Practitioner pattern · Alper Taner
When one ad eats 90% of an ad set's budget, give the other ads their own ad set
Other ads often 'bloom' once the dominant ad is removed
Workedpaid-socialexperimentation
What they did
Meta decides delivery in the first ~5,000-10,000 impressions, so an early 'lucky' ad can take 80-90% of spend and starve others, which are not necessarily bad. In a BAU ad set, leave the winner alone and move the under-delivering ads into a new BAU ad set. In a creative-test ad set, once the dominant ad hits your decision threshold, pause it and bench it for the next BAU creative refresh so the others reach the threshold too. A 50-ad set run for a week where one ad gets 90% is not a test.
What happened
Seen many times: removing the dominant ad lets the other ads perform.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Creative Misfires, False Positives, and Meta's Auction Flaws — Alper Taner, Stealth-Mode App Studio“And then I've seen that multiple times where you take out that dominant ad from that ad set and all the other ads suddenly bloom”
“If it's in a BAU ad set, then I would create another BAU ad set and then I would include those creatives that were under delivering into the new one and I wouldn't touch something that is working well.”
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