Don't Get Attached to Your Ad Process

These recent updates change how I create ads.

In 15 years of running Meta ads, I’ve come to understand that you should never get too comfortable. Don’t fall in love with one way of doing things because Meta will just pull the rug out from beneath you and change everything. We’ve seen that over and over again.

So I’ve become more comfortable with this constant state of uncertainty and instability. And that’s just where you have to be. Embrace the change and roll with it.

There are a couple of examples of this that completely change the way I do things.

Not long ago, on this very podcast, I talked about how the creative testing tool was a major part of my process. It was a new feature at the time, and I used it in both traditional and nontraditional ways. The nontraditional application was I’d start every new set of ads with a test in the active ad set.

There were a couple of reasons for this. First, an initial test would help me understand how an ad would perform if it were given a chance. Second, one annoyance with the creative testing tool was that you couldn’t test existing ads. Only new ones.

So instead of wishing I had run a test two weeks later when an ad isn’t getting any budget, I answer those questions from the start with a test. That’s the way I did things then, and it made sense given the options that we had.

But a new feature changes all of that.

Some advertisers will see an option to “Push Delivery to This Ad.” I unfortunately don’t have it yet, but I’m going to use the hell out of it when I do.

It works a lot like the creative testing tool, but you can push delivery to a single existing ad for a designated amount of time. So this wouldn’t be a test, it would simply be making sure that Meta spends a certain percentage of the budget on a specific ad.

This will eliminate my use of the creative testing tool in the nontraditional way. There’s no longer a reason to start new ads with a test because I can always answer questions later with Push Delivery if necessary. And I no longer feel like I need to create at least two ads at a time since that was the minimum when using creative testing.

So now I might create one ad at a time or two or three, but it doesn’t matter. And I don’t worry about whether Meta gives it impressions or not. If I have questions days or weeks down the road, I’ll push delivery to it for a few days. Maybe even just one or two days to get some answers.

Once I have the feature, of course, that’s exactly what I’ll do. And that also means that the creative testing tool, which was one of my favorite features of 2025, will get a whole lot less usage from me.

The other update that changed how I create ads is the new creative workflow.

This is a test that I’m lucky enough to be part of right now. It allows you to provide up to 10 images and videos for a single ad. And while that might sound like Dynamic Creative or Flexible Format, it’s so much better than that.

You can provide three aspect ratios for each creative. You can customize the text and destination URL for each image or video. You can even add or remove placements by creative variation. And most importantly, unlike Flexible Format, you can get reporting visibility into how each image or video performs.

But here’s how the new creative workflow drastically changes the way I create ads.

In the past, I’d lean into multiple formats so that I’d be a good advertiser and follow the laws of creative diversification. But I’d have to create separate ads, one for the static image and one for the video. Or I’d have six image variations that I’d want to try, so I created six ads, one for each image.

Whether I provided completely unique text for each ad or not, it felt completely unnecessary. In most cases, the creative variations didn’t suggest they needed completely different text.

So with the new creative workflow, I can create a single ad that uses all of these different images and videos. They can leverage the same primary text and headlines, but I can still edit them by creative if I want.

In one case, I had previously created separate ads for a lead magnet that used different images. And in each case, I sent people to a unique landing page that featured the same image that would be seen in the ad.

Once again, the new creative workflow allowed me to combine these into one ad. Six different images, same primary text and headline options, but I’d customize the destination URL by creative.

This allows me to drastically consolidate the way I’ve been creating ads. I took what was previously 36 ads and consolidated it into six.

Fewer ads isn’t necessarily better, just as more ads isn’t necessarily worse. But what it did was eliminate a lot of the repetition I had with those 36 ads. Because I was creating separate ads that leveraged slightly different creative or some of the same text, it violated the new rules we’ve been told to follow.

These new six ads are truly diverse, and I eliminated the repetition that Meta discourages.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

Push Delivery to This Ad and the new creative workflow are just the latest examples of how the evolution of Meta advertising has forced me to evolve, too. Do not tie yourself to a single approach or strategy.

If anything is certain, it’s that change is right around the corner. You can either fight that change and lose relevance or roll with that change and find a way to benefit from it.

For more about the test I’m involved in related to the new creative workflow, check out my blog post. Go to jonloomer.com/workflow.