Meta Ads: How much creative is needed by spend volume
The age-old question - how much creative does a Meta ad account really need?
Short answer (always): It depends. Longer answer? it depends on the answers to a few questions (below).
Questions to ask yourself if you want to scale Meta ad spend through creative:
How much budget am I willing to spend on Meta ads?
The higher the budget, the more amount of creatives you’ll need, which also means you’ll need a higher creative production budget, to include the cost of creative strategy/creative briefing, creator, designer, and/or editor fees, usage rights fees, and more.
What does my ROAS or MER need to be in order to scale spend up?
Before you can spend money on creative testing, ideally your account should be in a healthy or at least doable state so that you have a baseline for what success does and doesn’t look like.
Do I have unlimited budget if I reach certain return metrics (ROAS/MER) or do I still have a budget ceiling? If so, what’s that top line amount?
This will help to determine what creative volume we need NOW vs. what creative volume we need to work towards.
How much room is there in the MER/ROAS to creative test? What can I actually afford to lose? (Assume for creative testing that 100% of the ads return 0 purchases. This is not going to happen, but this is how you determine creative testing budget)
It’s difficult to creative test adequately if there isn’t room in the ROAS/MER for the potential to be at lower than goal and/or unprofitable.
What is your AOV and CPA? How much do you need to spend per creative in testing to know whether it’s a winner? This is usually 2-3x the CPA.
Knowing how much you have to spend per creative to get a statistically significant test is important because it dictates the budget per tested creative, which is multiplied by how many total creatives you’re testing at any time. The higher the AOV & CPA, the more money you need to allot to creative testing.
What creative capabilities do I currently have?
Do I have the knowledge internally or do I need to hire externally for a creative strategist to make creative concepts/briefs on the front end?
Do I have a creative strategist/analyst to review and analyze creative on the backend for analysis, iteration, and new concepting based on creative review?
Do I need to hire internally or externally for creative production? (Creator sourcing, video shooting, video editing, static graphic designer, etc.)
What creative hit rate should I be expecting?
This is difficult to know beforehand, but start with a goal of something like 10% of creatives tested show some signs of life and are profitable. As you go further in creative testing, this metric can adjust, and also have a sliding scale of what “hitting” means and just how successful that creative is.
Once you know what your average hit or win rate is on creative, you can get a better sense of how many creatives, iterations, and net new concepts are needed on an ongoing basis.
How much budget must go through an ad set or creative concept to be statistically significant?
Ballpark ranges for creative volume by spend
Keep in mind that EVERY ACCOUNT IS DIFFERENT. What’s our favorite thing to say around here…. it depends?! You could have an account that has the creative needs of a $5k/month account that’s spending $50k/month or a $200k/month account that has the needs of a $2 million/month account. Creative volume also depends on how quickly ads fatigue in your account and if you’re trying to scale spend (and how much room in the margin there is to scale).
Also, if you have a “super winner” creative in an account that is absolutely cruising, you may not think you need more creatives since it’s doing great on its own, BUT - it is very important to continue creative testing, so that when that creative inevitably fatigues, you have other creatives that are already proven and are ready to step up.
Some pieces of advice from the Foxwell Founders Membership:
“You should launch as many ads as you can and as the account can handle, while still retaining the function of retrospectively analyzing the tests. What was the hypothesis of each test, and how did they do?”i.e there’s little value in pure quantity. You always want quantity that you can still track and evaluate.”
Don’t sleep on creative iterations: At least half of our ads that have reached $20k+ in spend are 2nd or 3rd level iterations of a concept.
Why AOV & CPA matter? More conversion volume data = more ability to test more creatives with statistical significance of purchase data
Keep in mind that in addition to ad spend budget, there still needs to be a budget for creative production. From a Founder member: “10% (of ad spend) is a good minimum until you are spending $250k/mo, then it should go down a bit from there. Over 20% (of ad spend) is too high IMO for specifically creative production costs.
But for ACTUAL numbers you can bring to your creative team…
Spending $0-10k/mo: 1 new creative per month OR creative as-needed and as it fatigues in the account. This could mean 3 in one month and nothing additional for the next 6 months, since creative doesn’t fatigue as quickly at lower amounts of spend. This is assuming a high hit rate for winning creatives and/or not much opportunity for creative iterations & only big swings
Spending $10k-$25k/mo: 3-4 new creatives per month OR creative as-needed and as it fatigues in the account. Some sort of ongoing system for new creatives and iterations is needed at this level. Iterations can be included in the total per month.
Spending $25k-50k/mo: 1 new creative per week (4-5 per month) OR creative as-needed and as it fatigues in the account. This level of spend is starting to get to a point of needed creative refreshing, though some accounts at this range need more than others. This range may be the biggest exception for creative volume by spend.
Spending $50-100k/mo: 2-4 new creatives per week (6-20 per month). This is the first spend range where creative must become one of the more important aspects of advertising. Depending on AOV/CPA, you’re likely getting good data on creative tests (hard and soft metrics) and need to be continually iterating on creative and coming up with net-new concepts. About 40-50% of creatives should be iterations on previous concepts.
Spending $100-500k/mo: At this range, start looking at creative testing volume by a percent of spend instead of total new creatives needed. Here it’s less straightforward and more about reading the data in the account and feeding the account the creative it needs in order to stay healthy and continue growing. A healthy percent of spend on creative testing can vary greatly by account somewhere between 10-50% of spend. This is the first stage where you start to focus on quantity even more over quality.
For example, if you spend $250k/month, maybe you decide to allocate 40% of the monthly budget to testing and 60% toward scale. The math goes as follows:
$100,000/mo on creative testing
CPA = $100
Statistical significance = 20x CPA = $2,000 spent per creative to determine if it is a winner
$100,000/$2,000 = 50 creatives (~10-15 per week)
50 total creatives = 15 net new concepts, 35 iterations from previous winners or almost-winners
Lean into creative diversification as much as possible
Spending $500k-1 million or more/mo: Creative should be focused on net-new customers AND brand new audience personas and niches. Big swing creatives and out-of-the-box ideas are most welcome. Similar as the previous spend threshold, determine a percent of total ad spend that needs to go towards creative testing. At this range, 25-50% is likely a healthy range to be in. Do the same calculation as above to determine a statistical significance dollar amount for amount spent per creative test to determine how many total creatives and iterations are needed per month. At this range, it might be smart to set a separate budget percentage for iterations of previous winners or almost-winners (even slight “losers”) and a separate budget for testing net new concepts. At this range, it’s common to have multiple teams or agencies working and competing in the account on creative. It’s extremely difficult (but not impossible) to have creative QUALITY and QUANTITY of this amount, so by splitting up the creative load between different teams, it can help to ensure new ideas and iterations are always incoming, and having different creative strategists/creative minds can also help to keep things fresh.
Loving this insight? We’d love to have you contribute to this and other conversations with us in the Foxwell Founders Membership for expert ad buyers. Learn more here.
Once you’ve figured out how much creative volume you need in order to scale, account structure comes next.
How to structure accounts to best allow for more creative testing volume
One option from the Foxwell Founders Community:
ASC or CBO by product / category with tCPA and tROAS bid strategies.
Launching all creatives in the same campaign with a larger budget that allows Meta to properly deliver when profitable.
90% of the creative won't get spend and I'm fine with that because it's likely it wouldn't have been profitable in a lowest cost campaign
Another option from Foxwell Founders:
More campaigns, more places to spend – that can be ASC by theme (or any campaign type)
Campaign per product
Campaign per funnel (single product speaking to different audiences for example
Or if the creative angle naturally reaches a different broad audience than your other creative, I will isolate that as a separate campaign
A third option from Founders:
Run two creative tests:
Gladiator Test: Some sort of test where Meta picks the winning creative. Can be ASC+, grouped by ad set. All ads enter. Only one gets 95% of spend.
Digital Focus Grouping: This test removes as much of the system bias as possible so we are left with more clean creative learnings. For this one, I do one ad per ad set and test with the view content objective and $5 per day per variant. I also purposely land users on a home or collection page (somewhere that doesn't fire a view content event) so I can use CVR to VC as a proxy. Then I can stack rank the creative (or themes) to the client by Hook, Closer (meh CTR but good CVR) or Clickbait (high CTR, but low CVR)
From there, can also break down each creative by demo
Creative diversity is really affinity object diversification. The system breaks down creative/overlays into objects/words it can identify, and matches that content profile to user networks with an affinity for those objects
If your hit rate of creative tests is generally high, then it makes sense to use ABO, as you can scale multiple ad sets right there in testing
If your hit rate is low, or you have too many tests, but small budget, then CBO with minimum budget per ad set is better option
Regardless of your hit rate average, it’s best to group ad sets per concept, where each new ad set = new concept/tests, with multiple variations of that concept