How to create a killer Facebook ad testing campaign (for the 2025 algorithm)

In this video, I'm going to walk you through the exact step by step that you can follow to create killer Facebook ads testing campaigns, ultimately allowing you to scale hundreds of ads very fast so you can scale in 2025 and beyond. I'm going to reveal the exact strategy that we have used at the Moonlighters for over 100 brands. And we have done this in literally every single niche that you could imagine.

Just like this hap brand world tags that increased their purchase revenue in Facebook ads by 138% at the same time that they improved their return on ad spend by over 18% within just 30 days of working with us. And even one of our longest standing clients, Young Nails, that when implementing this system during a sale period were able to scale over 194% comparing to the previous month. For them in Facebook ads, this system generated over $600,000 in a 30-day period.

Every single part of this only works when you test meticulously, when you find out exactly what creatives are working well. And most importantly, you do this without wasting 20 or 30% of your ad spend, just like everyone else is doing right now. So, the very first thing I have to get into here is that the algorithm has never focused and favored best performing creative more so than it has right now.

This has ultimately made broad targeting and less manual optimizations more and more important but with important levers that need to be in place because if you just run an advantage plus campaign or if you just run 100% broad you are always going to be a victim to a massive system that is really focused on spending your money. What we need to do in everything that we like to set up is always going to be focused on maximizing the return on ad spend, minimizing the wasted ad budget. Now, what I see a ton of people doing these days is they run 20 to 30% of their entire creative on testing.

Many people might think this is actually a good thing, but in most cases, you are wasting somewhere to the tune of 10 to even 20% of your total budget on creatives that are underperforming. Imagine if you were able to capture back just 15 or even 10% of your total budget and push that into the top performing ads in your account, ultimately driving you a higher return on ad spend, more revenue, more purchase conversion value, generally just driving the business forward quicker. If you could minimize your testing budget to something of the tune of 5%.

You would save so much on your bottom line and ultimately profit because wasted ad spend is a direct line to profit. Imagine if you just spent 15% less and got the exact same result. You'd probably be on vacation right now.

So for step one here, we are going to be creating two new campaigns. First, we're going to be creating a prospecting CBO campaign. This is going to be the core testing element of the entire account.

And then we're going to be creating an advantage plus shopping campaign, also known as an ASC scale campaign. We're going to go ahead in the Facebook manager and click sales campaign. Click continue.

In here, you're going to be prompted to do two different things. Advantage plus shopping. We're going to get to that next.

Or manual sales campaign. That's what we're selecting. First things first, let's name our campaign properly.

I like to call this ML for Moonlighters_prospecting CBBO. This is going to be the framework that I can understand right away. This campaign is these three things.

They're owned by the Moonlighters. They're a prospecting campaign, meaning they're targeting new customers. And they're a CBO, meaning we have campaign budget optimization.

Moving down here, we are not in any special categories. We could select our buying type as auction, our campaign objective as sales, and clicking in more options, nothing should be selected. Right here, we have advantage campaign budget.

Keep in mind this is changing. So, by the time you see this, there's a chance this is called campaign budget. Make sure this is on.

You want your campaign budget to be set. We're going to set a daily budget. We're not using lifetime budgets just yet.

We're going to be setting daily budgets. And just for the sake of this, I'm going to assume this is a $100 daily budget. We're using a campaign bid strategy of highest volume.

There are some opportunities to use cost caps or bid caps, but for all intents and purposes, highest volume is going to be the best thing that we can do today. And then scrolling down just a little bit more in our reporting. We always want to make sure our advertising reporting is set up, meaning that we have engaged audiences and existing customers set up properly.

I obviously have to blur these out because we're protecting client information, but you should know that your engaged audiences should be anyone who's visited your website or engaged on any of your platforms in the last 30 to 90 days, and your existing customer should be anyone who's ever purchased from you. When we move down to the adset level, the next thing that we need to focus on is making a decision between website and shop and website. If you sell products on your Facebook shop and you've gotten sales from there before, go ahead and select website and shop.

If you haven't or you don't have that website and shop set up, just select website. Moving down, we are focused on maximizing the number of conversions. There's an opportunity long-term for value, but we're focused on number of conversions today.

Make sure you select your proper data set and you select your conversion event as purchase. We are not doing add toarts. I don't care how large your lead genen funnel is.

I don't care how big your average order value is. You are focused on purchase. So, we are telling Facebook that we want purchases.

Next here is attribution setting. We are setting this to 7-day click, one day view. You want to optimize on 7-day click, but you want to always include 7-day click and 1 day view.

Scrolling down a little bit more, there's nothing being changed in the budget and schedule section. The audience controls are going to be standard. There's going to be no changes to the audience controls.

And then here's a big thing in the advantage plus audience. We are switching to original audience and we are clicking use original audience right now through our testing and this has remained consistent for about a year. The audiences that do not use the advantage plus audience selection are outperforming those that do.

The big reason for this is because we could do proper exclusions. This is going to change, but for now this is the case. Once you're in here, we want to make sure we're targeting the entire country, very broad, that you're going to be targeting, potentially even multiple countries, all of the ages that you could possibly target for your product, all genders that your product applies to, and we are leaving advantage detailed targeting, aka interest targeting, completely blank.

Now, once you have this part set up, this is a key point. It's especially key for scaling. You need to add an exclusion.

So, you have to go ahead and click that exclude button there. Now, you need to push in your site visitors and you need to push in your past purchasers. So, in my case, I'm just going to go in and type in purchase and then we'll have a list of different purchasers here.

That's what we do for most accounts. So, that's it for the adset settings. Adset settings are extremely important.

We're going to move forward to the ad level. Keep in mind the ad level here is going to be a huge factor in terms of testing, but we're not going to dive too hard into it right now because we're actually going to come back to it at a later section of this video. The next thing we're going to do is we are going to go back to create a new campaign and we are going to create that scaling mechanism.

The good part, this is easy. For creating the scaling mechanism, we are again clicking create new campaign sales and we are selecting advantage plus shopping campaign. The great thing about an advantage plus shopping campaign in its current state is that the campaign does not have multiple adsets.

It is an adset and a campaign all grouped together. For this, we're going to name this ML for the Moonlighters. Name it whatever you want for your business.

Prospecting scale. Next piece, website and shop or website. Just like we discussed before, set the maximum number of conversions.

Select your proper data set. And then for under here, 7-day click, one day view. Just like before, your audience location should be including the country of course that you're in.

And then you could set excluded locations if that's necessary, perhaps states in your advertiser settings. That's not done right here. Same thing for reporting.

Engaged and existing audiences need to be set up. And then for our budget, this is where things get a little tricky when you're starting this for the first time. To keep it simple, start this at around 20% of your budget compared to your prospecting campaign.

Meaning our prospecting campaign, our CBO, our testing campaign as we call it, that had a $100 budget. That means this needs to have a $20 budget. That is going to change significantly as you scale.

For now, 20 bucks. In this case, we are going to select an existing customer budget cap and we're going to set it to zero. We don't want to spend any money on existing customers.

Facebook is actually rolling out exclusions into Advantage Plus campaigns. So, if by the time you're watching this, you are in beta and you have the ability to see different exclusions in your Advantage Plus campaign. Add them and add past purchasers and add site visitors.

We want this to be a pure prospecting play. Now, it's time to talk creative. So before we even get into the setup of things, if you want inspiration on the exact ads that I am personally inspired by and ads that we tell our clients to run and even ads that our clients are actively running right now completely for free, click the link down below in the description.

We have an entire swipe file with hundreds of active creatives. And the coolest thing is that nearly all of these creatives have run for over 3 months. We have ads right here, for example, that ran for 263 days, 167 days, 291 days.

What that tells me more than anything is that that is a successful ad because an ad that runs for 200 days had to work. It had to perform. And that's how we're picking our winners.

That's how we're inspired by what ads actually we need to create for the brands that we're working with right now. Go get it. Go replicate these ads.

It's 100% free down in the description. So, we've built our campaign setup. We have the core campaigns, the prospecting CBO and the scale campaign.

Within this, we need to create homes for actual new creatives to be tested. The big fundamental thing that you need to understand here is that there is not a third campaign for testing. You do not have a dedicated testing budget in this setup.

The reason is we are allowing Net's algorithm to ultimately decide where the budget should go for all of our creatives and we are creating a hyper competitive environment. We got to put a megaphone on that one because I want that to be loud and clear. We only want winners to rise to the top.

We don't want our ad account to be 10% on this ad, 5% on this ad, 10% here, 10% here. even distribution across the board. What we actually want the best performing ads to get the majority of the spend and only a very small percentage of spend to be wasted on testing.

The way that we do that is in this prospecting CBO campaign, we create what we call packs. So, when we created that very first adset, we didn't give it a name. That's cuz we saved it for right now.

The first thing you want to do is you want to create your very first pack. All a pack is is a group of creatives. It doesn't mean that it's the same creatives.

It doesn't mean that it's even remotely different creatives. All it means is that you and your team create a new creative, push them into a pack. In this pack, you could have anywhere from one creative to roughly 10 creatives, I'd say, at the very most.

Every time you have new creative that you want to test, you are launching those into new packs. And it's literally as simple as duplicating the existing pack, renaming it to pack two, deleting the existing ads within it, and creating brand new, fresh ads within this pack. so that over time your account starts to look like multiple packs with multiple ads within them.

So to give you guys a breakdown of what this is actually going to look like in practice, I've just created a bunch of packs with different ads in them. So you're going to notice right away the first pack has three ads. The second pack has 1 2 3 4 5 6 seven ads.

The third pack has four ads. Now the key thing that you need to understand is that what is actually happening because this is in a CBO environment is Facebook is allowed to distribute the budget anywhere it wants across this entire pack or really across this entire ad set and entire campaign. Now what that means is even though this ad here is in a different ad set as this ad, they are competing against one another.

So you have hyper competition within your ad account within this campaign. What that really means for you is that when you break this out over the course of multiple ads and multiple adsets is that the budget will be distributed to the top performing ads. What that furthermore means for you and this is the key when it comes to testing.

Let's say you launch pack number three today. There's a very high chance that these ads don't just spend right off the bat. They spend a little bit, a little bit, a little bit.

They get signal. Then, and only when they know they can beat everything in pack one and pack two do they actually start to scale. What that does for you is you have to be a little bit more patient.

This is a touch slower than forcing spend. But you know what? It's also a touch better at not wasting your cash.

And if you could save operationally 10 to 15% in a business, you are a hero. We now know how these packs operate. We know exactly what's going on with each of these ads.

What do we do when we actually have an ad that's winning? We need to define winning. Internally, what the moonlighters, what my team and I define as winning is an ad that represents 10% of your total budget and is above your baseline KPI.

So, what does that mean in very simple terms? It means the ad is spending a lot and it has a rorowaz above your baseline. So, if your baseline is two and that ad is spending a supreme amount and it's above a two rorowaz, then it can be graduated.

What does graduation mean? Let's talk about it. So, as you know, we created the prospecting scale campaign earlier.

This is the place where every single best performing creative that is a high spender and a top performer from a return on ad spend perspective gets graduated into. Do not fool yourself. Do not think you can graduate an ad that spent $30 and has a 15 return on ad spend.

That ad is not scalable. That ad is supportive. That ad does a good job of driving bottom bottom bottom bottom funnel.

That ad is not going to scale. You only take high spenders and high return on ad spend. or if you're running a CPA model or if you're running a different kind of business, whatever your KPI is, your key performance indicator.

In this case, what we do is we take the top ads and we move those top ads into the scale campaign. I'm going to show you exactly how we move them. Most people, what they do is they go into the prospecting CBO campaign.

They say, let's pretend that this ad in particular is a top spender and above the KPI. They go like this. They pause it.

They click here. They click copy. And then they move it in to their scale campaign.

Huge flaw. First off, we never pause an ad that's working. If you could write one thing down at the top of your screen, put a post-it note right there that you should never pause an ad that's performing well.

Period. So, what we do instead, we take this, we click this actual manual duplicate button. There's a very specific reason for this, and it's because if you click the manual button, you are able to show existing reactions, comments, and shares on new ads.

Zuckerberg himself came out and said, "Shares are the number one metric that are indicating if we should be continuing to show videos and images to more people. " The same thing applies to ads. Shares are your number one indication if Meta likes your video or your ad enough.

What we want to do is we want to duplicate our ad into an existing campaign. We are going to select that campaign, which in our case is going to be the scale campaign. We are going to not have to select any sort of ad set because there is no adset because it is a advantage plus shopping campaign.

So it actually holds the same name. And we're going to click the hard duplicate button. Once you do that, your ad is going to show up in your advantage plus campaign with the exact setup that it had in the previous campaign with all the comments, likes, and shares.

Killer move instead of restarting the campaign. And the reason that this is so critical is because while an advantage plus campaign is broad, your ad has adle learnings. Ad level learnings are stuck on that ad.

As long as you keep that post comments, shares, and likes, all the engagement is an indication to Facebook on who is going to continue to react to that. The core difference between an advantage plus campaign and a non-advantage plus campaign is that an advantage plus campaign does a much better job of connecting the exact ad creative and the learnings of those creatives to your actual audience. It does a significantly worse job of finding an audience that applies for all of your ads, which is what happens everywhere else.

That sounds confusing. All you need to know is that you need to bring your best creatives into your scale campaign. So that is what we call the graduation process.

That is the first step of the graduation process and it is the most important step. But there's one more key feature here that's actually going to allow you to squeeze about an extra 10 to even 20% return on ad spend out of your entire account. We've talked over and over how we created a hyper competitive environment within our account.

In your prospecting CBO campaign, you are also going to create interest groups. The way that you're going to do this is creating a new ad. And we're just going to name this interest number one just for the example here.

All of your settings are going to be exactly the same except when we go all the way down to the bottom here, we are going to add advantage detail targeting aka interest. Now, I'm just going to pretend this is Nike and we're just going to type in Nike and look for the interest group interest on the right side here. Once we do that, we have a defined audience.

That's the very simple fundamental of setting an interest and you never stack interest. You only set one interest at a time. The reason this interest exists is not to launch new creatives in this interest.

The reason this exists is you take your best performing ads that you just graduated into the scale campaign and you also graduate them into the interest group as well. All this is going to do is absolutely squeeze an extra percentage out of your total best performing ads. What this looks like in practice, again, pack number one, let's pretend that this right here is a top performing ad.

We're going to duplicate this. We're going to duplicate it into an existing campaign, our prospecting CBO campaign. We're going to have to change the adset.

So remove and we're going to change this to interest number one and we're going to click duplicate. Really straightforward, really simple. Takes that exact same ad with all the engagement of the best performer already and it now brings it into an interest group where ideally it grabs an extra 5, 10, 15% improvement in efficiency.

But the key here is that interest don't scale as well. When it comes to budget allocation, how much you should spend in each of these campaigns, it's going to depend. But just know that in 2025, the algorithm is better than ever at actually allocating the budget to the most appropriate place.

We are creating levers that we can pull to scale the best performing creatives and minimize wasted spend. If you follow this method for at least 90 days, you are going to see a significant reduction in your wasted ad spend. And if you do that over compounded periods of time, you're going to go from spending 20% on testing to sub 5%.

That is going to hit your bottom line so positively. And in the best case scenario, you could take that extra 15%, you could spend it on top performing scale creatives and ultimately scale your business in 2025 and well beyond. What does this actually look like in practice?

I've talked so much theory here. We've broken everything down. I want to show you guys the value of this single optimization that you can make in your ad account today in this calculator that I built.

First off, we're going to enter our total daily budget. I've just set $1,000 a day. Do whatever you need to make that distribution smooth for yourself.

I just want the,000 bucks in here. So, it's really simple. Everyone can see very clearly exactly how much more we're going to drive on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis here.

So, what we have in the first section here up top is the current budget distribution. This is the most common way campaign optimizers that media buyers these days actually distribute their budget. And what most people do is they start with that testing campaign.

And this testing campaign for this example, we're giving a two return on ad spend, which is pretty high. Then we're going to split right here. This is going to be one prospecting campaign.

The reason I have it broken down is because in your prospecting campaigns, you have top performers and you have bottom performers. I'm going to make an assumption roughly speaking that the top performers in your account are accounting for 50% of your budget and returning at a three return on ad spend. Your bottom performers represent 30% of your budget and still return at a solid two return on ad spend.

This means in total for this account, we have one campaign that's a test campaign. We have a top and a bottom evergreen which are just one single campaign resulting in a total revenue per day of $2500 on $1,000 in spend on a month that drives $75,000 in revenue. And I know some of you are saying, "Well, that's not that bad, but it could be better.

" And that's what we're here for. We are not here just to completely transform and throw everything away. We're here to build businesses steadily.

And we're most specifically at the Moonlighters focus on building businesses that are already successful and taking them to the next level. What does this look like on an optimized play? If we scroll down just a little bit here, I've shifted some things around.

Now, we're using the exact same amount of daily budget. We're just shifting it in appropriate places. And the most critical thing that we're doing is we are moving away from testing so much creative.

We are testing the same number of creatives. We are just allowing Facebook to test that creative instead of us as human beings who are completely flawed and illogical. The way that we're doing that is we have the prospecting CBO which is representing the bottom creatives and then we have the same prospecting CBO representing the top creatives.

I am estimating that the prospecting CBO in a mature state of an account is representing a total of 20% of the budget. So 5% plus the 15% equals the 20% total budget meaning 200 bucks a day in the case that we're spending $1,000 total. The prospecting top creatives I have here returning at a two when in the normal example I'm giving it a generous three.

So I'm literally dumbing it down. I'm making it even worse to show you a true worst case scenario for this. The next piece is the prospecting bottom creatives I have representing 5% of the budget which would be somewhere in this testing campaign.

And again I have this at a 1. 5 return on ad spend. That is worse than every metric you have in the top chart here.

This is where it all comes together. Because we are spending significantly less testing creatives, we are able to put a massive portion of creatives that are proven winners. Because everything we just built was about creating massive competition in our own ad account.

We are now able to take the advantage plus scaling campaign, push 80% of our total budget to it, only on proven winners. Very key there. Don't do this too early.

And I'm estimating this is going to drive the same rorowaz as the evergreen top at a 3x return on ad spend, which puts our monthly for that at 72,000. Totaling all this up, we're driving $83,250 in total revenue. If we just compare these results, every single month we're driving an 11% increase versus the current strategy.

And this is the worst case scenario in my opinion. That's driving a full $8,250 in new revenue for the business. Our monthly investment stays the same at $30,000 and our average rate of return is 2.

77x on an annual. We have the potential to increase over $99,000 in annual revenue by introducing this optimized budget. That is absurd.

Now, you can tweak this to however you want. Imagine if we increased to $10,000 in spend per day. We're now driving an additional $82,000 per month in revenue.

All of this has different factors going on based on what is in your business, what kind of creative you're able to produce. But just want to really emphasize how critical distributing the budget to the right place and then even go further to right time, right platform, right placement, right landing page. It has tremendous downfall effects and I very very highly encourage everyone to at least do this exercise at the bare minimum.

There is a lot that goes into testing, creating, executing, strategizing on Facebook ads and really e-commerce in general. And after over 11 years of running e-commerce businesses, running Facebook ads, and ultimately scaling brands with the methods that we're just talking about here, most people would probably sell a course. Most people would probably charge thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars for some ridiculously packaged course, but we give it all away for free.

And if you want to continue to support the channel, click on this next video where I literally break down everything, an hour and 21 minutes of all of my knowledge from Facebook ads step by step so you can follow it and scale your business. Also, if you have any questions, comments, anything at all, hit me down in the comments below. We try to answer every single comment that comes here, especially those from subscribers.

I will see you all in the next one. Adios.