Solved: Different Ads/Adsets for Different Facebook Formats?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your question about ad formats. It’s a really common issue people run into, and honestly, getting it right can make a massive difference to your campaign performance. You've spotted a problem that a lot of advertisers just ignore, which is that Facebook will happily take your money and shove your ad into placements where it looks completely broken.

Getting your head around this is the first step to running much more effective, and profitable, ad campaigns. I'll walk you through my thinking on it, from the immediate fix to the wider strategy you should probably be looking at. It's a bit of a read, but hopefully it'll give you a proper framework to work with.

We'll need to look at your placements and creative customisation...

So, to answer your main question directly: yes, you absolutely should be creating seperate versions of your ad for different placements, especially for something as visually distinct as in-feed versus Reels and Stories. That 1:1 square video looking "crazy" in a 9:16 vertical slot is exactly why. It's jarring for the user, it immediately screams 'this is a lazy ad', and people will just scroll right past it. You're paying for an impression that has almost zero chance of converting.

Think about the user experience. Someone scrolling through Reels or Stories is in a specific mindset. They're consuming fast-paced, full-screen, vertical video content. When your square ad with massive black bars at the top and bottom (or worse, awkwardly cropped) shows up, it breaks that flow entirely. It doesn't feel native to the platform. In-feed is different; users are more accustomed to various formats there, including square and landscape, so a 1:1 video feels perfectly at home. You have to create ads for the environment they're going to live in.

Meta gives you two main ways to handle this inside Ads Manager. The first, and simplest, is called Placement Asset Customisation (PAC). When you're creating your ad, instead of just uploading one video, you can select the ad creative and then choose to edit it for specific placements. So you can upload your 1:1 video for the 'Feeds' group, and then select the 'Stories & Reels' group and upload a seperate, properly formatted 9:16 video. It's all managed within the same ad, which keeps things tidy.

The other option is what you suggested: creating seperate ads or even seperate adsets for different placements. This gives you more control but can get a bit messy.

Here's a quick breakdown of the pros and cons:

Using Placement Asset Customisation (within one ad):
-> Pro: It's much simpler to set up and manage. One ad, one adset, you just provide different creative versions for different placement groups.
-> Pro: Meta's algorithm gets to use the combined social proof (likes, comments, shares) across all placements, which can sometimes help performance.
-> Con: The reporting can be a bit of a headache. You can break down performance by placement, but it's not as clean as having seperate ads. It can be harder to tell at a glance what's truly working.
-> Con: You can't allocate a specific budget to a specific placement. The algorithm decides where to spend, and it'll often favour the cheapest placements, not necessarily the best performing ones.

Using Seperate Ads/Adsets for Placements:
-> Pro: You have total control over budget. If you find Reels are performing brilliantly, you can create an adset that *only* targets Reels and give it its own dedicated budget.
-> Pro: Reporting is crystal clear. You know exactly how much you spent on your "Reels Ad" and what results it got. No digging through breakdown reports.
-> Con: It's more work to set up. You're duplicating ads and adsets, which can clutter your account if you're not organised.
-> Con: Social proof is fragmented. The likes and comments on your In-Feed ad won't show up on your Reels ad, and vice versa. This isn't a huge deal for most, but something to be aware of.

Tbh, for most people starting out, I'd suggest using Placement Asset Customisation first. It’s the cleaner way to ensure your creatives are always formatted correctly. If you then find that a specific placement like Reels is delivering amazing results, you can think about creating a dedicated adset just for that to scale it up. The non-negotiable part is that you *must* provide a 9:16 vertical version for your Reels and Stories. A simple re-edit of your 1:1 video, maybe adding captions and making sure the key action is centred vertically, is a hundred times better than letting Facebook butcher it for you.

I'd say you need a solid campaign structure...

Now, this whole issue with placements and creatives is often a symptom of a bigger strategic problem: the lack of a proper campaign structure. Just throwing an ad out there with automatic placements and hoping for the best is a recipe for wasting money. A structured approach based on a marketing funnel will always, always perform better.

I usually structure accounts using a ToFu/MoFu/BoFu approach. It sounds like jargon, but it's dead simple. It just means you're talking to people differently depending on how familiar they are with your business.

ToFu: Top of Funnel (The Strangers)
This is your cold audience. These are people who have never heard of you before. Your video ad is a ToFu ad. The goal here is to grab attention and introduce your brand or product to a new, relevant audience.
-> Who you target: Detailed Targeting (interests, behaviors) and Lookalike Audiences are your bread and butter here. You need to tell Facebook who your ideal customer is.
-> The creative's job: It has to be a scroll-stopper. It needs to be engaging, present a problem your product solves, or showcase something so interesting people can't ignore it. It is definately not the time for a hard sell.

MoFu: Middle of Funnel (The Visitors)
This is your warm audience. These people have shown some interest. They've visited your website, watched a good chunk of your video ad, or engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page. They know who you are, but they haven't bought anything yet.
-> Who you target: Custom Audiences. People who visited your landing page, people who watched 50% of your video, Instagram engagers, etc. You always exclude people who have already purchased.
-> The creative's job: This is where you build trust and handle objections. Show testimonials, user-generated content (UGC), explain features in more detail, show a behind-the-scenes look. You're reminding them why they were interested in the first place.

BoFu: Bottom of Funnel (The Almost-Customers)
This is your hot audience. These are the people who are right on the edge of buying. They added a product to their cart but didn't check out, or they initiated checkout but got distracted.
-> Who you target: Very specific Custom Audiences: 'Added to Cart (14 days)', 'Initiated Checkout (7 days)', etc. These audiences are smaller but have massive purchase intent.
-> The creative's job: Get them over the line. This is where you use a strong call to action (CTA). Maybe a reminder, a bit of urgency ("Stock is low!"), or a small discount offer. The creative can be much more direct.

Why am I telling you all this? Because the 1:1 video you made for your ToFu campaign is likely not the right creative for your MoFu or BoFu campaigns. And the 9:16 version you make for Reels in your ToFu campaign is definately not the same ad you should show to someone who abandoned their cart. Each stage of the funnel needs its own tailored messaging and creative, which should *then* be customised for the relevant placements.

For eCommerce, we'd prioritise audiences like this. Even if you're not in eCommerce, the principle is the same – audiences closer to the final conversion action are more valuable and should be treated differently.

Getting this structure in place means you can speak to the right people with the right message at the right time. And that's how you stop wasting money and start seeing a real return from your ads.

You probably should focus on proper split testing...

Once you have a decent structure, the name of the game is testing. You can't just set and forget. You need to be constantly testing to find out what works and what doesn’t. This goes way beyond just placements.

1. Audience Testing
At the ToFu stage, you should always be testing different audiences against each other. Don't just lump all your interests into one adset. Create seperate adsets for different audience themes. For example, if you sell hiking gear:
-> Adset 1: Target interests like 'Hiking', 'Backpacking', 'Mountain Biking'.
-> Adset 2: Target competitor brands like 'The North Face', 'Patagonia'.
-> Adset 3: Target a 1% Lookalike of your past customers.
Run them with the same ads and budget for a few days and see which one delivers the cheapest, most relevant results. Then turn off the losers and scale up the winner. I remember a B2B client. As I was testing different audiences on LinkedIn and Meta, I managed to reduce their cost per lead by 84% simply by finding the right combination of audiences.

2. Creative Testing
This is huge. Your ad creative is your single biggest lever for performance. Within an adset that's working well, you should be testing multiple ads against each other. The goal is to beat your current best-performing ad. You could test:
-> Formats: Your 1:1 video vs. a carousel ad vs. a static image.
-> Hooks: The first 3 seconds of your video are everything. Test different opening scenes or lines of text to see what stops the scroll.
-> Messaging/Angle: Test an ad focused on the features of your product vs. an ad focused on the benefits and emotional outcome. We've seen amazing results for SaaS clients just by switching from corporate-style videos to simple User-Generated Content (UGC) videos. It feels more authentic.
-> Call to Action: Test 'Shop Now' vs. 'Learn More'. The button text can make a surprising difference.

I remember running a campaign for a client selling online courses. I managed to hit a 447% ROAS in the first week, and a massive part of that was just rapidly testing dozens of creative variations to find the handful that really resonated. You can’t assume you know what will work; you have to let the data tell you. Your current 1:1 video is just your first test. Now you need to create more versions to try and beat it.

A good rule of thumb for testing is to let an ad or adset spend about 2-3x your target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) before you make a call on it. If your goal is to get sales for £20 each, let a new ad spend £40-60. If it hasn't gotten a sale by then, it's probably a dud. Turn it off and test something else.

You'll need to think about your objectives and costs...

Ultimately, all this work – customising creatives, building a funnel, constant testing – is about one thing: achieving your objective as efficiently as possible. Your objective might be leads, signups, or sales. The cost to get that result is your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and your main job as an advertiser is to get that CPA as low as possible while still getting high-quality customers.

The cost you can expect varies massively depending on your industry, your target country, and how well your campaign is optimised. A badly formatted ad like the one you described is going to drive your costs way up because its click-through rate (CTR) will be terrible and your conversion rate will be low. Getting the creative right is the first step to bringing costs down.

Just to give you a very rough idea of what's considered 'normal', here are some ballpark figures based on our experience running thousands of campaigns. These are for leads/signups, which are generally easier to get than a direct sale.

For direct sales from an eCommerce store, the conversion rates are much lower (usually 2-5%), so the costs are much higher. The point is, there's a huge range. If your costs are at the high end of that range (or higher), it's a clear sign that something in your funnel – your targeting, your creative, or your landing page – is broken. I remember working with a client, a medical job matching SaaS. I managed to reduce their Cost Per User Acquisition from a painful £100 down to just £7. That wasn't a miracle; it was a result of systematically applying the principles I've outlined here.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This is a lot to take in, I know. To make it a bit more concrete, here's a table summarising the exact steps I'd recommend you take, starting right now. This is the main advice I have for you to move forward.

I know this can seem overwhelming. It's a shift from just 'making an ad' to 'managing an advertising system'. It's not just about setting up a campaign and hoping for the best; it's about understanding your audience, methodically testing, optimising your targeting, creating compelling ads for each stage of the journey, and fine-tuning your entire funnel.

That's where a professional consultancy like us can make a huge difference. With years of experience and a deep understanding of the advertising landscape, we can help you identify the best strategies to drive down your costs per conversion. We can provide insights that you might not have thought of and take over implementation of the entire optimisation process for you, ensuring that every pound you spend is working as hard as it possibly can to grow your business.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a free initial consultation where we can review your account and strategy together. It's a great way to get some direct, actionable advice with no obligation.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh