# How To Succeed With A NEW Meta Ad Account in 2026

Channel: Ben Heath
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaBxYgZ7MAU
Duration: 19 min
Language: English
Words: 4174
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/vaBxYgZ7MAU

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[0:00] You absolutely can succeed with a brand new meta ad account, but most advertisers completely destroy their chance of success without even realizing it. Often, they mess up their meta ad accounts so much that it becomes completely unfixable. In this video, I'm going to show you what you should do to get great [music] Facebook and Instagram ad results with a new ad account, and just as importantly, what you should never do under any circumstances. Let's start with something you should never do pretty much under any circumstances. I wish I'd known this sooner. I'd have saved so much money. Do not boost posts from the Facebook or Instagram apps. You

[0:32] are much better off running ads in ads manager. Why? Well, ads manager has better functionality. You can create better ad campaigns that have more options. You can be much more specific with who you want to target using things like value rules. You can be more specific with how meta optimizes your ad campaigns, which is really, really important, and the more advanced an advertiser you become, the best you become at that stuff, the better results you get because of it. So, really important that you take advantage of the extra functionality. Also, if you boost posts in the Facebook app or Instagram app using an iOS device, which I imagine

[1:02] most people that are boosting posts are, you pay an extra 30% known as the Apple tax. Basically, Apple treats it as an in-app purchase, and they charge 30% on top for in-app purchases. So, you're effectively just adding 30% of whatever you're spending on the ads to give to Apple. You don't get any extra for that. You could run that uh through ads manager using a computer instead and save that 30%. And like, who wants to donate money to one of the most valuable companies in the world just because when

[1:30] you're not getting anything back for it. Most people have no idea that this is a thing. It's often how they get started with advertising cuz it's just really quick and easy, but much better off just taking a little bit of time, going through a few of my longer tutorials that show you how to set up Facebook and Instagram ad accounts. I've got beginners tutorials that that you can easily find that walk you through the process, and then doing things properly using ads manager, you save yourself 30% if nothing else. Okay, so the next point that's really important for new meta ad accounts is to differentiate with

[1:56] specificity. What do I mean by that? It's really difficult for you to compete with the bigger brands in your space. If your product or service to your prospects looks the same or very similar to theirs, because those people are just going to buy from your competitors that have the brand name. Now, there's obviously a number of different ways you can differentiate. You could differentiate by having the best price point and being less expensive than competitors. Often not ideal because that's going to eat into your margin and it's not great for the long-term viability of your business. One of the easiest ways to differentiate is with the specificity of your marketing

[2:29] message. You don't even necessarily need to have increased specificity in the product or service, but what you can do is instead of trying to create ads that speak to the whole market, break your market down into very specific avatars and then create ads to specifically speak to them. Because if you do that, people are much more likely to go, "Yes,

[2:47] that's me. I'll engage with this ad. I'll buy this product or service." So, let me give you an example, right? So, I've got an offer called the Ben Heath Inner Circle. Now, as part of the Ben Heath Inner Circle, you get 10 live Q&A calls with me per month and it's designed to be tailored feedback around Meta Ads or Google Ads and people can can come on, they can bring up their ad account, they can say, "Ah, you know, my results have dropped off or how do I improve this or how do I fix this?" And they can ask me questions and I can help them out and and give them specific

[3:12] advice. So, that's actually quite a broad offer, but we can break that market down, people who may be interested in that, into specific customer avatars and then create ads that really speak to those people. Same offer, different specific message. You could do the same thing with physical products. How might different people use your product? Break that down and then

[3:31] create ads for each specific use case. Which different types of people might be interested in your service? Is there residential versus commercial? Is there hobbyists at who are really keen versus complete beginners to the market? All sorts of different categorizations is going to very much depend on your business, but really do that and break that down and it's one of the easiest ways and most reliable ways to stand out from your competition. Because the big players are less likely to do that. The really big competitors within your industry, they are going for mass market and they can advertise for mass market and they can look to capture it because

[4:03] they have the brand reputation, the establishment, they have a lot of things going for them. By the way, if live calls with me where you can ask me any questions you've got about your Meta ads, we can review your ad account, help improve your performance sounds very interesting, there is a link to my inner circle in the description below. Now, this next one is a big one. So many people are getting their conversion tracking wrong. It sounds obvious, but I'm actually talking about a specific case that I see fairly often. So, I'll give you some examples. So, typically the way it would work is someone clicks

[4:26] on your Meta ad, they come through to a landing page, that triggers the page view event, then they go ahead and purchase and they would get the purchase conversion event that would usually load up on an order confirmation page, or they inquire, they become a lead, they go through to a a thank you page after they submitted their information and the lead conversion event would be triggered on that thank you page. But sometimes, advertisers or people setting this up will get this wrong and the purchase or the lead conversion event will be triggered on the landing [clears throat] page load up. So, basically, anyone that clicks off an ad from Facebook or

[5:00] Instagram comes through to a landing page, whether they go on to convert or not, a purchase or a lead is registered. That is a bit of a disaster because that tells Meta that everyone that clicks through becomes a purchase or a lead and Meta therefore goes, "Great, we just need to send this page as much traffic as possible." Meta won't be able to learn and work out who does convert and who doesn't. Who should we put ads in front of, what time of day, what placement options, all the various things that Meta's going to do to optimize your campaigns if you have

[5:29] conversion tracking set up properly. Instead, they're just going to send as many people as possible. That'll include spam accounts, that'll include bots, not stuff that you want at all. You're actually much better off with a Meta pixel that doesn't know how to get you results than one that thinks it is getting you results when it actually isn't. It's more of a common issue than you think. The easiest way to check it is to use this free Chrome extension, which is the Meta Pixel Helper. When you use that, you can go into the various pages on your website, and you can see which conversion events, which events

[6:00] are being triggered on page load, and just absolutely double-check that on the landing page that you're sending traffic through to, that nothing else is being registered as an event other than just simple page view. So, the next recommendation is for those of you operating with a bit more of a budget. of new Meta ad accounts set up by beginners, small businesses just getting started with small budgets, absolutely

[6:19] fine. This point probably isn't for you. But, if you're not in that situation, a bit more of an established business, you have a bit more money to play with, I would recommend that you hire influencers to produce your ad creative for you. There's a number of reasons for that. Firstly, influencers in your ad creative, in your imagery, in your videos has scroll-stopping power. They are recognized by their audience, which obviously you want to line up with your target market. You want to hire the

[6:41] right influencers for that to be true. So, they're far more likely to pay attention to your ads in the first place featuring these people. Then, their recommendation carries weight. So, your conversion rates from people that find out about your product or service, and then click through, are going to be higher because they've been recommended by someone that people within your

[6:57] target audience know, like, and trust. Also, it's a really easy way to get high-quality ad creative. A skill that a lot of advertisers, even more established businesses that are just starting running Meta ads with a new ad account, don't often have. And people who have become influencers have built followings, they usually pretty good at producing quality creative assets, like videos and things. Otherwise, they would never become influencers in the first place, right? So, many reasons to do that. Yes, it costs a bit of money, which is why it's not going to be a viable option for all businesses with a new Meta ad account. But, for those that

[7:29] do have a bit of budget, this is a great way to go. Meta has a free tool called the Creator Marketplace. I've got a video about that you can find on my channel that shows you exactly how to go and find the right influencers and creators to partner with to get these creative assets produced for you. A lot of people think influencer marketing is you just hire an influencer to post on their socials about your stuff, but a much more powerful way is to hire an influencer to produce video ads promoting your product service that you can then run as a partnership ad on the platform because then you can make sure

[8:00] that people see it for weeks, months, potentially even years if it continues to perform. For those of you that are more resource constrained, which I imagine will be most people watching this video, you're likely to find it difficult to produce high-quality ad creative if you do it yourself, but the perfect solution to that problem is Hollow. One of the biggest reasons small budgets fail on Meta isn't targeting, it's the creatives. Because testing properly requires variations, and variations cost money. A single UGC video from a creator, hundreds if not thousands of dollars. An agency to consistently produce and test new creatives, thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars per month. And

[8:33] that's before you even know if the ads convert. If you're working with a small budget, that math just doesn't work. Hollow flips that part of the equation. You just paste in only your website URL, and it analyzes your brand voice, positioning, and visuals. Then generates ready-to-publish ads, social posts, and email campaigns. But what makes this powerful for small budgets is the variations. Instead of giving you one creative, it can generate batches of different hooks, angles, formats, and layouts in seconds. You can tweak the size, swap visuals, adjust colors, change the messaging, translate it into another language, or even turn a static image into a video without starting from

[9:06] scratch each time. No prompts, no Canva marathons, no waiting weeks on freelancers. And here's why this matters for small budget advertisers. Meta rewards iteration. The people who win aren't always the ones spending the most, they're the ones testing the most. If you can create 10 to 20 creative variations quickly without spending thousands on production, you suddenly have leverage. Instead of spending your budget on creative production, you can spend it on actual ad testing. What used to take hours or cost thousands now takes minutes. For solo founders and small teams, that removes the biggest bottleneck in Facebook ads, producing enough creatives to find a winner. If creative costs have been holding you

[9:41] back from testing properly, Hollow is definitely worth looking at. There is a link in the description and a discount code if you want to try it. Okay, my next point is to optimize for what you really want. And this point is especially important for new Meta ad accounts because there is so much bad advice out there about this. You'll probably have heard this already, that with a new Meta ad account, you can't optimize for purchases, you can't optimize for leads, you can't use the sales or leads campaign objective, you have to go with traffic, send people through to your website and warm up the pixel, or you have to go with engagement

[10:13] and warm up the pixel. All absolute nonsense. It is true that new Meta ad accounts are not as good at generating sales and leads, the thing that you most likely want, as more experienced ad accounts, because Meta doesn't have as much conversion data that they can use to make all sorts of decisions and optimizations around who to target within your target audience, what time of day to put ads in front of them, is it better to put an ad on Instagram stories versus Facebook Reels. Much better off to run a conversion-based campaign, so like leads or sales, and get the results that you want and actually have the system learn. The

[10:44] optimization system within Meta is very literal. If you say you want link clicks, Meta will get you link clicks. And Meta won't think it's not doing what you want if those link clicks come from fake accounts, from bots. Meta's like, "Hey, these are link clicks. You wanted link clicks, right? We've got them for you." So, you have to be smarter as an advertiser and just not listen to that terrible advice that's been out there and just won't go away, and actually think, "Okay, this is what I want. This is what I'm going to optimize for." The vast, vast majority of advertisers, especially if you're sending people

[11:12] through to your website, should be going with the leads or sales campaign objectives. And then, as your performance goal, because you can mess up a good campaign objective selection by getting the performance goal wrong, the performance goal, make sure you're optimizing for the conversion event that you really want, usually leads or purchases. Here's another new piece of advice for new Meta ad accounts that

[11:31] very few advertisers actually follow. And that's to start with just one campaign and one ad set. You could have multiple ads within that ad set, but that is what I want you to start with for your campaign structure. Let's keep things really simple. As the platform has evolved and matured and become more sophisticated, we're moving more and more towards that setup even with more experienced ad accounts, but especially at the beginning I think it's really key. Firstly, new Meta ad accounts when you're getting started typically don't operate with large budgets. That means you're not going to be generating tons of conversions most likely. If you separate that budget across lots of

[12:04] different campaigns, really hard for Meta to learn, for you to get out of the learning phase, really hard for you as an advertiser to draw conclusions. If everything's going through the one option, then you can learn a lot faster and Meta can also learn a lot faster. I also think it really helps with focus. So, in that one campaign, what I would normally recommend, like just get started offering the one thing, the one product or product range, and the one service, your best seller or your most profitable offering. Keep things nice and simple early on. And along those same lines, it's really important that you respect the learning phase. So, the

[12:33] learning phase usually lasts 24 to 48 hours, but can vary significantly. And it occurs after you launch a new ad set or make significant adjustments to an ad set. And during that time period, Meta is going into hyper learning mode, testing who within your target audience is likely to deliver the best results, placement options, all those various things, right? So, results are very volatile. Meta continues to learn after the learning phase, by the way, but they're doing the more foundational

[12:57] heavy testing right at the beginning. So, results are likely to go up and down. What a lot of advertisers with new ad accounts cannot do is just leave their ad campaigns alone and give them a bit of time. So, it's really important that you give yourself I would try and come up with a fixed optimization schedule of like I'm going to launch stuff, I'm going to give it 5 days, I'm going to give it 7 days, I'm going to give it 10 days, then I'm going to assess, then I'm going to make a suite of changes, whether that's introducing new ads or tweaking other things in one

[13:21] go. I'll go back into the learning phase, I'll then give it more time, and then I'll assess the results. The length of time does vary because of your conversion volume. If you're generating just a few conversions a week, it might take months for you to know which ad is performing best and the correct adjustments to make. If, however, you're generating 200 purchases a day, well, you might be able to make decisions that same day. So, it very much depends on conversion volume. Try and establish a time frame and don't constantly tinker, otherwise you're constantly in the learning phase and you will hurt your results. So, my next

[13:53] point is very much overlooked by a lot of advertisers, not really understood. And that's it's really important to understand what your results mean. So, you've got your new Meta ad account, you've got your campaign, hopefully just the one, up and running, and you start generating results. And then what advertisers will then do based on the results is they will just kind of guess at what they should do next. You want to be much more intentional than that. So, I'm going to run you through a quick framework after some of the most common scenarios and what action you should take based on what you see. So, if

[14:20] you're not generating any conversions at all, it's most likely an offer problem. People aren't interested enough in what you have to offer at the price point in order to go ahead and purchase or become a lead. That's typical. A lot of advertisers in that scenario think it's a targeting problem. That's unlikely nowadays. Meta's so good at working out who to put your ads in front of. It's most likely an offer problem. You need

[14:42] to differentiate from your competition. How can you speed up the deliverable? How can you reduce the risk for your prospects? Guarantees, things like that. Is there anything you can do on price? How can you deliver more value? How can you make that clearer? An offer problem. My recommendation for how to improve offers is Alex Hormozi's 100 million dollar offers book, which is absolutely fantastic. Scenario number two. Let's say you're generating some conversions, not very many, less than you would like, but you've got a low hook rate and you've got a low click-through rate. So, people are clicking from the ad through to wherever it is that you're sending

[15:12] them. So, what that would typically demonstrate to me is that you've got an ad creative problem. So, you've got some conversions, like people are interested in your offer, but your ads aren't doing a good job enough of grabbing their attention in the first place, holding it, and then convincing them to take action. Ad creative problem in that scenario. Okay, next scenario. You've got some conversions, not many, not as many as you'd like, like before, but this time you've got a high click-through rate, potentially a high hook rate as well. So, that shows me that your ad creative is all good, and you've got some conversions, but not

[15:38] many, therefore it's likely a landing page problem or a post-click experience problem. The ad is doing its job, people are interested enough in the offer, but once they get through to the next stage, they're just not convinced enough. There's not enough proof around what it is that you offer and the results that you claim to deliver. There's not enough much supporting information. There's something that's potentially putting them off. Landing page problem. Next scenario, you're generating lots of

[15:59] conversions, but you're not profitable. And that sounds like it would be quite rare. It isn't. I see this come up very often. In that situation, I would say that you've got a model problem. You need to tweak your model. You need to add in upsells. You need to adjust your pricing. I have lots of conversations with advertisers that are generating purchases or leads for really small amount, less than I would expect. And then they tell me they're not profitable, and I'm like, "Well, you're either charging way too little for what it is that you're offering here, or you're only selling the one thing that's relatively inexpensive. You should have

[16:32] a significantly more valuable upsell." Often quite an easy fix, quite a good situation to be in cuz your ads are working, your offer's working, a lot of it's working, your landing page, post experience. We just need to adjust the stuff that happens either with pricing or post that initial purchase. But yeah, model problem in that scenario. Next scenario, the one we were on, lots of conversions and profitable, in which case, scale. Again, not all advertisers will do this. I've had lots of conversations with people being like, "The results look good. Should I spend

[16:59] more?" And I'm like, "Yes, absolutely." Of course we can improve things as you go along, but if it's working well and you have capacity to deliver on that product or deliver on that service, then go ahead and and scale. One thing that's really important, and this happens a lot to advertisers with new ad accounts that are new to the platform, is that unless they're in that last scenario, where things are great, lots of conversions and profitable, they run their ads and they don't get conversions and they get some conversions but not enough and they just assume Meta ads don't work. And that's a silly assumption. I think a lot

[17:29] of advertisers, new advertisers, do that because they don't want the responsibility to be on them and what they're doing. They'd rather make it the platform's fault, but that doesn't serve you in the long run. Businesses spend more money on Meta ads than any other form of advertising. It's literally just about to overtake Google, which has been um ahead of Meta for the last, well, however, since Meta ads uh became a thing. So, the idea that all those businesses are just sort of donating money to Mark Zuckerberg is ludicrous, right? Obviously, there are lots of businesses generating tons of leads, tons of sales, lots of customers um from Meta ads. They are making it

[18:02] work. That means you can, too. So, out of all those scenarios, I would say that the one that's most likely that I've come across the most is an ad creative problem, okay? So, you're getting some conversions but not many. The engagement metrics on the ads are okay, but not great. Hook rate could be better. CTR um could be better. And if you're in that scenario, I'd recommend that you check out this video next. In that video, I go

[18:24] through a number of different Meta ads. I review the ad creative, break them down into parts that work, the parts that don't. People who've watched this video have said how valuable it is to be able to go through that and help them create their own ad creative. So, if you haven't already, give this a watch.

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