Solved: Should I add new creatives to my Meta campaign?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

It's great to hear you're seeing some good momentum with your ads, moving from 160 to 211 conversions is a solid improvement. I've had a look at your question and I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance. Your concern about introducing new creatives is a really common one, but I'll be honest, it's probably the single biggest thing holding your account back from its true potential.

You're worried about harming your current winner, but the real danger is relying on it entirely. Let's get into why that is and how you can start testing creatives not just safely, but in a way that properly scales your results.

We'll need to address your biggest fear: The Budget Split Myth

Okay, let's tackle your main concern head-on. You're worried that adding a new creative will force Meta to split the budget 50/50, starving your current winner and dragging down the overall performance. Tbh, this is a complete myth, and understanding why is the first step to unlocking scale.

Meta's advertising algorithm, whether you're using Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) or Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO), is not a socialist democracy where every ad gets an equal share. It's a ruthless meritocracy. The platform's entire business model is built on delivering results for advertisers. It has one primary objective: to get you the most conversions (or whatever your goal is) for your budget. To do this, it has to be incredibly smart about where it spends your money.

When you have multiple creatives within a single ad set, the algorithm starts by showing all of them to a small portion of your audience. It's constantly gathering data points: clicks, engagement, and most importantly, conversions. Within a very short period—sometimes just hours—it starts to see which creative is performing better. It then automatically begins to shift the majority of the budget towards that winning ad. It doesn't ask for permission; it just does it.

So, what happens when you introduce a new creative? Two possible outcomes:

1. The new creative performs worse than your current winner. In this scenario, the algorithm will quickly realise this. It will give the new ad a small amount of spend to confirm its poor performance and then effectively put it on the back burner, continuing to spend the lion's share of the budget on your original, proven winner. Your overall results might dip ever so slightly for a day or so during this initial test, but they'll quickly recover. The risk is minimal.
2. The new creative performs *better* than your current winner. This is the outcome we're hoping for. The algorithm will detect that the new ad is generating conversions at a lower cost or a higher rate. It will then begin to aggressively shift the budget *away* from your old winner and towards the new one. Your concern about your top-performing creative being "negatively affected" is, in this case, exactly what you want to happen! You've just found a more efficient way to acquire customers, which means you can get more conversions for the same budget or scale your budget while maintaining profitability.

Thinking that Meta will sabotage your results by evenly splitting the budget is like thinking a professional football manager would give equal playing time to his star striker and a reserve player during the final match. It just doesn't happen. The system is built to back the winner. I've put together a simple flowchart to visualise this process for you.

I'd say your real problem isn't budget, it's risk

So we've established that the risk of testing is very low. Now let's talk about the monumental risk you're taking by *not* testing. You have one creative that works. For now. This situation is what we in the industry call having a single point of failure. Your entire campaign's success is balanced on a knife's edge, and it's only a matter of time before it falls.

The reason for this is a concept called Creative Fatigue. It's one of the most predictable and destructive forces in paid advertising. Here's how it works: your target audience sees your winning ad. Some of them convert. Great. Others see it, aren't interested, and ignore it. The algorithm keeps showing it to them. After the third, fifth, or tenth time seeing the exact same image or video, even people who might have been interested become blind to it. It's just background noise. Worse, they can become annoyed by it, which can negatively impact your brand perception.

As this happens, you'll see your metrics start to slide. Your Click-Through Rate (CTR) will drop. Your Cost Per Click (CPC) will rise. And most importantly, your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) will start to creep up, then skyrocket. The ad that was getting you 211 conversions a week will suddenly be getting you 150, then 100, then 50, all while your spend remains the same. Your profitability vanishes.

I have seen this happen to countless businesses. They find one ad that works, they ride the wave, and they resist change because they're scared of breaking what works. But the creative was always going to break. It has a natural shelf life. By not having a pipeline of new creatives tested and ready to go, you're not protecting your success; you're guaranteeing its demise. When your winner finally dies—and it will—you'll be left scrambling, trying to find a new winner from a standing start while your sales dry up. That's a position you do not want to be in. A proactive testing strategy is your insurance policy against creative fatigue.

You probably should be building a creative testing system, not protecting a single ad

The mindset shift you need to make is from 'protecting my winner' to 'finding my *next* winner'. This requires a system. It doesn't have to be massively complicated, especially when you're starting out, but it needs to be intentional. You stop thinking in terms of individual ads and start thinking in terms of a creative pipeline.

There are a few ways to structure this, but a simple and effective method is to use a dedicated testing ad set within your main campaign. Here's a practical approach:

1. Keep Your Winner Running: In your main, proven ad set (your 'scaling' ad set), leave your winning creative running on its own. Don't touch it. This ad set gets the majority of your daily budget.
2. Create a 'Testing' Ad Set: Duplicate your scaling ad set. This new ad set is purely for testing. Give it a much smaller portion of your budget—maybe 10-20% of your total spend.
3. Load Up the Test: Inside this new testing ad set, turn off your original winner and add 2-3 new creatives. The key here is to test meaningful variations. Don't just change the colour of a button. Test completely different concepts:
   • -> A user-generated content (UGC) style video vs. a polished, professional video.
   • -> A static image focused on the product vs. a lifestyle image showing the product in use.
   • -> A carousel ad walking through features vs. a simple image with a powerful headline.
4. Let it Run & Evaluate: Let the testing ad set run for a few days until each new creative has had enough spend to get a fair shot. The exact time depends on your budget and CPA, but as a rule of thumb, you want to let it run until it's spent at least 1-2x your target CPA per creative.
5. Promote the Winner: After the testing period, look at the results. If one of the new creatives in the testing ad set beats your original winner's performance (i.e., has a lower CPA), you have a new champion! You then turn off all the ads in the testing ad set, and add this new winning creative into your main 'scaling' ad set. Some people prefer to have only one ad running in the scaling ad set at a time, while others will put the old winner and the new winner in there together and let the algorithm decide. I'd recomend just having the single best performer in your main ad set to give it the maximum possible budget.

This process transforms ad hoc guesswork into a reliable system. You're constantly feeding new ideas into the machine, finding better performers, and raising the baseline of your entire account. I've worked on campaigns where this systematic approach has taken an account from barely breaking even to wildly profitable. I remember one campaign for a medical job matching SaaS client where we reduced their Cost Per User Acquisition from a crippling £100 down to just £7. That kind of jump doesn't happen by accident; it's the result of a deliberate testing system.

Here's a simple table outlining what this structure could look like in your account:

You'll need to understand what 'winning' actually means

This brings us to a crutial point. Your current mindset seems to be focused on total conversion volume. You went from 160 to 211 and that feels like a win. And it is! But as you start to scale and get more sophisticated, you need to evolve your definition of 'winning'. The best ad isn't always the one that gets the most conversions; it's the one that gets them most *efficiently*.

The metric you need to become obsessed with is your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) or Cost Per Conversion. Let's imagine a scenario:

• Creative A (Your current winner): Spends £100, gets 10 conversions. Your CPA is £10.
• Creative B (Your new test): Spends £50, gets 6 conversions. Your CPA is £8.33.

In this situation, Creative A got more conversions in total. If you were only looking at volume, you might mistakenly think it's the better ad. But Creative B is significantly more efficient. It's acquiring customers for almost 17% less. This is the ad that has the potential to scale. You can pour more money into it while maintaining better profitability. An ad with a lower CPA is what allows you to outbid and outspend your competitors in the long run.

To really understand how much you *can* and *should* be willing to spend to acquire a customer, you need to look beyond the immediate conversion and calculate your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire course of your relationship. When you know what a customer is truly worth, you can make much smarter decisions about your advertising spend.

A healthy business model often aims for an LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio of at least 3:1. This means for every £1 you spend to acquire a customer, you should be getting at least £3 back in profit over their lifetime. Knowing this number changes everything. Suddenly, a £50 CPA might seem expensive on its own, but if you know your average customer is worth £500, it's an incredible bargain. This math frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap leads and allows you to focus on acquiring high-value customers, profitably.

I've included an interactive calculator below to help you get a rough idea of your LTV and what a healthy CAC target might be for your business. Play around with the numbers; it can be a really eye-opening exercise.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

To bring everything together, it's clear that your next move isn't about protecting what you have, but about building a system to consistently find something better. Your success has given you a great starting point and a benchmark to beat, which is a fantastic position to be in. Now it's time to leverage that success to build a more resilient, scalable, and ultimately more profitable advertising machine. Sticking with one creative is like a race car driver refusing to make a pit stop for fresh tyres because they're currently in the lead. It might feel right in the moment, but it guarantees you'll lose the race.

Adopting a testing mindset can feel a bit daunting, which is why having an experienced partner can make a huge difference. An expert can help you design the right testing structure, analyse the data to identify true winners, and develop the creative angles that are most likely to resonate with your audience. It's about turning advertising from a gamble into a predictable science.

I hope this detailed breakdown has been helpful and has given you a new perspective on how to approach your campaigns. It's a journey from managing a single ad to managing a system, and it's the path every successful advertiser has to take.

If you'd like to discuss your specific situation in more detail and see how we could help you implement a robust testing framework for your business, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We could take a look at your account together and map out a clear plan for scaling your results.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh