Solved: Best Way to Test New Creatives on $200/Day Budget

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I had a look over your situation with the CBO campaign and the creatives feeling a bit stale. It's a really common place to get stuck, especially on a budget like $200 a day where every penny needs to work hard. You're asking about the best way to rotate creatives, but honestly, I think the problem is a bit deeper than just a rotation schedule. It's less about *how* you swap them and more about *what* you're swapping in and why the old ones stopped working in the first place.

Happy to give you some of my thoughts on how we'd approach this. It's a bit of a mindset shift away from just tinkering with ads and towards building a proper strategy that makes your creatives work from the ground up. Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at why your creatives are failing, not just how to replace them...

First off, let's talk about that CBO campaign. Campaign Budget Optimisation is great, but it's a bit like a hungry machine. It needs good fuel to run properly. The 'fuel' is your ads and the audiences you give it. When you put in 5 creatives and they all start doing "sloppy," it's a massive signal. It's telling you that the machine isn't finding enough people who want what you're showing them. Facebook's algorithm is smart; it's trying to find you customers, but if the message is wrong, it has nothing to work with. It'll just end up showing your ads to the cheapest, least-likely-to-convert people in your audience because it's given up trying to find actual buyers.

So, the question "do I rotate them all at once, or one every few days" is sort of the wrong question. Doing either is just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic if the creatives themselves aren't built on a solid foundation. If you swap in 5 more ads that are based on the same flawed assumptions as the last 5, you'll be back in this exact same spot in a few weeks, just $200 a day poorer.

Creatives usually fail for a handful of reasons, and it's almost never about the colour of the button. It's usually one of these three things:

1. The Message is Wrong: The ad doesn't connect with a real, painful problem the customer is experiencing.

2. The Audience is Wrong: The message might be great, but you're showing it to people who don't have that problem.

3. The Offer is Wrong: The message and audience are spot on, but what you're asking them to do (the offer) isn't valuable enough to make them act.

So before we even think about a testing schedule, we need to fix the foundations. And that starts with properly understanding who you're actually talking to. This is where most advertising goes wrong, right at the very beginning.

I'd say you need to define your customer by their nightmare...

Forget the generic customer profiles you've probably seen. "Sarah, 35-44, lives in London, likes yoga and organic food." That tells you absolutely nothing useful for writing an ad. It's a demographic, not a customer. It leads to weak, generic ads that say nothing to anyone.

To stop burning your cash, you have to define your customer by their pain. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare. What's the one thing that keeps them up at night related to the problem you solve? Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Let's make this real. Imagine you sell high-end, ergonomic office chairs.

• Bad ICP (Demographic): "Professionals aged 30-55, working from home, income over £60k." -> This is useless.
• Good ICP (Nightmare): "A freelance graphic designer who's getting nagging lower back pain after 4 hours at their desk. They're terrified this pain will get worse, stop them from hitting deadlines, and force them to turn down lucrative projects. Their current cheap chair is actively costing them money and threatening their career."

See the difference? The first one gives you nothing to work with. The second one gives you everything. You can literally lift the words right out of it for your ad copy: "Nagging back pain killing your freelance career?", "Is your cheap chair costing you more than just comfort?", "Hit every deadline, pain-free."

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can figure out where these people hang out. What podcasts do they listen to? What YouTube channels do they watch? What blogs do they read? Who do they follow on Instagram? This intelligence becomes the blueprint for your targeting. You're not just targeting "freelancers"; you're targeting people who follow specific design influencers, use specific software (like Adobe Creative Cloud), or are members of specific freelance communities. This is how you align your message with your audience. Do this work first, or you have no business spending another pound on ads.

You probably should write copy that they can't ignore...

Once you know their nightmare, you can write copy that grabs them by the collar. Stop writing ads that talk about your product's features. Nobody cares. They only care about what your product does for *them*. The best way to do this is to use a proven copywriting framework. The simplest and most powerful one is Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS).

1. Problem: State their nightmare back to them, in their own words. Hit the nail on the head immediately.

2. Agitate: Pour salt in the wound. Describe why this problem is so frustrating. What are the consequences of not solving it? Make them feel the pain.

3. Solve: Introduce your product as the clear, obvious solution. The escape route from the nightmare.

Let's go back to our ergonomic chair example.

Headline: That £50 office chair is costing you thousands.

Ad Copy:

(Problem) Getting that familiar, nagging ache in your lower back after just a few hours of work? You stretch, you shift, but it's always there, killing your focus.

(Agitate) It's not just discomfort. It's missed deadlines because you can't concentrate. It's the fear that you'll have to turn down that big project you wanted. Every day you sit in that cheap chair, you're not just hurting your back, you're actively sabotaging your income and your career.

(Solve) It's time to invest in a tool, not just a chair. Our chairs are engineered to support you through an 8-hour deep work session, eliminating pain and unlocking your most productive self. Stop letting discomfort dictate your income. See the chair designed for top-performing freelancers.

This is a world away from an ad that says "Buy our ergonomic chair! It has lumbar support and adjustable armrests!". One is a solution to a career-threatening problem; the other is a list of features. Your new creatives should be built around different angles of the same nightmare. Maybe one ad focuses on the financial cost of pain, another on the loss of creativity, and a third on the long-term health fears. Now you have a *strategy* for your creative testing, not just random guessing.

You'll need a better offer than your competitors...

So you've nailed the nightmare and written an ad that speaks directly to it. The user clicks. What happens next? This is where the third piece of the puzzle comes in: the offer. Your creative makes a promise, and your landing page and offer have to deliver on it in a big way.

The offer isn't just your product. It's the entire package of what the customer gets and what they have to do to get it. A weak offer can completely kill a brilliant ad campaign. If you've got a great ad that leads to a confusing website with a high price, no free shipping, and a clunky checkout, people will leave.

Your offer’s only job is to do two things: maximise perceived value and minimise perceived risk.

Ways to maximise value:

• Bundles: Instead of just selling the chair, sell a "Pain-Free Workstation Bundle" with a footrest and a monitor stand for a slight discount.
• Bonuses: "Order today and get our free guide to setting up a perfectly ergonomic desk."
• Discounts: A simple, clear discount (e.g., "£50 Off This Week Only").

Ways to minimise risk:

• Strong Guarantee: "Try it risk-free for 100 days. If your back pain doesn't disappear, we'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund."
• Free Shipping & Returns: Removes a huge point of friction for online buyers.
• Social Proof: Show testimonials and reviews from other freelancers who've had their pain solved.
• Payment Plans: Klarna or similar options make a high-ticket purchase feel more manageable.

Your £200 a day budget is small, so every click you pay for is precious. You can't afford to lose potential customers because of a weak offer. A small improvement in your website's conversion rate can have a massive impact on your campaign's profitability, often more so than finding a "winning" creative. It lets you afford to pay more for a click, which in turn lets you compete for higher-quality users. This is how you scale.

I'd say you need a structured testing process...

Okay, so now we have the foundations in place: a nightmare-focused ICP, ad copy written with the PAS framework, and a high-value, low-risk offer. NOW we can finally talk about how to test your creatives properly within your CBO campaign.

The goal of testing isn't just to find one "winner". It's to build a system that constantly finds new winners, because even the best creative will eventually fatigue. You're not looking for a single magic bullet; you're building an assembly line for them.

Here's a simple, reliable process:

1. Keep Your Main Campaign Running: Don't mess with what's already working, even if it's "sloppy". Create a completely separate campaign for testing. You can call it "[TEST] - CBO Prospecting". Give it a smaller portion of your budget to start, maybe $40-$50 a day.

2. Create One Ad Set for Testing: Inside your new test campaign, create one ad set. Use your best-performing audience from your main campaign, or a new high-potential audience based on your nightmare ICP research. The key is to keep the audience consistent so you're only changing one variable at a time: the creative.

3. Launch 3-5 New Creatives: This is where your strategy pays off. Don't just test 5 random images. Test different *angles* of the nightmare.

• Creative 1 (Image): Focus on the pain. An image of someone wincing in back pain at their desk. Headline: "Your Back Pain Isn't Just a Nuisance."
• Creative 2 (Video): Focus on the transformation. A quick video showing someone working comfortably, energetically, and pain-free in your chair. Headline: "This Is What a Productive Day Feels Like."
• Creative 3 (Carousel): Focus on the social proof. A carousel ad with 3-4 slides, each featuring a glowing 5-star review from a customer. Headline: "Why Freelancers Are Ditching Their Old Chairs."
• Creative 4 (Image): Focus on the financial cost. A graphic that says "Your Cheap Chair's Real Price Tag: £1,500 in Lost Billings." Headline: "Stop 'Saving' Money on the Wrong Things."

4. Analyse and Iterate: Let the test run for at least 3-4 days, or until each creative has had a decent amount of impressions. Don't make decisions after one day. Look at the key metrics: Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost Per Click (CPC), and most importantly, Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) or whatever your conversion goal is. You're looking for a clear winner or two.

5. Promote the Winners, Kill the Losers: Once you have a clear winner (e.g., Creative 2 has a CPA that's 50% lower than the others), turn off all the losing ads in the test ad set. Now, take that winning creative and copy it into your *main* scaling campaign's ad sets. Let it run alongside your existing "sloppy" creatives. CBO will automatically see it's performing better and start shifting more of the budget to it.

6. Repeat Forever: Your test campaign is now ready for the next batch. The process never stops. You're constantly feeding your main campaign with new, proven winners, which keeps performance stable and prevents creative fatigue. This is how you systematically improve your results instead of just randomly swapping things and hoping for the best.

This process avoids the instability of constantly changing ads in your main campaign. It gives you a clean environment to get clear data on what's working, and it ensures you're only scaling proven winners. It's more work upfront, but it's the only way to build a sustainable advertising machine.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a big shift from just thinking about which ads to turn on and off. But this strategic approach is what separates campaigns that limp along from those that scale profitable. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Getting this all set up and running smoothly can be a lot of work, especially when you're also trying to run your business. It involves research, copywriting, strategic thinking, and disciplined analysis—skills that take time to develop. While the principles are straightforward, the execution can be tricky.

If you feel like this is the right path but would rather have an expert guide you through it and speed up the process, that's where we can help. We do this day in and day out for our clients, building these systems to turn ad spend into predictable growth.

We offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can take a proper look at your ad account and current strategy together. We could pinpoint the exact places where these principles can be applied to your business and give you a clear roadmap. It might be the most valuable 30 minutes you spend on your marketing all year.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh