Solved: Multiple Ads vs Multiple Ad Sets on Facebook

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I saw your question about ad sets vs ads and how to structure your budget. It’s a really common point of confusion, and tbh, the way you're thinking about it highlights a much bigger issue that's probably costing you a lot of money and stopping you from getting any real results with your advertising. The answer isn’t as simple as creating four separate ads at £5 each. In fact, doing that would be a complete waste of time and money.

You’ve asked a tactical question, but the real problem is a strategic one. So, I’m going to give you a bit of a brain dump on how we approach this for our clients. It’s a bit of a longer read, but I promise it’ll completly change how you think about running ads on Facebook and Instagram. We'll go from the ground up, starting with why your original question is flawed, and build up to a full strategy that actually works.

We'll need to look at your fundamental campaign structure...

First off, let's kill this idea that "you get more from running multiple ads vs one ad with multiple ad sets". That's a massive oversimplification people throw around on forums. It's like saying a hammer is better than a screwdriver. Better for what? They're different tools for different jobs. The real question you should be asking isn't "which structure is better?", but "what am I trying to test?".

In paid advertising, you can only get reliable data if you test one variable at a time. Your campaign structure should reflect this.

-> You use different Ad Sets to test different Audiences. Each ad set targets a different group of people. For example, Ad Set 1 could target women aged 25-34 who like 'Yoga Journal'. Ad Set 2 could target women aged 25-34 who like 'Lululemon'. The ads inside both ad sets would be identical.

-> You use different Ads within a single Ad Set to test different Creatives. For example, you have one Ad Set targeting your best audience. Inside it, you have Ad 1 (a video), Ad 2 (an image), and Ad 3 (a carousel). Here, the audience is the same, but the ads are different.

Mixing and matching without a clear hypothesis is just chaos. You'll never know what actually worked. Did the video ad do well because the video was great, or because the specific audience you showed it to was just more responsive? You won't know if you're testing both at once.

Now, let's talk about your budget idea: splitting a £20 daily budget into four £5 ad sets. This is one of the fastest ways to guarantee failure. The Facebook algorithm needs data to learn and optimise. It learns by getting conversions (or whatever your objective is). With a £5/day budget, you’re basically giving the algorithm no fuel. It can't exit the 'learning phase', it can't find pockets of users who are likely to convert, and you will never, ever get enough data to make a sensible decision. You'd be judging an audience based on maybe 100 impressions and zero clicks. It’s meaningless.

If a single conversion for you costs £15 (which is pretty normal for many businesses), an ad set with a £5 daily budget might run for three days without a single result. You'd then turn it off, thinking the audience was bad. In reality, you never gave it a chance to work. You need to budget enough for an ad set to get at least one or two conversions per day, or at the very least, enough budget to get a few conversions over a week before you decide if it's a dud. Spending £20 a day on ONE ad set to test one audience properly is far, far better than spending £5 on four seperate ones.

I'd say you need to build a proper advertising funnel...

Your question implies you're thinking about your advertising as a single action. You run one campaign to get one result. That's not how it works. Successful advertising guides a potential customer through a journey. We call this a funnel, and it's usually broken down into three stages: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

You should have seperate campaigns for each stage of this funnel, because the audience, the message, and the objective are different at each stage.

1. Top of Funnel (ToFu) - The Strangers
This is your cold traffic. These people have never heard of you. Your goal here isn't necessarily to make a sale straight away, but to introduce yourself and identify people who might have the problem you solve. The objective for this campaign is usually conversions (like leads or purchases) but you're targeting a broad audiance.

Who you target here is everything. This is where you test your interest-based audiences, your demographic targeting, and once you have data, your lookalike audiences. The audiences I'd prioritise testing here are:

• Detailed targeting (interests, behaviours) that are highly specific to your ideal customer.
• Lookalike audiences based on your best customers (more on this later).
• Lookalikes of people who have already purchased, initiated checkout, or added to cart.

The messaging here is about grabbing attention and relating to their problem.

2. Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - The Visitors
This is your warm traffic. These people have shown some interest. They've visited your website, watched one of your videos, or engaged with your page. They know who you are, but they haven't taken that final step. The goal here is to build trust and remind them of the solution you offer.

Your MoFu campaign is all about retargeting. The audiences you'd use are:

• All website visitors from the last 30-90 days (excluding those who already converted).
• People who watched a certain percentage (e.g., 50%) of your video ads.
• People who engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page.

The messaging here can be more direct. You might show them testimonials, case studies, or a different angle on your product's benefits.

3. Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - The Almost-Customers
This is your hot traffic. These people were on the verge of converting. They added a product to their cart but didn't buy. They started filling out a lead form but got distracted. Your goal here is to get them over the line.

This is your most valuable retargeting campaign. The audiences are small but highly motivated:

• Viewed Cart / Added to Cart in the last 7-14 days (excluding purchasers).
• Initiated Checkout in the last 7-14 days (excluding purchasers).
• For a service business, maybe people who visited your pricing or contact page.

The messaging here is about urgency and overcoming final objections. You might offer a small discount, remind them of your free shipping, or show them a specific review that addresses a common concern.

By structuring your account into seperate campaigns for ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu, you can allocate budget more intelligently and tailor your message perfectly to where the user is in their journey. It's a world away from just lumping £20 into a single campaign and hoping for the best.

You probably should rethink who your customer is...

Even with the perfect funnel structure, your ads will fail if you're talking to the wrong people. I see this all the time. People create an "ideal customer profile" that looks something like "mums, aged 30-45, living in London, interested in fashion". This is completely useless. It tells you nothing of value and leads to generic, boring ads that get ignored.

You need to stop thinking about demographics and start thinking about nightmares. Your ideal customer isn't a person; it's a person in a specific, urgent, expensive problem state. Your job is to become an expert in that problem.

Let's say you sell a project management tool for small agencies. Your ICP isn't "agency owners with 5-10 employees". Your ICP is an agency owner who just woke up at 3 AM in a cold sweat because she realised a client deadline was missed, her top designer is threatening to quit from burnout, and she has no idea if they're even profitable on their biggest project. That's the nightmare. Your product doesn't just organise tasks; it saves her from chaos and gives her back control of her business and her life.

Once you understand the nightmare, you can find where these people gather. What podcasts do they *actually* listen to on their commute? What newsletters do they open without fail? What specific tools (like HubSpot or Slack) do they already pay for? What obscure Facebook groups are they members of? This intelligence is the foundation of your targeting.

When you're picking interests in Facebook Ads Manager, avoid the obvious, broad ones. If you're selling high-end coffee beans, targeting "Coffee" is a waste of money. You'll hit everyone from teenagers buying a Starbucks Frappuccino to people who only drink Nescafe instant. Instead, you should target interests like 'James Hoffmann', 'Aeropress', 'Speciality Coffee Association', or followers of specific independent roaster pages. You are looking for interests that a person in your target audiance is much more likely to have than the general population.

This is the work. Do this research first, or you have no business spending a single penny on ads.

You'll need a message they can't ignore...

Once you know who you're talking to and what their specific pain is, writing the ad copy becomes much easier. Your ad's only job is to stop their scroll and make them think, "How do they know?". You do this by speaking directly to their problem.

Forget listing features. Nobody cares that your software is "built on a robust Python framework". They care about what it does for them. A couple of simple frameworks work wonders:

Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS):
This is perfect for service businesses or anything that solves a nagging issue.

• Problem: State the nightmare directly. "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?"
• Agitate: Poke the bruise. Make the problem feel more painful. "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?"
• Solve: Introduce your solution as the way out. "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

Before-After-Bridge (BAB):
This is great for SaaS products or anything that creates a transformation.

• Before: Paint a picture of their current, painful reality. "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out."
• After: Show them the dream state. What does life look like with your solution? "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated."
• Bridge: Position your product as the bridge to get them there. "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

This is what good ad copy looks like. It's not clever or witty. It's empathetic and specific. It shows the customer you understand their world better than they do.

We'll need to talk about what you really should be measuring...

So many people get obsessed with the wrong metrics. They panic about a high Cost Per Click (CPC) or try to get their Cost Per Lead (CPL) as low as possible. This is a fool's errand. A cheap lead from the wrong person is worthless. A £200 lead from your absolute perfect customer who will go on to spend thousands with you is a bargain.

The real question isn't "how low can my CPL go?" but "how high a CPL can I afford to acquire a great customer?". To answer that, you need to know your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

It's a simple calculation, but it's the most powerful number in your business. Here's how to work it out, using an example for a subscription business:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What does an average customer pay you per month? Let's say it's £100.
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? Let's say it's 75%.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? Let's say it's 5%.

Now, the calculation is:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

LTV = (£100 * 0.75) / 0.05

LTV = £75 / 0.05 = £1,500

In this example, every new customer is worth £1,500 in gross profit to your business over their lifetime. Here's a simple table to show it:

Now you have the truth. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for a customer worth £1,500, you can afford to spend up to £500 to acquire them. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £50 per qualified lead.

Suddenly, that £25 CPL from your campaign doesn't look so bad, does it? It looks like a great deal. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent scaling and frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality leads.

And finally, this is my main advice for you:

I know this is a huge amount of information, and it's a world away from your original question. But I hope you can see that just tweaking budgets and ad sets is like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic if the underlying strategy is flawed. Getting this right involves a complete shift in thinking.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below in a table to summarise everything.

Executing a strategy like this takes time, expertise, and a rigorous testing process. You have to be part strategist, part data analyst, part psychologist, and part copywriter. It's why so many businesses struggle to make paid ads work – they treat it like a simple task to be checked off a list, when it's really a core business function that requires deep specialisation.

If you've read this far and feel a bit overwhelmed, that's completely normal. The good news is you don't have to figure all this out on your own. This is what we do all day, every day. We've run campaigns for dozens of businesses, from B2B SaaS getting leads for $22 on LinkedIn to eCommerce stores seeing a 1000% return on ad spend.

If you'd like to have a chat and see how this kind of strategic approach could be applied specifically to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can take a look at what you're doing now and give you some clear, actionable advice on what to do next.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh