Sales & Conversion
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
OK, so here's something that drives me crazy. Every Facebook Ads guide tells you to "set a daily budget" like it's some magical formula for success. You know what? That's exactly how I burned through thousands of euros for my e-commerce clients while watching their ROAS tank to 1.5.
The problem isn't that daily budgets don't work - it's that we're thinking about them completely wrong. While everyone's obsessing over "how much to spend per day," they're missing the bigger picture of how Facebook's algorithm actually allocates budget and when it performs best.
I've managed Facebook Ads for multiple e-commerce stores, from fashion brands with 1000+ SKUs to subscription boxes, and here's what I discovered: the daily budget isn't your constraint - it's your ceiling. And most people are setting that ceiling way too low, in all the wrong places.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why the "start with $20/day" advice kills your campaigns before they begin
The creative testing strategy that outperforms audience targeting every time
How I shifted from daily budget thinking to campaign performance thinking
The budget allocation method that improved ROAS from 2.5 to 8-9 (even though it was attribution trickery)
When to scale budget vs when to kill campaigns entirely
Ready to stop fighting Facebook's algorithm and start working with it? Let's dive into what actually works.
Industry Reality
What every marketing guru tells you about Facebook Ads budgets
Walk into any Facebook Ads course or agency presentation, and you'll hear the same tired advice repeated like gospel:
"Start with a conservative daily budget of $20-50 per ad set." The logic seems sound - test small, scale what works, minimize risk. Most marketers recommend splitting your budget equally across multiple audience segments, testing different demographics separately.
Then there's the classic "increase budget by 20% every few days if performance is good" rule. Sounds reasonable, right? You'll also hear about the importance of "detailed targeting" - creating specific audiences based on interests, behaviors, and demographics.
Here's the typical Facebook Ads budget framework everyone teaches:
Set up 5-10 ad sets with different audiences
Allocate $20-30 daily budget per ad set
Run for 3-5 days to "gather data"
Scale the "winning" audiences by increasing budget
Pause underperforming ad sets
This approach exists because it feels logical and gives marketers a sense of control. It's also what worked... back in 2018 when Facebook's targeting was more granular and privacy regulations weren't reshaping how the platform operates.
But here's where this conventional wisdom falls apart: Facebook's algorithm has fundamentally changed. iOS 14.5, privacy updates, and machine learning improvements mean the platform now works better with larger, broader audiences and bigger budgets to optimize against. Yet most marketers are still playing by old rules.
The result? Campaigns that never get enough data to optimize properly, audiences fighting against each other for the same users, and budgets too small to trigger Facebook's learning phase effectively.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
Let me tell you about my wake-up call. I was working with a B2C Shopify store - a fashion brand with over 1000 products. Classic e-commerce setup, decent conversion rate on the website, but their Facebook Ads were bleeding money.
The client came to me frustrated because their previous agency had been running the "textbook" approach: 8 different ad sets, each targeting specific interest groups ("fashion enthusiasts," "sustainable living," "ethical fashion" etc.), with $25 daily budgets per ad set. Total daily spend around $200, ROAS hovering at a painful 1.8.
Here's what was actually happening behind the scenes: Facebook was getting confused. With multiple small budgets competing for similar audiences, the algorithm couldn't gather enough conversion data in any single ad set to optimize effectively. We were essentially creating artificial scarcity in a system designed to work with abundance.
The breakthrough moment came when I looked at their attribution data more carefully. The client had recently implemented an SEO strategy alongside their paid ads (sound familiar from my distribution work?). Something weird was happening - Facebook was reporting higher ROAS, but overall traffic attribution was all over the place.
That's when I realized: we weren't just fighting against Facebook's algorithm, we were fighting against a multi-channel attribution problem. The daily budget structure was making both problems worse by fragmenting data and creating too many variables to track effectively.
The real issue wasn't the budget amount - it was how we were thinking about budget allocation entirely. While I was obsessing over "which audience gets what daily spend," customers were actually discovering the brand through multiple touchpoints, making the granular budget control meaningless.
This led me to question everything I thought I knew about Facebook Ads budget management.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's what I did that changed everything: I stopped thinking about daily budgets and started thinking about weekly campaign performance.
Instead of the traditional approach, I implemented what I call the "One Big Campaign" strategy:
Campaign Structure Revolution:
1 main campaign with a larger total budget ($300-400 daily)
1 broad audience (removed most detailed targeting)
Multiple ad sets focused on CREATIVE variations, not audience segments
3 new creative tests launched every single week
The budget allocation was simple: let Facebook decide where to spend based on performance, rather than me manually constraining each audience segment.
Creative-First Budget Strategy:
Here's the key insight - creative quality became my targeting. Instead of trying to find the "perfect audience," I created diverse creative content that would naturally attract different customer segments within the broad audience. A lifestyle-focused ad would pull in different people than a problem-solving product demo, all within the same campaign.
The weekly rhythm became:
Monday: Launch 3 new creative variations
Wednesday: Review performance, kill obvious losers
Friday: Identify winning creative angles for next week
Sunday: Plan following week's creative themes
Budget Management Reality:
Instead of micromanaging daily spend, I set weekly performance targets. If the campaign was hitting target ROAS over a 7-day period, budget stayed or increased. If not, I looked at creative performance first, audience second, budget third.
The most important shift: I stopped trying to control Facebook's spending patterns. Some days it would spend $150, others $400, but the weekly average and performance metrics became incredibly stable.
Attribution Strategy:
Since I knew attribution was messy (especially with their SEO efforts running simultaneously), I focused on blended metrics: overall revenue growth, not just Facebook-attributed conversions. This gave me a more realistic picture of actual performance.
The result? Facebook's reported ROAS jumped from 2.5 to 8-9 within a month. Now, I knew this was partly attribution weirdness - the SEO work was driving organic conversions that Facebook was claiming credit for. But overall revenue increased significantly, which meant the strategy was actually working.
Creative Testing
Launch 3 new creatives weekly instead of testing audiences. Let content quality do the targeting work.
Performance Tracking
Focus on 7-day ROAS trends, not daily budget utilization. Weekly performance beats daily budget anxiety.
Attribution Reality
Expect messy attribution in multi-channel setups. Track blended revenue growth, not just platform-reported metrics.
Algorithm Partnership
Stop fighting Facebook's spending patterns. Let it optimize within broader constraints rather than tight daily limits.
The numbers told a compelling story, even accounting for attribution messiness:
Performance Improvements:
Facebook-reported ROAS: 2.5 → 8-9 (within 4 weeks)
Overall monthly revenue: +40% increase
Creative testing velocity: 3x faster iteration
Campaign management time: 50% reduction
But here's what really mattered: the client stopped stressing about daily spend fluctuations. Instead of checking the ads manager every morning panicking about yesterday's budget allocation, they started focusing on weekly trends and creative performance.
The unexpected win was creative quality improvement. When you're launching 3 new creatives every week, you get really good at understanding what resonates with your audience. The creative team started developing better instincts for what would work before even testing.
Timeline Reality: The shift wasn't instant. Week 1 was chaotic as Facebook's algorithm adjusted to the new budget structure. Week 2-3 showed stabilizing performance. Week 4+ became consistently better than the old approach.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here's what I learned from completely rethinking Facebook Ads budget strategy:
Daily budget obsession is a distraction. Weekly performance trends matter more than daily spending patterns.
Creative quality beats audience targeting every time. In 2025, your ad content IS your targeting strategy.
Facebook's algorithm works better with abundance than scarcity. Bigger budgets in fewer campaigns outperform lots of small budget ad sets.
Attribution is fundamentally broken in multi-channel setups. Focus on blended revenue metrics, not platform-reported conversions.
Creative testing velocity determines long-term success. 3 new creatives weekly beats perfect audience research.
Fighting the algorithm is expensive. Work with Facebook's optimization patterns rather than against them.
Weekly rhythm beats daily panic. Consistent creative testing schedules outperform reactive budget adjustments.
The biggest mindset shift: stop trying to control every variable and start optimizing for the variables that actually matter. In Facebook Ads, that's creative quality and overall campaign performance, not granular budget allocation.
If I were starting over, I'd skip the "test small audiences" phase entirely and go straight to broad targeting with diverse creative testing. The learning phase would be faster and the results more reliable.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies, focus on:
Trial conversion creative testing over demographic targeting
Weekly budget allocation for consistent lead flow
Attribution modeling that accounts for longer sales cycles
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores, prioritize:
Product-focused creative variety over audience segmentation
Seasonal budget flexibility rather than fixed daily limits
Creative performance tracking integrated with inventory management