My Meta ads campaign strategy.

01Meta changed. Your strategy should too.

Meta's ad engine, called Andromeda, now reads what is inside your ad to decide who sees it. The old playbook of 20 ad sets with tight interests and one ad each no longer works. These four rules replaced it.

• Creative is the targeting. Different concepts reach different people. Your ads find your audience, not your interest list.
• Consolidate. Use fewer campaigns and ad sets, with more concepts inside them. The system learns faster when the data sits in fewer places.
• Go broad. Let Advantage+ audience find buyers. Use hard limits only where the law or the offer requires them, such as location or minimum age.
• Feed it clean signal. The algorithm optimises for whatever you track. Bad tracking means it finds the wrong people, very efficiently.

02Do this before you spend

1. Pixel and Conversions API, both live

   Track the event that means money (Purchase, or a qualified Lead) from the browser and the server, with the same event ID so Meta counts it once. Send the value.

2. Know your numbers

   Average order value, margin after product, shipping and fees, and how many leads become customers. Without these you can't judge an ad.

3. A landing page that matches the ad

   Same promise, same offer, same visuals. Fast on mobile. One clear next step: buy, book or message.

4. A creative bank, not one ad

   Start with at least 6 to 10 genuinely different concepts: different angles, people and formats. This is a rule of thumb, not a Meta rule.

5. A naming system

   Name every campaign, ad set and ad the same way (see section 7), so you can tell which ideas win, not just which file did.

03Three campaigns. That's it.

Every account I run starts from this shape. The budget split is a rule of thumb; adjust it once you have data.

Selling to leads (services, real estate, clinics)? Use the same shape. Optimise for the lead event that matters most, ideally a qualified lead you send back to Meta, not just any form fill.

04How much to spend

Meta says an ad set needs about 50 optimisation events in 7 days to leave the learning phase. Work the budget backwards from that.

If you can't afford that

• Put everything into one ad set so the events aren't split up.
• Optimise for an earlier event that happens more often (Add to cart, Lead) until you have volume.
• Test fewer concepts at once, but test them properly.

How to scale

• Vertical: raise the budget on a winner by about 20% every 2 to 3 days (rule of thumb), so delivery stays stable.
• Horizontal: add more winning concepts to the Scale campaign.
• Don't touch an ad set every day. Every big edit can restart learning.

05The creative does the work

Build each concept from three choices. Change at least one of them and it counts as a new concept. Change only the colour and it is the same ad.

Hooks: the first 3 seconds

Lead with the payoff. Use a value hook (“the 3 settings I change first”), a statement of intent (“stop doing X”) or a question. Brief at least two hook types per concept.

Build it to work on mute

Burn in captions. Show the product early. Design vertical 9:16 first, then 4:5. Keep text away from the edges where Instagram's buttons sit.

06When to kill, when to scale

These are my rules of thumb. Write yours down before you launch, so you decide with numbers, not feelings.

The four numbers I check first

• Hook rate: 3-second video views ÷ impressions.
• CTR (link): are people clicking?
• CPA: compared with your break-even CPA.
• Frequency: how often the same people see the ad.

07The weekly rhythm

Consistency beats genius. This routine keeps fresh creative going in and bad spend going out.

• Daily, 10 minutes: check that spend is pacing, nothing is rejected, the pixel is firing and no ad is burning money with zero results. No big changes.
• Monthly, 1 hour: look at the age, placement and region breakdowns, rebuild the creative bank, and recheck your break-even numbers if prices or costs changed.

Naming convention

08Let Claude build your plan

Paste this into Claude, with the Meta Ads connector switched on or your Ads Manager export attached, and replace the parts in brackets. Not connected yet? The ten-minute setup guide shows you how.

You're my senior Meta ads strategist. Build my campaign plan using this structure: Test (20%), Scale (70%), Warm (10%).

MY BUSINESS
Offer: [product + price] · Margin: [%] · Market: [city/country]
Goal: [purchases / qualified leads] · Monthly budget: [amount]

DO THIS
1. Calculate my break-even CPA and ROAS.
2. Tell me the minimum daily budget per ad set (target CPA × 50 ÷ 7) and how many ad sets my budget can actually support.
3. Give me 8 concepts (angle × person × format), each with 2 hooks.
4. Lay out the 3 campaigns: settings, budgets, which ads go where.
5. Write my kill and scale rules using my numbers.

Use tables. Flag anything you're unsure about. Don't invent results.