What’s Working Now on Meta Ads Manager: How We Drive Over $150M+ in Revenue for Our Clients

From the introduction of ASC+ campaigns to changes in the algorithm — in the last few years, Meta ads have evolved a lot. It feels scary to rely on Meta’s machine learning system and reduce your control over ad performance.

But while Meta becomes increasingly hands-off, it still remains one of the most effective ways to optimize for profitable outcomes.

How do we know this? We've spent years managing ad accounts and analyzing over $400M in ad spend, combining our core principles of creative testing, cost controls, and financial planning. In this article, we'll show you exactly how to apply these proven strategies.

Note: This article summarizes the key takeaways from our roundtable discussion with Andrew Faris. If you want to watch that, here you go:

The Principles That Form a Successful Meta Ads Strategy

It’s fair to question whether the suggestion is still relevant whenever you hear something about Meta ads. But the principles below are immune to any changes in the notorious Meta algorithm. 

At a surface level, they are about leaning into Meta’s machine learning system and having a strong creative strategy. The next few sections will explain how combining these components will lead to an effective long-term game plan that gives you excellent results. 

Make financial forecasts the foundation of your Meta ads strategy

Successful paid campaigns start long before Meta is open. Profitability in your ad account isn’t solely reliant on killer creatives or optimization. The forgotten part? Financial forecasting.

At a minimum, you need to have a clear understanding of your business’:

• Unit economics
• Contribution margins on SKUs/offers
• New customer revenue and CAC
• Projected spend analysis
• Seasonality
  
  

When you haven’t done the legwork of creating a solid financial forecast, you’re resting on a foundation of quicksand.

At Kynship, we look at two years worth of historical data of our clients, factor in seasonality, and outline a future spend analysis. It gives us an idea of the levers we can pull for acquisition and set realistic benchmarks. Without this upfront work, we’d shoot for profitability in the dark.

You can’t set accurate targets if you don’t know what your profitability looks like on a spreadsheet. With financial forecasting, you aren’t continuously testing and adjusting your ad account — you know your targets and what you need to grow your ad account sustainably.

💡 Want to learn about financial forecasting in detail? Begin by reading our part one guide.

Launch every creative — even if it’s ‘off-brand’

This creative is a freeze-frame static ad we ran for one of our clients.

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It generated:

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• $12 CPA
• $18.51 ROAS
• $222.62 AOV
  
  

Would a marketer have picked this one? Probably not. But the numbers don’t lie. You never know what’s going to perform incredibly well in your ad account. So test absolutely everything.

This is especially true if you don’t think your ad “looks like an ad” — one of those cookie-cutter, scripted, studio shoot types of creative. Those ‘on-brand’ creatives are challenging, time-consuming, and cost-intensive to create. If you insist on running only brand-first creatives as ads, you immediately put yourself in a corner for both creative variety and scale.

And even if you can create branded content at scale, there’s absolutely no guarantee that it’ll perform better than UGC, IGC, or CGC. You’d be surprised at which ads perform best in your ad account.

Put it this way: the only bad creative is the one that’s not being launched.

Build a creative flywheel of diverse creatives

A lack of variety is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your ad account. It’s simple to do but can drive outsized results.

You want to run a creative flywheel in motion with creative diversity, volume, and refreshes.

Diversity: Creative diversity doesn’t mean chopping up the same UGC video in 20 different ways. It’s about how different your net new content is. Think static vs. video and product-first vs. human first. Our recommendation? 40% static and 60% video. 50-50 balance between product and human-centric creative. Wondering where you’d find so many ideas for creatives? This graphic also contains 12 more types of creatives to help diversify your content:

Volume: You want to launch at least 150+ creatives in a campaign to feed the Meta algorithm with enough data. Meta loves a large quantity and variety of creatives. The more you have to launch, the faster you’ll be able to optimize your spending and double down on what’s working. Mix all types of content sources: seeding, UGC, IGC, CGC, and branded.

Refresh: Refresh your creatives once a week to keep them from stagnating. When campaigns max, keep replacing the non-spending content with new content. This will also allow you to ride the momentum and ensure top-performing content stays within optimization.

Creating the above flywheel will ensure a consistent flow of net new creative driving CAC down in your ad account.

Rely on Meta’s machine learning to optimize for the most profitable outcomes

Here’s a hard pill to swallow: Meta’s machine learning system is way better than you at putting the right creative in front of the right audience at the right time.

Here are the three most common mistakes that revolve around not trusting Meta’s machine learning system:

a) Continuing to launch creatives that aren’t performing well: This is the classic sunk cost fallacy in action. It’s frustrating when you’ve spent a lot of time building creatives and they don’t perform well. But that’s exactly what should happen when you let Meta take the reins. 10% of your creatives will get 90% of the spend. That’s the reality of prioritizing performance over spend. Just because you think something should perform doesn't mean we should try forcing something that Meta's machine learning algorithm — with billions of data points — says isn't working. You can’t out-spend a poorly performing creative. Repeat after me: Creatives not performing is a part of the process.

b) Trying to outsmart the machine: A/B testing is a sacred thing in marketing. It’s uncomfortable to lean into the best practices and let Meta do its thing, without trying to control or outsmart it. But Meta has much more data to work with than you ever will. For better long-term outcomes, let go of the human adjustments.

c) Tinkering with a winning campaign: Moving around campaigns from testing to scaling is common in the world of Meta ads. But it’s equivalent to pulling the rug out from your best creatives. You’re sending your winning campaigns back to the learning phase by resetting optimization. Strike the iron while it’s hot — as long as you can.

Here’s a cool example: One of our clients, Create Wellness, had a “kinda shitty static image” as their top-performing ad — it spent 6-figures with a strong efficiency.

💡 By following Kynship’s evergreen principles, Create Wellness decreased their CPA by 48% and amplified their ad spend by 135%. Read their full case study here.

The biggest takeaway from this pointer? Lose your emotions and shed the personal bias. Trust that Meta’s machine learning system has your back.

Run cost control campaigns

Hot DTC take incoming: Daily ad budgets throttle your ad account performance.

Cost control campaigns ensure you only spend when your ad can hit your target CPA, which you set at a profitable limit. This way, you can take advantage of the tide when it’s rising and stay low when the waters are unfavorable.

Best of all: You don’t waste any money on creatives that aren’t performing.

And again, cost control campaigns involve leaning on Meta instead of tinkering. On the days when the auction is getting you a much lower CPA, Meta will lean into your spending to take advantage of it. If you're limiting daily spend, you don't get this benefit — unless you keep manually adjusting and hawk eyeing your ad account.

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But remember: Cost controls are best set up with more content, not less. Every piece of creative gives us the opportunity to find new customers at the most cost effective dollar. Each creative has potential to do this. It's only upside by launching it.

Cost caps vs. bid caps: Which is better?

There’s often a battle between cost caps vs. bid caps in the cost controls arena.

• Bid caps are like a maximum threshold. They tell Meta the most you’re willing to spend on an acquisition.
  
  
• Cost caps do the same thing — except your highest amount isn’t an inflexible maximum.
  
  

So, for example, if you put $100 in a bid cap, Meta won’t spend it if it can’t get a conversion at or under that amount. However, in cost caps, the auction could give $90 bids on one day and $110 on another day; it’ll adjust to a $100 bid over time.

Bid caps are essentially more strict, and cost caps are a bit looser.

At Kynship, we use both strategies because each has its respective use case. Both are still better than high volume (HV) auto bids. Why? Because HV is prioritizing traffic, not conversions. There’s no guarantee of how Meta will spend your money. In contrast, you can ensure the spend will be profitable whether you choose bid caps or cost caps.

So, be exclusive to cost control campaigns. Bid caps and cost caps both have their place — there’s no single winner.

What You Should Know about Meta’s Algorithm

We’d be the first ones to say it: Meta has had issues this year. But blaming the algorithm isn’t going to make your ad account perform any better.

Instead of spending time, energy, and resources trying to understand and game the algorithm, you’d be much better off focusing on what you do have control over: the creatives. It’s the ultimate variable of success. By maximizing your creative volume, you provide Meta with more testing points and increase your chances of success.

That said, there are a few things you should know about Meta’s algorithm that will largely remain unchanged.

Meta is moving more toward automation

Meta is moving toward more automation, and the Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) signal that. But if you’ve been following Meta’s best practices, you won’t find much difference between ASC+ and Business As Usual (BAU) campaigns.

ASC+ is best practice:

• Automated targeting
• Optimize for conversions, not traffic
• Maximize creative launching volume
• Diverse mix of creative assets
• 1DC/7DC attribution vs. view through
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Notice how the best practices overlap with the five core principles mentioned in the previous section? ASC+ is just a reinforcement of the best practices we discussed earlier. If you haven’t been following them already, Meta’s pushing you to start.

Meta records way more than just clicks

Ecommerce business owners often get frustrated by how much Meta can know anything in just a few clicks. But the Meta ad dashboard actually uses many engagement signals to determine how your audience perceives your ad. One example is the three-second views that show on your dashboard. It tells you something about the way your ad attracted attention.

Here are three metrics you should look at to examine your creatives:

a) Thumbstop ratio: This is the metric we talked about earlier — the three second video views/impressions. How many people paused to actually view your ad instead of scrolling away? Benchmark this metric for 25%. If you aren’t hitting the 20%+ range, your intros need some work. Remember it doesn’t matter how great your creatives are if the hooks are off.

b) Sustain rate: This is the number of people who got to the 25% point in a video, and continued watching to the 95% point. Shoot for a 50% benchmark here. You aren’t framing your product or offer properly if you don’t hit this number. Craft a message that’d keep the viewers hooked till the end by reorganizing clips and splicing up your video content.

c) Click through rate (CTR): This number measures the strength of your call to action. It tells you how many viewers clicked to view your landing page.

What is a common thing among all these metrics? They can all be positively impacted by running more creatives in your ad account. The more you test, the more you find your top performers. Then, you can unpack what makes them work and try to duplicate it.

Meta loves signals from organic

In a post iOS 14 world, Meta loves signals from organic. The more organic impressions you get, the more efficient your ads will be.

Don’t believe us? It took our client just one creative to 9x new customer orders and drop CAC by 89.3%. It wasn’t even a salesly post or a ‘link in bio’ post. Most of the sales still came through Google/Meta.

How? The client activated an influencer partnership (830K Instagram followers) to post about one of their staple products. The creator is a single mom with a strongly engaged community around food, fashion, and family life. They trusted the influencer to showcase their product however she wanted.

In just one story about their product, our clients saw:

⬆️An increase in 1,600+ orders from their average volume

⬇️A decrease in CAC by $67, same-day

The next day, there were 220+ more orders than average with half the average CAC. When the creator posted about our client again (a week later), they still got 800 more orders than average on the same day and the same CAC range as day two of her first post.

Don’t sleep on the power of influencers in today’s market. Forget direct sales, they can even help you amplify the paid efforts you already have in place.

A Successful Ad Strategy Doesn’t Operate in a Vacuum

Here are the top takeaways from this article:

1. Run every creative you have at your disposal, even if it appears off-brand to you. Create a creative flywheel to have a variety of creatives in your ad account.

2. Run cost control campaigns over high volume campaigns. This allows you to lean on Meta’s machine learning system with billions of data points.

3. Financial forecasts are the foundation of a successful paid media strategy. Create one that’s rooted in historical data, considers seasonality, and outlines your future spending analysis. It’ll help you set accurate and realistic profitability targets.

4. Meta is moving more toward automation, but if you’re already following the core principles of broad targeting, creative testing, and machine learning, you’ll see minimal differences in your results.

5. Meta is recording way more than just your clicks. When you’re examining a creative, also check its thumbstop ratio and sustain rate.

6. In the post iOS 14 world, Meta loves organic content. Double down on influencers and UGC creators to amplify your paid efforts.

All these takeaways prove one thing: A successful ad strategy isn’t in a silo. You need good creative at scale, accurate financial forecasting, and a thorough buying strategy to work together in tandem. All these webs of moving parts inform one another to make the whole operation successful. If you’re struggling with Meta ads, you’re probably leaving something out of the equation.