How to Effectively Test Creatives on Meta Ads Without Wasting Budget
Creative testing is a crucial part of finding the ads that resonate with your audience and drive sales, but it’s easy to waste budget without a solid strategy. Here, we explore the best practices for testing creatives on Meta ads while ensuring your budget is used efficiently.
1. Avoid Diluting Your Budget
Think of your ad set budget as water filling cups (your ads). If you have a limited amount of water and eight cups to fill, none of them will be full enough for you to determine which cup is best. The same concept applies to ads: if you divide your budget across too many creatives in a single ad set, none of them get enough spend to truly shine. For effective creative testing, aim for no more than three ads per ad set or more if your budget is sizeably higher than £100 per day. This way, each creative gets a meaningful share of the budget to prove its value.
2. Allow Ads Time to Perform
Turning off an ad too soon can be likened to pulling a cake out of the oven before it's had time to bake. You might not know whether the recipe is a success or a failure until it's fully cooked. Similarly, running an ad for just a couple of days isn’t enough to see its true performance. Meta’s algorithms need time to learn and optimise. Be patient and allow an ad to run for at least 5-7 days before making a judgement, unless the performance is clearly very poor from the outset.
3. Don't Test Creatives in Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns
Imagine trying to train a group of puppies by giving treats only to the one who does the best trick—you'd end up with one star performer and the rest untrained. Similarly, Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) tend to allocate budget to the ads it perceives as the best, meaning new creatives rarely get enough attention to prove themselves. To properly test new creatives, use separate ad sets instead of mixing them into an ASC that already has multiple high-performing ads.
4. Keep Metrics in Mind
When running creative tests, it’s important to define what success looks like. For instance, are you aiming for higher click-through rates (CTR), lower cost per click (CPC), or increased return on ad spend (ROAS)? Using consistent metrics across all creatives will allow you to determine which ad performs best based on your overall goals.
5. Test One Variable at a Time
Think of ad testing like a science experiment: to know what works, you need to control all other variables. Test only one change at a time—whether it’s the headline, imagery, or call-to-action (CTA). If you change multiple elements at once, it becomes difficult to know what impacted the results. A/B testing is ideal for isolating which elements work best.
6. Allocate an Adequate Budget for Testing
Testing requires adequate spend. Allocating 10-20% of your total advertising budget to testing ensures you have enough data to make informed decisions. Underfunding your test phase is akin to taking a few random bites from a meal and deciding if it’s good—testing with a small budget may not provide a representative result.
7. Look Beyond Immediate Results
Sometimes a creative might not perform well on direct metrics like conversions, but it may have a positive impact on other aspects like increasing brand awareness or retargeting efficiency. Be sure to assess your creatives holistically—sometimes the best long-term performers start with a slow burn.
8. Iterate on Successful Creatives
Once you identify a winning creative, iterate on it rather than starting from scratch. Minor tweaks, such as changing the background colour or adjusting the CTA, can often improve performance further. As they say, "if it ain't broke, don’t fix it"—instead, make it better.
Conclusion
Testing creatives on Meta ads without wasting budget is about focus, patience, and measurement. Stick to a limited number of ads per set, give each creative enough time, and keep your experiments controlled. By refining your approach, you’ll discover which ads work best and scale your e-commerce success.
