing better creative, which is probably likely to lead to Meta splitting budget um across the board. Not all businesses are in that scenario, or at least they won't be in that scenario all the time. You might be at certain points and not others. But there are scenarios where you can just do nothing, and that might actually be the right way to go. Okay, so we'll get to the other options, the other potential solutions in a second, but

4:58first I want to quickly let you know about my Meta ads mentorship program, which gives you all the support you need to get the best possible results from your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns. And included in my mentorship program is exclusive educational material that you won't find anywhere else. Unlimited one-to-one support, so you can literally ask us as many questions, send us messages, show us stuff within your ad account, anything that comes up, and we'll get back to you with tailored feedback and instructions for your specific circumstances. We also offer daily, multiple daily live calls and Q&As with both me and my expert team members. I've got team members that

5:29specialize in various areas of Meta ads. You can literally just jump on, ask them about uh how do I fix this, how do I improve this, and they'll be able to help you out as as will I. So if that sounds interesting, then go ahead and click on the link in the video description below. There you can book in a free call with one of my team members to find out more about my mentorship program, and hopefully me and you get a chance to work together directly [music] very soon. So option number two is to create a separate testing campaign. So we leave our ad creative that's getting

5:54all the spend, that's probably producing the best results, um in our existing campaign, what we'd often call our scaling or evergreen campaign. And then we would create a separate testing campaign where we put new ad creative in there, where we can control the budget, basically force Meta to spend budget on new ad creative um so that we can see how it performs, what cost per purchase does it actually generate, what cost per lead does it actually generate when we force Meta to spend on it, we can actually see and test. So when you do this, if you take this step, expect

6:22results to be worse in the short run. And that's actually true of most testing because most of the things you test, particularly if you already have stuff that's performing well, the new stuff you test won't perform as well as the existing stuff. So overall, you're going to see a drop in results. But that that con, that negative, may well be worth it if you go ahead and find, through maybe a few rounds of testing, some ad creative that can outperform your current best performers, and you can then introduce those into your scaling campaign, your evergreen campaign, and scale as the name suggests, and spend a lot more and acquire a lot more

6:54customers. So it's like a short-term hit to hopefully find some winners that can provide some real long-term gain, okay? Now, it's also not ideal to have the two campaigns running side by side. You want to be targeting the same people, everything else wants to be the same, but you're testing different creative to have a scaling and testing campaign. But again, I think the negative tivity of that can be overcome by the the wins, the potential big wins that you find from testing. It's almost like if you think about it, right, I'm willing to take a 10, 20% hit in the short run in order to potentially find an ad that

7:26performs 50% better than my current one, that allows me to spend three times as much profitably and acquire three times as many customers, grow my business, and etc. So when would we do this? When would we take this approach? Firstly, you need to have enough conversions to justify the two separate campaigns. If you don't have enough conversion volume for Meta to be able to learn properly, don't do this. So if you're generating less than 50 conversions per week, and what I mean by conversions, the

7:51conversion event you are optimizing for. So if you're optimizing for purchases as your performance goal, then that's the one that I'm talking about here, not just any conversions, right? If you're generating less than 50, don't do this. This is not the option you want to take. You want to take either the first one I do nothing or the one I'm about to get to um in a second. But if you are generating, you know, 100, 200 conversions a week or more, then absolutely fine to have the separate campaigns because Meta is going to be able to optimize those campaigns

8:16and learn with the the separate budgets. We also won't typically do this if it's a short-term campaign, like I already described. There's not much point in breaking out and testing if this thing's only going to run for a few days or even a couple of weeks, right? Okay, so option number three is to create new ads

8:30and introduce them into the same ad set. So instead of having a separate testing campaign, we're introducing them into the same ad set alongside the ones that are getting all the spend. You might want to turn off some of the ones that currently aren't getting any spend to sort of make space for them. And this is typically what Meta would recommend that

8:45we do if we if we run into this problem. Now, what I recommend if you do this is that you make sure that the new ads you create are quite different from the existing because if they're not different from the existing ones that are getting all the spend, if they're just small tweaks and variations like a different background color on an image or something like that, there's a good chance Meta won't really spend any money on these either, and then you just run

9:05into the into the same issues, right? You might also find that you need to do this multiple times in order for Meta to actually start spending some money on the new ads. If you introduce a a bunch of new creative into an ad set that's got a couple of winners and Meta keeps spending on the winners, most of the time Meta has basically analyzed your new stuff and gone, "We don't think this is going to perform better than the existing." Maybe they test it a little

9:26bit. Meta is sometimes wrong, hence why in there are scenarios where we have a separate testing campaign. But often they're not wrong. Often Meta is right. And I've seen a lot of advertisers create some new ads, introduce them into an ad set alongside winners, those ads not getting any spend, and they think, "Well, there's no point in this. I'm not going to bother producing any new stuff." That's often the wrong approach if you're going to go with this option. You want to keep going to try and find new creative that will outperform the the existing ads, and then Meta will analyze and go, "Oh, yeah, we think this

9:58is going to be a winner. We'll start putting some significant budget behind this." Also, obviously, as time goes on, this will become more and more important because you're going to run into ad fatigue with your with your existing winners. So, when would we take this option? Cuz obviously, it has similarities to the separate testing campaign. We would go with this option where we don't have enough conversion volume to justify the separate campaign

10:17where they can optimize properly. [snorts] So, if you're generating less than 50 conversions a week, you don't want to have another a separate campaign. Um this is just not going to be able to optimize properly, and neither is your current existing one going to be able to optimize fully. So, if you don't have enough of the conversion you're optimizing for, go with this option as opposed to the separate testing campaign. That might mean that testing takes longer. It might mean that less of

10:40your budget is spent on testing. Um but, I think that's the better overall scenario trying to balance different factors there, and you have to allow meta to optimize your campaigns properly. Um that's you know, without that, your campaigns are just not going to perform as well as they would otherwise. I'll get to option number four, which is not actually something I've talked about in a YouTube video before in a second. First, I want to quickly let you know about Hyros. Hyros is the best tracking and attribution software for meta ads. It's the software all the big players in this industry use, including myself. I use it to track

11:09results for my own ads as well as all my organic results as well. So, if someone books a call for our done-for-you services, for example, I can see exactly where that person came from with a lot of accuracy. That allows me to make better decisions for my marketing and my business. Hyros has been able to track that from our ad spend in this campaign, we generated 96,000 pounds. But, 58,000

11:28pounds of that was not reported by meta. So, if I was just looking at my data within my meta ad account, I might come to the conclusion that this campaign is doing okay, but in reality, this campaign is doing a lot lot better. Now, this is a relatively extreme example because of the nature of our business. So, most of our products services have a recurring billing element. Meta might be able to see what we make initially from our ad spend on that initial transaction, but not those subsequent payments. That's why it it shows the importance here of being able to accurately see what did we actually get from our ad spend in order

12:00to be able to make better decisions and optimize correctly. So, if you want to improve the performance of your ad campaigns without having to touch your ads, go ahead and sign up to Hyros. There is a link in the video description. So, option number four, and a really good potential solution to this problem, is to use meta's inbuilt creative testing tool. So, let me show you how this works. I'm in an example ad account here. I'm in ads manager at the campaign window. I'm just going to go ahead and create a quick uh I'll use a

12:22leads campaign in this scenario. Um and then I'm going to jump to the ad level. And then when we scroll down, we've got this creative testing section underneath where you set up your your ad creative. So, you can see it says here, "Compare up to five different versions of your creative in a test that helps ensure delivery to new test ads." And if we click on set up test, then we get this window here. So, how many test ads do you want to create? We can between two and five. So, you don't just have to test, you know, ad A versus ad B. You can test more at once if you want. How

12:52much of your budget should go to test ads? Fairly self-explanatory. I've just created a quick dummy campaign, as you've seen. So, this has got a 25-pound uh daily budget. So, I can spend all of my campaign budget on this test if I want to, or only a percentage of it and and lower that down. How long should the test run? This is really important. 7 days is the default. I think that's a good starting point, but you can adjust this depending on conversion volume. So, if you're generating hundreds of conversions a day, you could really shrink this right down because you're

13:17going to find out really quickly. Um if you're generating a handful of conversions a week, then you're going to really need to extend this time frame because you don't want the test to finish and you go, "Actually, we don't have enough data to know how this is performing." But, for most businesses, you know, 7 days is is probably a decent starting point. And then this is really important. How do you want to compare performance? So, cost per engagement, no. That's what's recommended, but that's not what's really important to our business. We want to know how well does ad A perform versus ad B for our primary objective. So, that's most

13:51likely going to be cost per lead, cost per purchase, whatever it is that you really want. So, very importantly, change that. This is a lead campaign I just created, so I could go with um cost per lead as the example, right? Go ahead and click on that. And as you can see that now that I've selected cost per lead, we have this little warning warning pop up saying, "Since your durational budget changed, the recommended key metric was updated in the drop-down." Um what meta's basically hinting at there is that like, "Look, if you're only going to spend 25 a day over 7 days, we might not be able to work out

14:17which of of these ads you want to test um is going to know does this produce a better cost per lead versus this one?" We just You might not have spent enough. You might not have given this long enough to work that out. Um whereas they're pretty confident that on a cost per engagement basis, um meta will be able to work that out cuz obviously, engagements are a much more frequent action than leads are. So, in this scenario, we would probably want to either up the budget or up the number of days to run this test given that um warning that's that's popped up, and you

14:45may see something similar when you go through this process. And then once I click confirm, you'll see that over here on the left, we've got these new uh these test ads here, right? Um so, you'd obviously make sure that one of them had one ad creative, another one had a different ad creative, and we've kept everything else the same. So, we've isolated that creative variable. We can run this test and then see how the creatives perform. And like I said before, we could have up to five um going in this test, and that could be a really good way to find answers, force meta to spend money on new ad creative,

15:13and um and achieve some of the stuff that we're looking to achieve by testing different ad creative in terms of having the potential to find winners that can help us really scale our campaigns and significantly improve our performance. So, when would we use this option? When would we use meta's creative testing tool? It's often the best way to test. If we're going to have a separate testing campaign like I described earlier, we'll often use meta's creative testing tool uh to test ad creatives in that, and it has some advantages. So, firstly, you don't really need to worry about auction overlap because meta's going to properly divide your audience

15:43so that only group A see ad A and group B see ad B, etc., etc. Whereas if you just have different ads in different ad sets or different campaigns, then the delivery can all get a little bit messy. They can overlap, and you can run into issues. So, with the testing tool, you get a sort of neater, cleaner, more accurate test, and you can trust the results more as a result. And you can run a test, and then once you finish the test, um once that comes to an end, that time period comes to an end, delivery will just return to normal. So, the ad set can sort of go back to how it was um

16:11functioning previously. Sometimes meta will learn from the test, and they'll allocate budget differently. Um but, yeah. So, so quite an easy flexible tool to use. If you're using just the one campaign, you don't have the conversion volume to justify separate testing campaigns, uh things become a little bit more tricky when using the creative testing tool. So, uh a few few potential issues to watch out for, right? If you do lots of rounds of testing, it could quite easily become really difficult to manage. Like, doesn't feel like an issue at the beginning, but just I've been there, and you do enough rounds of testing, and you look kind of look at

16:43your one ad set, and you're like, "What? We've got this as a winner, and we've had these tests, and what on earth is going on here?" It could become really quite um quite complicated. The other thing is that we have seen that if you're running, say, two test ads alongside one with previous winner that's just been run as normal, and you said I want to allocate a proportion of the budget to the test, not all of it, it can negatively impact the existing winner, that the scaling ad. Uh whereas obviously, it's a separate campaign, you don't have to worry about that. So, so I'm not saying don't use the creative

17:11testing tool if you're just sticking with the one campaign cuz you don't have enough conversion volume to justify separate campaign, but there are just few things to watch out for that may well happen. And I think that if you are in that scenario, just don't look to test as much. Sort of choose your test wisely. Don't go crazy and and look to test everything. You want to be a little bit more selective with how often you test and and things like that. Whereas with the separate testing campaign, you can basically just just go for it. You don't have to worry about messing

17:36anything else up. So, we could talk about what's not a good solution. So, I talked about four potential options there, although a couple of them overlap. Obviously, you go with option four and option two at the same time. What's not a good solution that I've seen quite a few people do? I would not recommend that you turn off the best performing ad creatives um that are getting all the budget. I've seen a lot of advertisers do that, and they think, "Well, great. I'll turn that one off. I'll force budget to be spent on the other ones." What often happens when you do that is performance tanks because

18:05that was your best performing ad creative, and that's why meta's putting all the all the money behind it. Now, as we're talking about ad creative and delivery and the control you have over that as an advertiser, I need to mention meta's relatively new ad sequencing feature, which I go through in detail in this video here. Could be really really powerful for anything high ticket, for anything that people might not be super familiar with already, need to explain, and and sort of take them through that process. So, we've been experimenting with it, and a lot of advertisers have, and seeing some very interesting results. So, if you haven't already, go

18:34ahead and give this video a watch.