Service
Meta Ads, where creative is the account.
Targeting stopped being the lever years ago. What separates accounts now is creative supply and signal quality – how many genuinely different ideas you can produce, and whether the system is learning from clean events.
- From
- $2,500 / mo
- Platforms
- Facebook · Instagram
- Signal
- Conversions API
- Free audit
- ~5 working days
Creative is the targeting now
Meta's delivery system decides who sees your ad partly from what the creative implies about who it is for. A pool of near-identical variants gives it almost nothing to work with, which is the usual cause of an account that plateaus and never recovers.
So the question is not "what is our best ad" but "how many genuinely different arguments are we making". Different hooks, different problems named, different formats – not the same idea recut six ways.
| Variation | Counts as new? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Different problem named in the first three seconds | Yes | Reaches a different person entirely |
| Different format – UGC vs studio vs static | Yes | Different surfaces, different expectations |
| Different offer framing | Yes | Changes who self-selects |
| Same video, new thumbnail | No | Same argument, same audience |
| Same script, different actor | Marginal | Sometimes – worth one test, not a programme |
| Same ad, new caption | No | This is a caption test, not a creative test |
Signal quality decides everything downstream
Consent banners, ad blockers and iOS restrictions removed a large share of the browser-side conversions Meta used to learn from. The Conversions API puts a meaningful portion back by sending events from your server.
Setting it up correctly means deduplication that actually works, event parameters rich enough to be useful, and consent handled so you are not silently dropping a third of your data. It is plumbing, it is where we start, and skipping it is why two accounts with the same budget and the same creative perform differently.
Structure: fewer, larger, better fed
The instinct is to split by audience, placement and format until every combination has its own ad set. The result is twenty ad sets with too few conversions each to leave learning, all competing in the same auction against each other.
We consolidate until each unit gets enough conversion volume to optimise, and separate only where the decision genuinely differs – market, objective, or a product line with different economics.
Reporting past Meta's own attribution
Meta's attribution is generous to Meta, and its view-through window will claim credit for conversions other channels closed. We report against your own source of truth – backend revenue, CRM, or MMP data for apps – and treat platform numbers as an input rather than an answer.
Questions people actually ask
- How much creative do you need per month?
- Enough distinct concepts that the system has something to choose between – several genuinely different ideas, not fifteen cuts of one. A narrow audience burns through creative faster because the same people see it repeatedly, so budget for a standing cadence rather than a launch batch.
- Broad targeting or detailed audiences?
- Broad, in most accounts, with the conversion signal doing the work detailed targeting used to do. Meta's delivery finds the audience better than an interest list does – provided your Conversions API setup is feeding it clean events. Where the signal is poor, targeting still matters.
- Is the Conversions API actually necessary?
- Yes. Browser-side tracking loses a meaningful share of conversions to consent banners, ad blockers and iOS restrictions. Server-side events put much of that back, and an account with good signal simply outperforms an identical account without it.
- How do you test creative?
- One variable at a time, audience held constant, with a written hypothesis and a minimum sample agreed before the test starts. Killing a creative on day four because someone got nervous is the most common way accounts learn nothing over a year of testing.
- Do you do creative production?
- We write the copy and the briefs and specify what each concept needs. Filming and design are quoted separately or handled by your team – we would rather be honest about that than pretend a media buyer is also a studio.
- What about Advantage+ campaigns?
- Useful, and not a strategy on their own. They work well when conversion volume is healthy and creative supply is real. They work badly as a way to avoid making structural decisions, which is mostly how they get used.
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Related.
How eight advertisers handle the offer in their creative, and what the same discipline looks like on app campaigns.