Today marks the beginning of a series of articles on one of the hottest topics of the last five years, cracking social ads creative.
If you spend any time on LinkedIn, read industry newsletters, or get served Meta ads about making Meta ads (peak meta) you definitely have heard of Meta's Andromeda update by now.
As someone who is highly exposed to all three of those things I can confirm the noise has been loud.
Meta has published plenty of articles on Andromeda's engineering, patting themselves on the back for the model complexity and improvements to personalisation. But the only thing Meta has officially said on record to help advertisers succeed in this new era is: diversify your creative.
This has left a lot of room for performance marketers, media buyers and social content agencies to speculate. New narratives about creative have emerged, some genuinely helpful for marketing teams, and some an opportunity to sell creative services (boys gotta eat y’all).
So in an attempt to cut through some of the noise, let's unpack three emerging narratives and work out what's valid and what's BS.
Myth #1: Never pause an ad. Your losing ad is feeding your winners.
Where I heard it: This one came from LinkedIn. I was starting to buy into it because I consistently saw a social agency quoting that “first-time impression ratio” (i.e. the rate of new people seeing your ad) for “bad ads” is higher, therefore they are the “top of funnel” ads fuelling growth.
Is it valid? When I ran this analysis on my own accounts using the same custom metric, it was a bit of a different story. Yes all lower converting ads had a higher first-time impression ratio, but they were also low spend. So the easier explanation was simply "Meta isn't pushing these ads out to the same people again because they aren't driving action."
So a better statement would be: “Never pause a high spending ad that’s driving conversion volume. Even if the CPA is relatively worse than others in the set.”
My belief is ads with moderate or high spend and low conversion volume absolutely have to go. Also, I’ve observed that Meta can skew spend to ads with higher engagement in the short term - it tends to hit smaller datasets harder so worth monitoring if you’re in that camp.
Verdict: A bit too black and white for my liking. There are scenarios where bad ads should be paused and scenarios when they shouldn't. Define them. No one should get a free pass to be a lazy optimiser.
Myth #2: Volume is the key to success. Bad performance? Ship more ads!
Where I heard it: Seemingly everywhere. My favourite was an agency ad that quoted “you only need 5 more ads this month to hit your target revenue!”
Is it valid? Volume alone is not enough to guarantee performance (what a simple game this would be if it were).
And there's a budget ceiling that everyone pretends doesn't exist, mostly because there's no official guide on it. You can see it in your account: if a high portion of your ads are getting low or no spend, you could just be loading too many.
So a better statement would be: “Volume, when combined with creative diversity, is a strong conversion lever.”
I wouldn’t be the queen of caveats without saying “But wait there’s more”.
Ad diversity needs to be driven by a deep understanding of your audience - their needs, wants, pain points etc. We will explore this in the next few issues.
Verdict: BS. This narrative benefits creative production agencies the most. Meta also pushes for creative volume but that’s because they have no clue what other advice to give so want to feed the system with as many options as possible.
Myth #3: Your creative is your targeting now.
Where I heard it: Industry articles and LinkedIn too.
Is it valid? The first time I read this, it resonated with me straight away because it explains something I’ve seen pop up in creative performance reports time and time again.
Calling out who your ad is for or what problem it solves helps to find your audience quicker than you can via targeting interests, lookalikes or behaviour. “Making your ad direct” is a non-negotiable I spoke about in #010.
From the GEM papers we know the ads model does read our ads but we are never explicitly told which elements it reads. From my own lived experience, I'd bet on text doing a lot of the work here and that it can read still images a lot better than video.
Targeting audiences isn’t completely redundant but it is a lot less powerful than it once was. Audience exclusions are still worthwhile.
Verdict: This is a genuinely helpful way to think and should be at the forefront when designing and creating ads for your brand.
Final thoughts
Not everyone is out there selling snake oil, but if a narrative feels too black and white, comes without clear examples, or conflicts with what you see in your own account - question it.
One thing that isn't a myth: Meta has fundamentally changed the way it serves ads.
Using your creative as targeting and diversifying your content are worth building into your strategy and processes. Blindly doubling your ad count and never pausing anything is not.
Cheers,
Sarah Arvela Webb
Brought to you by a combo of lived experience, late night reading and too much time on LinkedIn.
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