Solved: How to test creatives on my first Facebook campaign?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts on your first campaign. It’s good you're getting stuck in and testing things, but I can see a few areas where you might be making things harder for yourself than they need to be.

Honestly, your question about duplicating ad sets or campaigns is a good one, but it’s a bit like asking which spanner is best to fix a car engine when the real problem might be the fuel you're putting in it. The whole thing starts with your offer, your audience, and then your campaign structure. If you get those bits right first, the question of how to test creatives becomes much, much easier to answer. Let's break it down a bit.

We'll need to look at your offer first...

The single biggest reason I see campaigns fail, especially for new businesses, is a weak or unclear offer. You're selling a "food product," but what are you *really* selling? Nobody buys a "food product"; they buy a solution to a problem. They buy a feeling. They buy convenience. They buy a healthy lifestyle. They buy a Friday night treat that doesn't involve a greasy takeaway.

Your ad copy and creatives need to tap into that. Right now, you're competing with every restaurant, supermarket, and takeaway in your city. You can't win by just saying "we sell food." You win by identifying a specific nightmare your ideal customer is having and selling them the dream. This is where most people go wrong, they focus on what their product *is*, not what it *does* for the customer.

Think about it. Who are you trying to sell to? Let's imagine a couple of potential customers:

• The Busy Family: Mum and Dad are knackered after a week of work and school runs. The idea of cooking a proper meal on a Friday is a nightmare. But they also feel guilty ordering another Dominos for the kids. Their pain is the conflict between convenience and wanting to provide a decent family meal.
• The Health-Conscious Professional: They've been disciplined all week, hitting the gym, meal-prepping lunches. Come Friday, they want to relax but don't want to undo all their hard work with a calorie-bomb. Their pain is the lack of healthy, convenient options that still feel like a treat.

You need to pick one of these 'nightmares' and build your message around it. I'd suggest using a simple framework like Problem-Agitate-Solve. It's brutally effective.

See the difference? We're no longer just selling "food". We're selling a stress-free family evening, or guilt-free indulgence. This is what makes people stop scrolling and actually click. Before you spend another quid on ads, you need to be crystal clear on what problem you are solving.

I'd say you need to rethink your audience targeting...

Right, let's talk about your audience. You said your 'broad' ad set has an audience of 362k. Tbh, for a local business limited to one city, that's not a 'broad' test audience; that is pretty much your entire potential market. The problem with targeting everyone is that you end up speaking to no one. Your message about a "healthy meal" is wasted on the person looking for a cheap, greasy kebab, and vice-versa.

This is why defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on their *pain* (like we did above) is so important. Once you know *who* you're talking to, you can use Meta's tools to find them. Forget just 'broad' for now. For a new account with no data, that's just asking Facebook to burn your money efficiently. Your pixel has no idea who a good customer is yet.

You need to start by giving it clues. This is where detailed interest targeting comes in. Your goal is to find interests that your ideal customer is *much more likely* to have than the general population.

So, for the "Health-Conscious Professional," you wouldn't just target "Fitness". That's way too broad. You'd get more specific. What brands do they like? What gyms do they go to? What influencers do they follow?

Here’s how I would start thinking about building out some audiences to test. Remember to layer the interests with your location targeting.

You should create seperate ad sets for each of these themes. Don't just lump them all together. You want to see which customer type responds best. After you've run ads for a while and your pixel has some data (at least a few dozen purchases), then you can start building retargeting audiences (people who visited your site, added to cart etc) and Lookalike audiences. But you have to feed it good, specific data first. Start with interests.

You probably should fix your campaign structure...

Okay, now we can get to your actual question. How to test creatives. The answer is: you should have multiple creatives running *inside each ad set* from the very beginning. Running only one creative is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. You're giving the algorithm no choice and no chance to learn.

Do not duplicate the entire campaign to test a new creative. That's messy and inefficient. A campaign should be organised around a single objective (which you've done correctly with 'Sales'). Ad sets are for testing audiences. Ads (creatives) are for testing messages within those audiences.

Here is a much better structure to start with. Simple, organised, and built for testing.

With this setup, you're doing a few things right:

1. You're testing two distinct customer profiles (audiences) against each other.
2. Within each audience, you're testing 3-4 different creatives. You should start with at least 3, ideally 4-5. The creative is your biggest lever for performance. You need to test different formats (video, carousel, static image) and different angles (problem-focused, solution-focused, social proof).
3. It's organised. After a few days, you can easily look inside each ad set and see which ads are getting clicks and sales, and which are duds. You can turn off the losers and add new ones to test without messing up the whole campaign.

This approach lets Meta's algorithm do its job. It will automatically start showing the best-performing ad more often within each ad set. You just have to give it enough options to choose from.

You'll need to understand your numbers...

This is where things get really interesting, and where you can move from just guessing to making proper business decisions. Most small business owners get obsessed with getting the lowest possible Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Purchase (CPA). Tbh, that’s the wrong way to think about it. The real question is: "How much can I afford to spend to acquire a new customer?"

The answer lies in their Lifetime Value (LTV). How much is a customer worth to you over, say, 6 or 12 months? Once you know that, you know how much you can spend to get one. Let's do some rough, back-of-the-napkin maths for your business.

Now, this changes everything. Suddenly, paying £20 or even £30 for a new customer doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a brilliant investment. A common rule of thumb is to aim for a 3:1 LTV to CPA ratio, which means you could afford to spend up to £54 (£162 / 3) to get a new customer and still have a very healthy, profitable business. This number, your 'allowable CPA', is your north star. It frees you from worrying about a high CPC and lets you focus on acquiring valuable, long-term customers.

This is all hypothetical, you'll need to plug in your own numbers, but you should definatly do this exercise. It will give you the confidence to invest properly in your advertising.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Getting this stuff right from the start is critical. It's the difference between an ad account that profitably brings in new customers every week and one that just burns cash with nothing to show for it. I've seen it countless times. I remember one eCommerce client in the cleaning products space who was struggling with low returns; we restructured their campaigns with this kind of logic and saw their return jump to over 600%. The principles are the same, whether you're selling soap or soup.

This is obviously a lot to take on yourself, especially when you're also running the rest of your business. Getting the strategy, targeting, creative, and tracking right all at once is tough, and mistakes can get expensive fast.

If you'd like to go over this in more detail and have an expert look over your setup, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We could hop on a quick call, I'll have a look at your ad account, and give you a clear, actionable plan. It's often the quickest way to get clarity and start seeing real results.

Either way, I hope this has been genuinely helpful for you. Good luck with the campaign!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh