The Best Facebook Ads Strategy for 2026 (Post Andromeda) transcript

Once Meta dropped their Andromeda update, I saw hundreds of comments of people reporting that their return on ad spends dropped from really high three, six, even 10, all the way down to barely breaking even. And even though tens of thousands of advertisers spending hundreds of millions of dollars in Facebook ads have freaked out, the truth is is that this is just another time when you need to adapt. If you do, you can gain a massive advantage over all of your competition.

And this is exactly what we've done over the past few months. Like this brand that drove $108,000 in revenue in just seven days. Or like this Shopify store that grew 141% quarter over quarter during the exact time that Andromeda was released. So to help you get back on track and start this year off with a bang, I'm going to share everything that you need to do to get your ad account in the best possible position for 2026.

So to kick things off, a good lay of the land is what did Facebook used to look like and what does it look like now? Before Andromeda, what would happen is we would select our audience and then we'd make a bunch of creative for that audience. And ideally what we would do is we would spend as much as possible against an audience that worked for us with a creative that worked. Then Andromeda releases and we move to a space where the concept actually creates the audience for us.

So our objective goes from a place where we want to select our audience and select our creative to match to the concept automatically being matched to the audience. So people have said things like creative is the targeting which is true but the important part that you need to understand is it's not as simple as just uploading your ads. You need to have a system in place to develop as many great concepts as possible cuz what you want to happen over time is you want to create a bunch of different concepts in your account.

Ideally each of these concepts convert at different rates. For example, concept number one might only spend 10% of your budget, but do so at a 5x return on ad spend. Concept number two might spend 90% of your budget, but do so at a 2x. And I could obviously go down the list here, but in old school Facebook, you would push all of your spend to the first concept here. New school Facebook post Andromeda, we like both concept A and concept B because each of these concepts is above our target, which I'm assuming is a 2x return on ad spend for this example.

So, if you are just starting, this is your very first day running ads, and you're like, "What the heck do I do? I just entered Facebook ads, and this thing looks like I'm the captain of a ship. There's so many buttons, I don't know what to click." I'm going to keep this really simple. For day one of running ads, all I would like to create, if it was my first day running ads, is a single prospecting campaign with three ad sets.

I have never said this before, if you've been watching my videos for the last three plus years, you've never heard me say this. This is something I've pushed more so than ever before because I've seen it be successful. The first ad set that you want to create is a pure 100% broad ad set. The other two adets are interestbased adsets. What I've seen most recently with Andromeda is that the pixel takes a little bit longer to learn, but once it learns, it runs.

What I like to do is I like to give it two interest groups that are most applicable to my business. Whatever your category is, find the most niche slash smallest brand that you could possibly target in Facebook ads and run with that as your first interest group. Your second interest group, you could literally do the same thing. All we're trying to do with these two interest groups is guide the algorithm so that over time our broad audience, which is by far our most important thing, is starting to get more and more spend against the right people.

So, what this will look like in your ad account is you'll have a prospecting CBO campaign. You'll have your broad pack one with all of your creatives grouped in together. And then you'll have a few interest groups. At the campaign level, we're using campaign budget always all the time. We're always using highest volume or value when we're just starting. And we're setting up our audience segment reporting. If you do not have these set up, make sure you include your engaged audiences, which are your 30-day site visitors, your 90-day ad to carts, and your existing customers, which are lists of your entire customer base.

Inside of our broad pack, our conversion location is always website. Our performance goal is always maximize number of conversions. And our conversion event is always purchase. Don't fall for add to carts. Don't fall for initiate checkouts. You need to use the purchase events. Otherwise, you're literally telling Facebook you want to do something that is not actually the end goal. And scrolling down to the audience section for your broad pack of your very first day of running ads.

Then yeah, you're going 100% broad. It should say advantage plus on. There should be no exclusions in place. and you should just let this rip. We're going to put all our placements on, letting Facebook do its thing as much as possible. The interest group is going to be a little bit different. Every setting up top is exactly the same, except when we scroll down to the audience section. In the audience section, we're going to select our exact single detailed targeting.

And I have something here that we're going to get to a little bit down the line when we start excluding customers. But you can leave your exclusions completely open if it's your first day of running ads. And just like before, our placements stay wide open. Now, your goal here, if it's your first day, is just get your ads in. Look at what ads are working the best and go ahead and make more of them. It also would be a really good move here to look at your competitors, look at what they're doing, and try to copy with your own flare of what they're doing the best.

Moving on to the state of under $3,000. The big difference here in this stage is that we're basically running our prospecting exactly the same. There's no significant change in our prospecting. You can keep your interest. You could also delete your interest if you want to. And as you can see down here in my under 3K section, I've added an existing customer bucket. That existing customer bucket is a new campaign that I am specifically and only targeting all of my existing customers.

The reason for this is Facebook has a tendency to overspend on your existing customers. And we want to break that out as early as possible. We want prospecting to truly be new acquisition and we want existing customers to truly be a retention effort. The way that we do this is really simple. Again, we're keeping our prospecting basically the same. If those interests are working, keep them. If they're not working and the broad's doing most of the work, cut the interest and just keep the broad.

So, really, we're just creating our retention campaign here. And the only thing we really need to focus on is inside of the ad set. Everything stays exactly the same, same settings we went over before, except our audience. In our audience, we have to do two very important things. First, we have to include an audience. So, make sure you include your purchasers over the last 180 days. And if you have an alltime list from like Clavio or something, get that in here as well.

Do not select this button right here that says use as a suggestion. If you do select this, Facebook is allowed to go beyond your list, which is not what you want at all. You want this to very clearly be a retention effort just against your purchasers. So unselect this. And then there's going to be an option that says further limit the reach of your ads. And let me show you what this looks like. So right here, this is what it will look like if you don't click further limit the reach of your ads.

You want to click further limit the reach and then again further limit the reach. Click continue. It's a big roadblock there. When you do this, you then have to go back into your inclusion and unselect use as a suggestion. If you don't do this, Facebook is technically just treating this as a source and then it's going to expand beyond it. That's not what we want to do here. Now, during this phase of around $3,000, your objective remains the same.

All you really want to do is take your best creatives and make more of them and then take iterations of those best creatives and continue to again produce more. Once we get beyond $3,000, beyond a hundred bucks a day, it's time to introduce the pack system. Now, the pack system is one of the most important systems that you could possibly integrate into your account because it a keeps you organized and b works with the algorithm so that you have a mix of control plus allowing the CBO to actually do its work.

So, what I have on my screen probably looks like a monster. However, it's actually really simple and this system builds with you over time. We have some accounts that have 70 packs that are either active or were active at one point. So, how this works is every time you launch new creatives, you launch a new pack. For example, if I had four new creatives, whether they were all statics, all videos, even if they were catalog, I would throw them into a new ad set every single time.

What's really happening here is we're not resetting the learnings at the campaign level, and we're not resetting learnings or interfering with anything at the ad level. All we're doing is introducing all new things that are starting from scratch. And if Facebook thinks that these ads within this new pack are good, it's going to start to spend money against this pack. So between $3 to $10,000, as we were just addressing, this is the first introduction of the pack system.

You ideally want to launch all broad packs and you take your best winners and you graduate those into interest groups. What this looks like in practice is you're taking your first broad pack, you're literally creating pack number two with the exact same settings and getting your next round of creative. The idea here is that as you build your account, you get more and more and more creatives. Yes, you're going to have a larger amount of adsets.

You're going to have a big campaign in here, but you have a hyper competitive environment. And that means that Facebook will determine where to spend your money. If this adset's doing better, more money is going to go to this adset. If it starts to fatigue, which is going to happen, then that cash is actually going to go down to a different high-erforming pack. So, we actually create almost a flywheel within our prospecting campaign that actually prevents us from making manual intervention by pausing ads.

And it also helps us because as things fatigue, it's going to redistribute that spend to other high performing places. And again, in that 3 to 10k range, we're looking at a prospecting and an existing customer campaign. Really, at this point, you've learned some things. You've spent some money. If you've been running ads for a longer period of time, then you've really learned some things. You've really spent some money.

So if something worked, for example, like interest when you first started out, just like I said in the under 3K mark, don't be scared to keep that in your 3 to 10k mark. And now the part that everyone including myself starts to really geek out about. We're going to introduce our scaling mechanism. So the way that this really works is your top performing ads get graduated into what I call the winners's bucket. This bucket is imaginary.

It doesn't mean anything. Just think of it as the holding ground for all your best ads. What we do with those winners is two things. First, we graduate them down below into our interest groups. The reason we graduate these into our interest groups is because now creative isn't the variable for if an interest is successful. Interest groups need to be tested for the interest, not for the creative. If I put different creative in every single interest group, we wouldn't know if the creative is the reason the interest is doing well or if the interest targeting is the reason it's doing well.

After we graduate into the interest, we graduate into what I call an ASC scale campaign. Now, ASC is kind of old school Facebook. Call it what you want. This is just my old brain doing this for so long calling it an ASC. It's really just a 100% broad campaign. So, in my actual account, I literally call this scale. I call the one ad set scale and I throw all my ads in here. This campaign doesn't do anything magical. All this does is guarantee that I could spend more money against my top performing ads within this adset.

Just like before, we're excluding all of our existing customers. We want this to very specifically just target net new acquisition. Now, during this 10 to 30k range, I call this the messy middle. This is the spot that most brands get stuck. This is both a mental trap and actually a roadblock that is real. The mental trap part of this is that most brands can't physically get over the hump of spending more than $1,000 per day.

It feels like a big hit to their bottom line, and it is. It's a lot of money that you're spending. The real roadblock here is that you begin to overspend just like before on existing and engaged audiences. The objective of all paid advertising is to get new customers to your website. Everything you do after that, like delivering really good value of your product, email campaigns, SMS campaigns, engaging with your customers on social media, that's how you keep existing customers coming back over and over.

And of course, we have an ad effort to do that just a little bit. But people that are pure prospects, they've never even heard of you before. maybe they've seen one or two ads like the post something really small. That's the focus of Facebook. So, what I would urge everyone to do in this 10 to 30k range is make sure that the roadblock that you're actually facing is a real roadblock and make sure you're spending as much money as possible on new customer acquisition and you're not overspending on existing and engaged, which you can see easily in your audience segments.

I will also take this moment to say that at the Moonlighters, we work with brands in this range. So, as long as you're spending $20,000 per month and you're in the 1 to10 million revenue mark, then go to the moonlighters.com/apply to see if you're a fit to work with us. Worst case, you talk to someone on my team for 10 minutes, you don't like us, and you come back and you get your free value right here. Best case, you're a client like the hundreds that we have worked with successfully scaling their businesses profitably.

Once we get beyond 30K, you're going to see really quickly that things get big. Your account's going to start growing. you're spending a,000, $2,000, $3,000 a day. Things are moving quickly and things become more fluid. What I mean by fluid is in this stage, you'll tend to see budgets go up and down in very large degrees very quickly. You can go from spending $1,000 a day to $3 or $4,000 a day if things are going right and then right back down to a,000 or $2,000 a day when it's time to appropriately pull back.

Now, during this period, we have the same prospecting CBO system as before. Everything else is maintaining exactly the same in this prospecting campaign. We have our scale. Now these two red brackets represent our new customer acquisition. We then have our existing customer effort which is going to represent retention. And then finally we have the new addition of retargeting. Now retargeting here is going to be very very important as we continue to grow.

And the reason I add retargeting in here is specifically because we start to see the overspending in prospecting in the scaling campaign happen more so at this 30k plus range than ever. What I would advise most brands to do at this stage is to add add to cart plus site retargeting. What that usually means is add to cart 90 days and site visitors 30 days. I would generally match this with my engaged audiences that I had previously set up.

And there's something really important that you need to know in this stage because as you start to spend more money, you're going to run into a CBO roadblock. The classic CBO roadblock that I know a lot of advertisers have run into is that one ad set gets the majority of the spend and then your new adsets don't have any opportunity to actually spend and be tested. So the way that we solve this is in our adsets, we scroll down to our budget and schedule setting and then we click adset spending limits.

When you click adset spending limits, change this from use percentage to use dollar value and set your daily minimum to one time your target cost per acquisition. If your target CPA is 50 bucks, you put 50 bucks here. So, I'd mark my daily minimum as $50. And I would let this run for no greater than 7 days. There's a maximum of 7 days. And here's how you need to think about it. If the spend on this adset is above $50 every day after I set the minimum, then you could safely remove this adset spending limit and it's going to spend more than the $50 you have set.

That's easy. If it's exactly at the $50 minimum, then you'll also know unfortunately that this is not a scalable adset and you could again remove the minimum. The only odd case where you can keep this minimum is if it's driving a high return on ad spend for you and it's not spending more than your minimum that you set. For example, if I set 50 and my target was two, but I was getting a four return on ad spend, then I would keep this.

In fact, I'd probably be a little crafty here and increase that 50 up to 100 bucks or even greater to force some more spend on this ad set. And now for the big time spenders. We're talking $100,000 plus. I know by many people's standards, $100,000 is actually not too much to spend in ads, but other folks will look at 100K and think that is astronomically larger than I could ever imagine. Think about it like this. If you went from 3,000 to 6,000, would you really think that is huge?

Probably not. But if you went from 100 to 200 or even 300, that feels really big because the actual number of dollars in and out is significantly greater. But in percentages, which is what a lot of this needs to be dealt with, you're not actually scaling too much. So when I say 100K plus, I truly mean well beyond 100. Now, the crazy part here is you probably notice from 30 to 100, we have generally the same setup, but there's a few nuances that need to be addressed.

At this point, you have a lot of creative flowing in. And I like to use a rule for how much creative you actually need to be uploading into your ad account to grow it. My best piece of advice is to use the rule of 10,000. For every $10,000 you spend per month in advertising, you need to upload that many ads per week. For example, if you spend $100,000, you should upload 10 ads per week. If you spend $500,000, you should upload 50 ads per week.

And no, that doesn't include size variance. That doesn't include little tiny iterations. I'm talking about different ads. This sounds crazy cuz it is crazy. It's hard. It's very hard to do. And even though we're working in the same system that we were at 30K, things naturally get bigger. You run a sale, you have a different campaign that needs to stay on, you have different parts of your business that are active. So don't think that just because I'm saying these are the four campaigns, it's all said and done.

That's not necessarily true. Usually, most of the brands that we're working with have significantly greater and larger ad accounts because in time we find different things that work. And just like I said at the beginning of this video, we never shut something down that's actively working. Now, when you get to 100K plus, really beyond this, you have to start to factor in some other pieces. First, I really like to involve cost caps at this stage.

I think cost caps, bid caps, or even target rorowaz is a fantastic way to sustain your return on ad spend or your cost per acquisition. and let spend be a little bit more variable. This is very important. Next is it's a good opportunity to implement things like day parting and week parting. You likely can very easily see which days of the week perform better for your business. So spend more money on those days. In fact, go into your Shopify right now, find those days and figure out, are you spending more on your better performing days?

If not, this is one of the easiest things you can do to get 10 even 20% better performance without touching a thing. And finally, this is a big tip for big advertisers out there. Use incremental attribution. Gone are the days of 7-day click. Gone are the days of one day click. 7-day click one day view is typically a little bit too big when you're at this sort of stage. So either evaluate or actually use incremental attribution because you're going to have a massive halo effect.

You're going to have a lot of referrals, a lot of word of mouth that's growing. We really want to understand what are the purchases that happen because of Facebook. It's exactly what incremental attribution does. Now, I just broke down my entire strategy for you. And if you want to see the step-by-step implementation of this, the actual document that describes everything that I just went through, the flowcharts, and way more, then click the link down in the description where I give you my full 22page M3 guide.

And last, if you want to see how you can multiply your static ad output to create a content machine, click this video right here where I take you step by step on how to use Google's new Nano Banana 3 completely for free to multiply your creative output. That's all for today. I hope everyone got a ton of value out of this video and I will see you in the next