Sales & Conversion
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Two years ago, I was managing Facebook ads for a B2C Shopify store with what looked like the perfect setup on paper. Multiple audience segments, detailed targeting, lookalike audiences stacked three layers deep. The whole nine yards that every Facebook ads guru preaches.
Our ROAS was mediocre at best. We were burning through budget testing different audience combinations while our creative performance kept declining. Sound familiar?
Then I discovered something that completely flipped my understanding of Facebook advertising in 2025: creatives are the new targeting. The privacy regulations that killed detailed targeting also opened the door to a much simpler, more profitable approach.
What you'll learn in this playbook:
Why complex audience targeting is actually hurting your ROAS
The one-campaign structure that outperformed our 15-campaign setup
My 3-creative-per-week testing rhythm that scales winners
How to let Facebook's algorithm do the heavy lifting while you focus on what actually converts
The creative framework that works across different product categories
This isn't about following the latest Facebook ads "hack." It's about adapting to how the platform actually works now, not how it worked five years ago. Most e-commerce stores are still fighting yesterday's war.
Reality Check
What every e-commerce marketer has already tried
Let me guess your current Facebook ads setup. You probably have:
Multiple campaigns for different objectives: Awareness campaigns, traffic campaigns, conversion campaigns. Maybe even separate campaigns for different product categories or customer segments.
Detailed audience targeting: You've spent hours crafting the perfect audience. Demographics, interests, behaviors, custom audiences, lookalike audiences. You probably have a spreadsheet tracking which audiences perform best.
Complex funnel structures: Cold traffic goes to awareness ads, warm traffic gets retargeting ads, hot traffic sees conversion-focused creative. You're managing 10+ ad sets across different funnel stages.
Creative rotation schedules: You refresh creative every few weeks when performance drops, usually scrambling to create new ads when the algorithm stops delivering.
This approach made sense in 2019. Back then, Facebook's targeting was granular enough that you could actually reach specific audience segments with surgical precision. The platform rewarded marketers who understood its complexity.
But here's what happened: iOS 14.5 and privacy regulations killed detailed targeting. The data Facebook used to build those precise audiences? Most of it disappeared overnight. Yet most marketers kept trying to optimize the same way, wondering why their cost per acquisition kept climbing.
The conventional wisdom exists because it worked in the past. Facebook's own documentation still promotes audience testing and funnel optimization. Every course and agency still teaches the "proper" way to structure campaigns.
But this approach falls short because it's optimizing for the wrong variable. You're spending 80% of your time on audience refinement that barely moves the needle, while your creative – the thing people actually see and respond to – gets 20% of your attention.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The situation that opened my eyes happened with a B2C Shopify client selling home goods. They came to me frustrated with their previous agency, who had built this incredibly complex Facebook ads setup.
Picture this: 15 different campaigns, each targeting different audience segments. Separate campaigns for men vs women, different age groups, interest-based audiences, lookalike audiences based on purchasers vs email subscribers. The account looked impressive in screenshots.
But the numbers told a different story. Their ROAS was hovering around 2.5 with a €50 average order value. With their margins, they were barely breaking even. Worse, every time they tried to scale spend, performance would tank.
The first thing I noticed: their creative was completely overlooked. They had maybe 5-6 different ads running across all those campaigns. The same lifestyle photos, the same product shots, the same generic copy. No wonder performance was declining – people were seeing the same ads over and over.
The agency had spent months optimizing audiences, testing different bidding strategies, adjusting budgets between ad sets. But the creative? "Oh, we refresh those when performance drops."
What really convinced me to try a different approach was a conversation with the client about their best customers. When I asked how they found their products, the answer was revealing: "Most say they saw the ad and just loved the product instantly."
It wasn't that the right audience saw the ad – it was that the right creative made someone who wasn't actively looking become interested. The creative was doing the targeting, not Facebook's audience parameters.
That's when I decided to test something completely counterintuitive: what if we flipped the script and made creative the star while simplifying everything else?
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's exactly what I implemented that changed everything for this client – and why it works so well in 2025's privacy-first advertising landscape.
Step 1: The Great Campaign Consolidation
I killed 14 of their 15 campaigns. Yes, you read that right. We went from this complex multi-campaign structure to essentially one broad campaign with multiple creative variations.
The setup was simple:
One conversion campaign
One broad audience (minimal targeting – just country, age 25-65, and gender if relevant)
Multiple ad sets with different creative angles
This wasn't about being lazy. This was about letting Facebook's machine learning do what it does best – finding people likely to convert – while we focused on what humans do best: creating compelling creative.
Step 2: The Creative Testing Machine
Here's where the magic happened. Instead of spending time crafting perfect audiences, we built a systematic creative testing process:
3 new creatives every single week. Not when performance dropped. Not when we felt like it. Every week, without fail.
Each creative tested a different angle:
Lifestyle-focused: Show the product in use, lifestyle benefits
Problem-solving: Address specific pain points the product solves
Social proof: Customer reviews, user-generated content
Product-focused: Features, quality, craftsmanship
Step 3: The Algorithm Partnership
This is the key insight most people miss: your creative IS your targeting in 2025. When you create a lifestyle-focused ad featuring young professionals, you're essentially targeting young professionals – but you're letting Facebook find them based on behavior, not demographic assumptions.
The algorithm looks at who engages with each creative and finds similar people. It's dynamic targeting based on actual interest signals, not static audience definitions.
Step 4: Performance Tracking That Actually Matters
Instead of tracking audience performance (which was mostly noise), we focused on creative performance metrics:
Hook rate: How many people watch the first 3 seconds
Hold rate: How many watch to completion
Engagement rate: Comments, shares, saves
Link click rate: How compelling the offer feels
When a creative hit our benchmarks (3%+ link click rate, strong engagement), we'd create variations. When it missed, we'd analyze why and apply learnings to future creative.
The Weekly Creative Calendar
Monday: Analyze weekend performance, identify winning creative angles
Tuesday: Brief new creative concepts based on winners and market trends
Wednesday: Produce 3 new creatives (mix of video and static)
Thursday: Launch new creatives, pause underperformers
Friday: Review week's performance, plan next week's angles
This systematic approach meant we always had fresh creative in market, the algorithm never got bored, and we could scale winners while killing losers quickly.
Winner Analysis
When a creative hit our performance thresholds, we'd immediately create 3-5 variations testing different hooks, offers, or formats to maximize its potential.
Algorithm Feeding
Facebook's algorithm learns faster with diverse creative signals. Each new angle teaches it something different about who responds to your product.
Creative Velocity
The 3-per-week rhythm prevents ad fatigue before it happens. Fresh creative keeps costs low and engagement high while competitors fight algorithm decay.
Performance Scaling
Once we identified winning creative themes, we could produce similar angles at scale. One winning video concept became 15 profitable variations.
The results spoke for themselves. Within 6 weeks of implementing this creative-first approach:
ROAS jumped from 2.5 to 7.8 – not because we found better audiences, but because our creative was actually connecting with people who weren't actively looking for home goods.
More importantly, we could scale spend without performance degradation. When you have new creative launching every week, the algorithm doesn't get "tired" of your ads. We went from spending €500/day to €2000/day while maintaining profitability.
The creative insights were equally valuable. We discovered that user-generated content outperformed professional photography by 300%. Videos showing the "unboxing experience" drove 40% more conversions than lifestyle shots. These learnings came from systematic testing, not guesswork.
But here's the kicker: the client's organic social media performance improved too. When you're creating 3 pieces of scroll-stopping content every week for ads, you naturally get better at creating content that works on social platforms generally.
The time savings were massive. Instead of spending hours optimizing audiences and bidding strategies, we spent 30 minutes per week reviewing creative performance and planning new angles. The work became more creative and strategic, less technical and tedious.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After implementing this approach across multiple e-commerce clients, here are the key insights that changed how I think about Facebook advertising:
1. Creative fatigue happens faster than you think. Even winning ads start declining after 7-14 days. The solution isn't to optimize audiences – it's to have new creative ready to launch.
2. Facebook's algorithm is incredibly sophisticated at finding your customers. It's terrible at guessing what creative they'll respond to. Focus your energy where humans add value.
3. The best audience targeting is no audience targeting. Broad audiences + great creative outperform narrow audiences + mediocre creative every time.
4. Creative diversity beats creative perfection. Five different "good" angles will outperform one "perfect" ad because they teach the algorithm more about your market.
5. Video doesn't always win, but motion does. Simple slide shows or cinemagraphs often outperform expensive video production.
6. User-generated content is worth its weight in gold. Real customers using your product beats professional models every time.
7. When this approach works best: Products with broad appeal, visual products, anything that solves an emotional or lifestyle problem. It struggles with highly technical B2B products or very niche items.
What I'd do differently: Start the creative testing rhythm from day one instead of trying to optimize audiences first. The data from diverse creative teaches you more about your market than any audience research.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies, adapt this by focusing on:
Problem-solution creative angles over feature lists
Customer success stories and case studies
Demo videos showing actual software value
Founder-led content for B2B trust building
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores, prioritize:
User-generated content and customer reviews
Product-in-use lifestyle content
Unboxing and "first impression" videos
Before/after transformations where relevant