Solved: Best Ad Setup for Testing Multiple Facebook Ads

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It’s a common question, and getting the structure right from the start can save you a lot of money and headaches down the line. I’m happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on how you should be thinking about setting up your campaigns to test multiple ads effectively.

The short answer is that bundling everything into a single ad set is the right way to test creative, but the overall campaign structure needs to be a bit more thought-out to avoid the very issues you're worried about and to set yourself up for scaling later on. Let's get into it.

The common mistake: The 'everything in one bucket' approach

First off, let's address your core question. Your instinct to keep the audience the same when testing ads is spot on. You want to isolate the variable, and in this case, the variable is the creative (your ads). However, just throwing all your ads and all your future audiences into one big, messy campaign is a recipe for disaster. I see this all the time with new accounts.

Why is it a problem? Because not all audience members are at the same stage of their journey with you. A person who has never heard of your brand needs a very different message than someone who has visited your website and added a product to their cart. If you treat them all the same, your message will be irrelevant to most of them, and your ads will perform poorly.

You mentioned not wanting ads to compete against each other. Inside a single ad set, this isn't really a 'competition' in a negative sense. Meta's algorithm is designed to test them against each other and push spend towards the ones that perform best according to your campaign objective. It's a helpful, internal auction. The real problem of competition, or 'audience overlap', happens when you have multiple ad sets targeting similar or identical groups of people. This drives up your costs because you're essentially bidding against yourself to show an ad to the same person. This is why a proper structure is so important.

A better way: Structuring your account by the customer journey

Instead of thinking in terms of one campaign, you should think in terms of the customer journey, often called the marketing funnel. It's a simple concept but incredibly powerful when applied to ad account structure. It basically breaks your audience down into three main groups:

• Top of Funnel (ToFu): These are your 'cold' audiences. People who have no idea who you are. The goal here is introduction and awareness. You're trying to find new potential customers.
• Middle of Funnel (MoFu): These are 'warm' audiences. People who have interacted with you in some way—they've watched one of your videos, visited your website, or followed you on social media—but haven't taken that final step. The goal here is to build trust and consideration.
• Bottom of Funnel (BoFu): These are your 'hot' audiences. People who are very close to converting. They've added a product to their cart, initiated a checkout, or spent a lot of time on your pricing page. The goal here is to convert them into a customer.

By creating seperate campaigns for each stage of this funnel, you can tailor your message, your offer, and your creative to match exactly where that person is in their decision-making process. This leads to higher relevance, better ad scores, lower costs, and ultimately, more conversions.

So, how do you actually test your dozen ads?

Right, let's get practical. Based on the funnel structure, here’s how you’d set things up to test your ads:

1. Create a "ToFu - Prospecting" Campaign: This campaign's job is to find new customers. Set the campaign objective to whatever your goal is (e.g., 'Sales' or 'Leads').
2. Turn on Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO): This is the answer to your payment question. You set the budget at the campaign level, not the ad set level. CBO allows Meta's algorithm to distribute your budget across your ad sets in real-time, pushing more money to the ones that are getting you the best results. It's far more efficient than manually setting budgets, espescially for newbies.
3. Create your first Ad Set: Inside this campaign, create one ad set. In the audience section, you'll define the single audience you want to test against. This could be an interest-based audience, a lookalike audience, or whatever you've decided on.
4. Load up your Ads: Now, inside this single ad set, you create all dozen of your ads. Mix it up—different images, videos, headlines, and primary text.

That's it. By setting it up this way, you've told Meta: "Here's my daily budget for finding new customers. Here's the first group of people I want you to talk to. And here are twelve different ways to say it. Go find me the cheapest conversions." The algorithm will then run all dozen ads, quickly learn which ones are resonating with the audience, and start allocating more of the ad set's budget to those winning creatives. You can then check the ad-level reporting after a few days to see which ones are the clear winners and turn off the losers.

We'll need to look at your audiences...

Once you've found some winning ads, the next step is to find winning audiences. This is where you'll start adding more ad sets to your ToFu campaign. Each ad set will target a different cold audience. With CBO turned on, Meta will not only optimise which ads to show within an ad set but also which ad set (i.e., which audience) to give more budget to.

But which audiences should you prioritise? There’s a definite hierarchy to this, based on performance. Too many people just start testing random interests. A more systematic approach will yield much better results. The further down the funnel an event happens, the more valuable the data is, and the better a lookalike audience built from it will perform.

Here’s how I’d typically prioritise audience testing for an eCommerce client, from coldest to hottest:

You start with detailed targeting to gather data, then move onto creating powerful lookalike audiences and retargeting campaigns as soon as your pixel has enough information (you typically need at least 100 events to create a custom audience, but more is always better).

You'll need realistic expectations on cost...

A question that naturally follows is, "what should my costs be?". The truth is, it varies wildly. It depends on your industry, your audience, your offer, the country you're targeting, and the quality of your ads. However, based on the hundreds of accounts I've managed, I can give you some rough ballpark figures. This is absolutley not a guarantee, but it helps to have a frame of reference.

For something like a lead or a simple signup in developed countries (UK, US, CAN, etc.), you might see a Cost Per Click (CPC) between £0.50 and £1.50. With a decent landing page converting at 10-30%, your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) would land somewhere between £1.60 and £15. For eCommerce sales, where conversion rates are naturally lower (usually 2-5%), that same traffic could lead to a CPA of £10 to £75. Costs in developing countries are often much lower, but so is the purchasing power and sometimes the quality of the lead.

To help you get a feel for these numbers, I've built a simple calculator. You can adjust the sliders for your average CPC and your website's conversion rate to see how it impacts your estimated Cost Per Acquisition.

You probably should focus on value, not cost

While it's good to know your CPA, obsessing over getting it as low as possible is a rookie mistake. The real question isn't "how cheap can I get a lead?" but "how much can I afford to spend to acquire a great customer?". The answer to that lies in calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

LTV is the total profit you expect to make from a single customer over the entire duration of your relationship. Once you know this number, you know how much you can profitably spend on ads to get a customer (your Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). A healthy business model often aims for an LTV:CAC ratio of at least 3:1. This means for every £1 you spend on marketing, you get £3 back in profit over the customer's lifetime.

This single calculation changes everything. Suddenly, a £50 CPA doesn't seem so expensive if you know that customer will be worth £500 to you. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap clicks and allows you to invest confidently in growth. Here’s a simple calculator to figure out your LTV.

I'd say you should start with this setup...

So, to bring this all together, what does a good starting structure look like for you? It's simpler than you might think. Forget about dozens of campaigns and ad sets for now. Start with two simple, long-running campaigns.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This structure is clean, scalable, and follows all the best practises. It allows you to systematically test creatives and audiences, while keeping your messaging relevant to the different stages of the customer journey. You start with most of your budget in the ToFu campaign to feed the funnel, and a smaller budget on retargeting to capture the high-intent users.

Getting the structure right is the first step, and it's a huge one. But the real work comes in the ongoing management: analysing the data, creating new ads based on what's working, researching new audiences, and optimising your landing pages. It can quickly become a full-time job.

This is where expert help can make a significant difference. An experienced eye can spot opportunities and problems much faster, saving you from wasting budget on tests that are doomed to fail. We've scaled accounts from zero to tens of thousands in monthly spend by applying these principles rigourously.

Hope this helps clear things up for you! If you’d like to have a chat and get a second opinion on your specific situation, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can look at your account together.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh