The ONLY Facebook Ad Tutorial You Need For 2026 transcript

I've been running Facebook ads for over 10 years and we advise on over $200 million in ad spend. And every year I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money on my own personal ads that follow you around the internet every day. And in this video, I'm releasing my Visual 2026 update and full guide from A to Z stepbyep on how to run Facebook ads in 2026. This applies to beginners and this applies to advanced marketers.

Whether you're just getting started spending $100 a day, 1,000 a day, 10K a day, or even $200,000 per day like my client Symbiotica, this video is for you. And Facebook ads have changed so much even in just the last year. And with the Adromeda update, what used to work doesn't work anymore. So today, I'm covering the campaign structures, the targeting, the audiences, the creatives, the offers, how to scale ad budgets, the strategies, everything from A to Z so you can profitably run Facebook ads in 2026.

And I don't have a fancy intro. So, let's get right into it and start building these campaigns. All right, so the first step with setting up your Facebook ads in 2026 is we're going to first build a sales campaign. So, if you're optimizing for purchases, we need to set up a sales campaign, not link clicks, no other type of campaign. And this is going to be an interest testing campaign. And this will eventually become your proven campaign over time with winning creatives.

We're just going to name that. And then we're going to scroll down here and we're first going to set our budget on the adset level. Now, over time, all of this will change, but this is going to be the initial setup that you're going to use. We'll leave this setting turned on and we'll continue to scroll down here and we'll hit next. The very next step is we're going to name our audience. And the first audience we're going to use is a broad audience to let Meta do the targeting for us.

We're then going to optimize for purchases. So, you'll go ahead and make sure that you have your purchase event selected. You're then going to scroll down and you're going to set your daily budget. We're going to start with $10 initially. If you have a higher budget, you can go up slightly from here, but this is initially where we're going to begin because we'll be scaling later. And then, as we scroll down here, we're going to see our audiences.

We'll leave all of this alone except for the exclusions. So what we're going to do is further limit and we're going to exclude people who've already purchased from us in the past. So we're going to add a purchase audience of 180 days. You can also upload your customer list. We're going to exclude that so that way we only reach new people. And then as we scroll down here, we'll continue to go to the ad creative level.

And this is where we're going to build out five unique ad creatives. The reason we do five unique creatives, no one creative is going to be alike. With the latest Adama update, it's very important that we only have totally unique creative assets because we want to ensure that we're able to reach different people with different angles and appeal to a wider audience group with our creatives and they're going to play off of each other as they run.

And so, we're going to go ahead and set up this first ad. So, we're going to be doing this example on Lululemon and we're going to scroll down here. We're going to choose manual upload, single image. We're going to leave multi-advertiser selected. And then as we get down, we'll paste in our product URL. And we're going to come down here and upload our creatives. And we're going to start with a blend of both image and video.

We'll select media. And we're going to go ahead and select our first creative. And you want to make sure that everything fits in line. So we're going to choose original on this. And just make sure everything is within view. And this is a 9x6 for vertical placement. And a 1080 x 1080 will also fit in all creative placements here. We're then going to select next. And we're going to come back to this in a second. And Metal likes to use a lot of AI generated images.

We're not going to use that because we already have our creatives and we don't want this to affect our campaigns. This is good for beginners who don't have a content team or don't know how to make creatives. We do. So, we're going to go ahead and skip this part. And then for enhancements, we are fine with enhanced CTA. That's totally fine to use. Now, visual touch-ups for clothing specifically. We don't want to change our visuals on this, so we're going to turn it off.

You can leave music on if you want the music. That is a personal preference. Now, animations, we don't want to add animations to this. Overlays, we don't want overlays. Text improvements is fine if we want to have some of the phrasing with what they do, but really we want to turn off most of this stuff because the AI isn't as good as Meta claims it is. So, we're going to leave it alone so that way we can ensure our creatives look good whenever we launch them.

So once we upload our first creatives, we're going to go ahead and scroll down here and we're going to enter in our primary text and we're going to paste this primary text and we're going to add a few more options here. So we need at least five ad copy angles per creative. All right. So, we've gone ahead and added our five ad copy variations here, but one thing about Lulu is I've taken these directly from what they're using, but what we'll notice is they're all very short variations.

Now, it's okay to have one or two lines of text here, but ideally, we would have totally unique ad copy formats where we have both long, medium, and short form to be able to maximize our creative testing to find out what works best. So, we're actually going to adjust a few of these so that way we can fully build this out. So the first line is because she deserves to be wrapped in warmth. That's fine. Now some of these others we're going to adjust.

So I'm going to remove three of these and we're going to build these out together and we're going to make some longer form variations. So we're going to go to the featherweight jacket and see if we can craft some of the ad copy. So here we are on their website and one of the first ad copy variations we want to use is the features and benefits. So, we're going to call out some of these features and benefits that they have and and we're going to design the ad copy just as it reads on the website.

And we're going to add in a few additional call outs. And we're going to adjust this and add in some of the features and benefits. And then we're going to come down here and add in a little bit more about the product. and then we'll finish this off. So now we have our features and benefits version where we call out some of the features and then benefits of why you'll love it. And so this is a little bit longer of a form of ad copy.

We have both short and then we can add another version which is going to be review based. And so we'll come down here and find a good review and we'll say perfect cozy travel jacket. And then we'll add in our review here. And then we'll say five star review. Then we're going to break some of this up so that way it reads a little bit better. And then we'll add in a more of a lifestyle version which kind of paints the picture around why this jacket is going to be incorporated in their lifestyle.

Whether they're looking for warmth, going out, traveling, and how it fits into the overall aesthetic and what they do in their daily lives. We're just going to break this up so it's easier to read. And then we have our five ad copy variations. We have both short form, medium form. We have features and benefits, review based, and then we have our lifestyle oriented ad copy. And now you can use some of these additional variations from Meta.

I'm going to go ahead and turn them off because we already have five ad variations here, but you're more than welcome to include these if you'd like, if you prefer some of the language that they're using. But for now, I'm going to deselect them and build out our own. We're going to add in five ad headlines as well. And now we have our five ad headline variations. And these are pretty simple. Once again, taken from Lulu.

There's only a few tweaks that I'd make to this one, which is actually including the product name in one of the headlines because that way people know exactly what they're selling. And we can go ahead and just adjust this one so that way we have that variation included. And then for our description, we'll also add in five variations here. And now that we have our five descriptions, which goes below our headline, we want to make sure everything is short and concise so that way it can be fully read.

And since we're going to be optimizing for purchases, we don't want to use learn more. We want to use shop now. So that way it frames the buyer mindset of buying this product. Now that we have our ad copy and headlines and descriptions fully built out, we can come down here and confirm that we've turned off everything that we don't want to include. And then as we go down further, everything else looks good to go. So now we'll just come up here and name our ad.

And we'll name it based off our creative. So it'll be meet our new featherweight jacket. So that way we know exactly what the creative is. Then all we're going to do is come to our ad and hit duplicate. And we'll do original campaign. So that way we can build our next creative. We'll come down here and we'll go ahead and remove this current creative. and we'll swap this out. And then we're going to choose our next variation of creative for the product.

And this one is just a simple side shot showcasing lifestyle in the mountains. And I'm going to frame this up so that way it can be seen. And then everything else we'll leave alone. And now we have our second creative, which is just a lifestyle angle. So, we'll just name this lifestyle- mountains and it's going to the same product. And then we'll hit duplicate. And the very next creative we're going to do is a carousel.

So, this will be a features/benefits. So, every creative is going to be totally different. And this is going to be a carousel. And we're going to go ahead and come down here and swap this to carousel. And essentially what we want to do is we need to read our primary text. We'll just come back here and grab those And once we have our five ad copy variations in our carousel, we'll go down and come back up here to add in our image cards.

And a carousel essentially allows us to show the features and benefits of the product. And we're going to go ahead and upload one more image which is going to be that direct shot. And we'll select all these. And then essentially we can break down each of the features and benefits of this product. So we'll come back down here and we'll go ahead and paste this exact line here. And then this will be our subcription exactly as is on the website.

And then we'll come back and grab this because it shows exactly the benefits and features as we go through each card. So that way people can make a buying decision and understand exactly how the product works. And then for our final card, that is just our product name. and then available now. And now we have our carousel version of an ad. And this is our third ad variation. So we have features and benefits, we have meet our new product, we have our lifestyle.

Now we're going to create our review based. And then we'll just remove this and add in our reviewbased ad. And then we are good to go. Then we can just name this the review ad. And then we'll create one more variation here. And this is going to be our video collage ad. And this is where we introduce a video. And because we already have the four images, now we're going to add a video ad creative here. We're just going to come down here and remove the image.

And then we're just going to hit add video. And now we have our video creative done and we can now move on to the next stage. So we have our five ad variations here. Five unique ad copy, five unique headlines, five unique creatives, and five unique descriptions. This will ensure that we can see which formats work best and it's already paired up nicely with the latest updates with meta. Then all we're going to do is hit duplicate on the ad set level and we're going to build out five audiences.

So, we'll come down here and do our audiences and we'll choose apparel. And then we'll duplicate and choose another audience. And then we'll just name that. And same thing. And then once we have our five audiences, we now have all of our ads, the same ads in each audiences underneath all of these. And we've officially built out our interest testing proving campaign. Next up is our creative testing campaign because we're going to test totally new creatives there.

And once they are proven and get dedicated budget, we'll rotate them over into our interest improving campaign. So that way we can ensure we have the best performing creatives being scaled up in this campaign. And creative testing is for only net new ideas. So that way they get dedicated budget so we can test and see what works best there. So, the reason we're setting up our interest testing campaign this way is because not only do we want to see which audience performs best, we're going to be able to notice that each ad may perform differently in both the interest audiences.

And then whenever we look at our return on ad spend and our purchases, we're going to scale what is performing better, we're going to scale back what is performing worse, and we're going to turn off what is not getting any results. And this will end up becoming our proven campaign. And we'll only have our best performing ad creatives in each of these. And over time, whenever I show you how to launch your creative testing campaign, you'll migrate an ad out into your performing audiences, and we'll continue to rotate those over and scale these up.

This is going to help prevent creative fatigue. It's going to allow us to identify our best performing audiences. And it's going to ensure that we have a creative system in place to be able to get dedicated budget towards creative testing and scale up the ones that are actually performing over time without disturbing these campaigns. So let's go ahead and build out our creative testing. So we'll hit create. We'll go to sales campaign.

It'll be a very similar campaign setup except this is where we're going to test totally new creative ideas. This is stuff that we've never tested before. And we're going to have different audiences in here as well because we want to ensure there's no overlap and we have totally unique creatives and totally unique audiences to ensure that we have a 100% unique testing variables at play. So that way we can find new creatives that work in any audience that could be duplicated anywhere and still perform.

So we'll come down here and we'll go to the adset level now. And this is going to be a totally new targeting audience. and we'll hit further limit the reach. And we're going to once again exclude our past purchasers. And for this creative testing, we're going to select some interest and we're going to come up with ideas that we haven't tested before. So, we're going to target an audience like travel because this product is for people who travel in the winter.

And we're just going to select that audience. and it's an audience that we haven't targeted in the other interest campaign. And we're going to now build out all of our new creatives because we want to have totally new creative ideas here, our proven ads in the other campaign. So now we're going to test our five unique ad creatives. And I've gone ahead and uploaded a few variations and we're going to test totally unique formats.

And this is going to be a mixture of both videos and images. And these are new creative ideas like UGC content from different UGC creators. So that way we can see which creator performs best. And because we have our interest testing campaign running, we want to ensure that we get new budgets dedicated towards our creative testing. So that way we can find out what works and then we'll migrate it over. So I'm going to go ahead and upload one of the videos.

And we're going to come back through here. And once again, we're going to turn off visual touch-ups because we're a clothing brand. We don't need video effects. There's nothing that we want to change about this. And we're going to hit done. And we have a UGC creator which is raw natural variation. So we're going to try one where somebody's just styling it off. And this is going to allow us to see if this ad format works.

And if it does, we can find more UGC creators to just do try on videos. So it's a very simple video. There's not much to it. No text. It's just somebody literally showing off the product. We're going to come up with five totally unique ad copy ideas. Once again. All right. So, the first ad variation we're going to do is going to be our morning routine/real life ad copy angle. And this is from a perspective of a UGC creator.

We're going to add another text variation here which is going to be the travel and adventure angle. And so we want each angle to appeal to different audiences so that way we can see which one performs best. And we're going to break this up so it's easier to read because people like to scan. And then we'll add another text variation which is going to be the style/function variation. So this is how they would style it and the function behind the actual product.

So, this says this quilted down jacket pairs with jeans or leggings as we can see. And then we can come down here and adjust some of this as well. And then we'll add another variation which is the problem solution angle which is tired of bulky winter coats. This is the perfect one. It's sleek. And then once again, we're breaking this text up. And the reason we're testing new creatives is we want to be able to identify new ad angles we haven't tried before and new creative angles we haven't tested as well.

And then the before and after which pairs perfectly with this video because she's trying it on. And there we go. We have our five ad copy variations. Once again, we could allow Meta to use these AI versions. You could proofread these and see if there's something you want to use. For now, I'm just going to turn them off and move on to the headlines. Once again, we'll always include our product headline because that has been proven time and time and again to convert.

And then we're going to come up with some more unique ad copy headlines. And now that we have our five ad copy headlines that are totally different from what we tested before, we'll drop in our descriptions. Once again, these can be call outs like free shipping, just dropped. And we want these to be short so that way they will actually fit in whenever people see our video. And now that we have our five ad descriptions, we're going to once again choose shop now for this.

And we can build out the next five ad variations. And so this will be our try on UGC video. And then we're going to hit duplicate. And this is a totally different variation from what we were testing in our other campaign. We're going to swap this. We'll make sure to add our URL. And then we'll swap our creative. The next one is going to be an image. And we'll make sure this text fits in. Everything else looks good. We'll make this one original.

And then we'll hit next. And then we'll skip this part once again. And then we need to come back down here because I saw that it was going to add in all this stuff. We need to turn this off because we don't want these. We don't want to adjust brightness. We don't want to reveal. We'll leave relevant comments and enhance CTA. Add music. Text improvements is fine as well. All right. So now that we have this variation, this is our image and it's meet our new.

So this is introducing our product. Meet our new featherweight jacket. All right. Then we'll hit duplicate. And then we'll come down here and swap this for our next unique ad video format. In this next video, we're going to be testing is the fall-based creative, which they're in a fall setting reviewing the product. So, this is a fall-based UGC video and review fall-based review. And so, this is another unique ad format.

So, we have our try-on video, we have a fall-based review video, and then we'll duplicate. And what you'll notice is every format that we're doing is totally different. No one UGC creator is alike. So the next video is going to be our styling video and this one has with music on. So this is a music on the video and it's somebody who's styling this and showing it off. A little similar to our tryon but definitely different.

And then our final variation is with no person. So that way people can imagine themselves in it. And it looks like a story. It's natural. It's raw. And we're showcasing the product. So this is going to be our camera angle story POV creative. So we have a POV, we have a tryon, we have a styling, we have a meet our new and then we have a fall-based review. So every one of these are totally different ad creative formats that we can see what works best.

And then from there what we can do is we can create variations of these once we see what's performing. But ideally what we have is 100% totally different creatives every time. So that way we can ensure we find creatives that work. So, now that we have our creative testing campaign set up with our five totally unique ad creatives, what we're going to do is we're going to duplicate these into two more audiences. And every time we have a new batch of creatives, every week, we're going to be uploading another five to seven new variations inside of our creative testing to see what's working.

And we'll be transferring it out once it's proven into our proven interest testing campaign. This is the most effective way of being able to scale and ensure dedicated budget. Once again, make sure these are set to purchase. So, we'll do Adventure Travel and we'll just create one more audience. We don't need that many audiences for creative testing because we're just going to be dropping creatives in here. So, now we have the same five ads in each of these audiences.

So, now we have both our creative testing where we're testing totally net new creative ideas. Once they are performing and getting a good rorowaz and purchases, we'll migrate them into our interest testing where this will become our proven campaign at scale. Next up is going to be a retargeting campaign. This is where we retarget past people who have seen our ads, engaged with our socials, and we're going to go ahead and name this a retargeting.

We're going to set this on the adset level, and this is going to be our website. 180 days and IGF Facebook engagers 365 days. And what we're doing here is we're optimizing for purchases once again and we're going to be retargeting anybody who's visited our website, anybody who's engaged with our ads. And we'll come into our custom audiences here and we're going to hit create new. And we're going to build out our retargeting.

And so this is going to be people who visited our website in the last 180 days. So, this will be website visitors 180 and we'll hit create audience and we'll be able to retarget these people. And then we'll do an Instagram engagers 365. And then we'll do a Facebook engagers as well. So, this is anybody who's engaged with our page. and we'll turn off use as suggested because what this does is this ensures that it is a proper retargeting.

If you have this selected, this will not be a retargeting campaign. It will reach people outside of these audiences. So, we want to ensure this is turned off to make it a 100% retargeting audience. And then we'll add in our exclusions of past purchasers of 180 days. And that is our retargeting audience. And what we're going to do is we're going to drop in all of our best performing ads in here. And I'm going to assume that you already have your best performing ads.

And we'll come in here and we'll just grab those out of our interest testing. And we'll just grab these out of our interest testing. And all you do is either press control or command C and this will copy those five ads. We can come back to campaigns. We can select retargeting. We'll select our retargeting audience and we'll press commandV. And this paste all of those ads inside of our retargeting automatically. And we'll have our best performing ads inside of retargeting.

And you can also launch a carousel, a dynamic carousel as well for testing. But for now, we're going to have the best ads in there. And then we'll hit find and replace. And we'll just remove the dash copy. So that way our data is aligned on the back end when we view it in Shopify. And so now what we have is our retargeting, our creative testing, and our interest proven campaign. Now this is the base setup for what you need to run Facebook ads.

The only other audience you'll have is an advantage plus where you have 15 of your highest performing ads. But in order to do that, you need to be able to already have your creative testing going, rotating those over. Once you get up to your highest performing 15 ads, you're going to take all of those and paste them into an advantage plus. All right. So, now that you understand the structure for having your interest testing, your creative testing, and retargeting, you can officially publish these and ensure they're all actively running.

The next step is understanding how to optimize and scale these once they've been running for at least a week to two weeks. And I'm going to show you what that looks like after you've gotten this campaign live so you can understand the direction of where you're going. So, here we are inside of an ad account, and it is the exact same structure that I just set up with you. They're averaging a 4.76x rorowaz. They've spent $18,000, generated over roughly 1,200 purchases at an average cost of $15 per purchase, which is absolutely crushing it for them.

And as you can see, their best performing audience is retargeting, which makes sense because we're retargeting people who are already interested in the product. We have our creative testing which is allowing us to find new ideas and new creatives to get the highest return in ad spin which makes sense. And then we have our highest spin campaign which is our interest testing/provening campaign where we're rotating those winning creatives into our scaling campaign which you'll expect the row to be slightly lower because we're spending more money at scale.

So this is exactly how the structure should look with data populated in it. And as we go into our interest testing you'll see the different audiences. Some are scaled up based off higher return in ad spend. Some are scaled down based off of lower return in ad spend. And you can see each of these are performing and we're able to scale them up over time to be able to get more purchases. And as you see, there's lots of ads in here.

And that's because we've been rotating some of the creative winners over into our proven campaign. And you'll notice there is no single ad that's eating up all the specific spend. The entire goal is with unique creatives, you're able to layer your purchases across multiple ads and not have to worry about creative fatigue. And every week we're dropping in these creatives into our creative testing where we're identifying ones with higher return and ad spin.

So these are totally unique ad ideas that we've never tested before. And what we're doing is we're taking some of the best ads, copying them, and pasting them into our interest testing. So, this is the exact setup that you need to be able to perform with Facebook ads over time and is the one of the best structures you could use for 2026. So, now I've shown you exactly what the structure looks like when these three campaigns have been running.

Now, I'm going to break down how to analyze your data and understand your metrics the proper way. And the first step to doing that is is by calculating what your break even rorowaz is. So that way we can get into the portion where you know what to scale and how to optimize. To be able to do that, you're simply going to come to this tool, which I've linked below the video, and you're going to enter in your AOVs, your cost of goods, and all of this information here to calculate exactly what your break even rorowaz is.

And your break even is essentially anything above that, you know, it's profitable. And anything below your break even is not profitable. And what we're going to do once you filled out all this information and you find out what your break even rorowaz is, we can then come back to meta ads manager and set up our conditional formatting rules. What we're going to do is set up a rule for our return and ad spin. And we're going to do this if it is greater than and this is going to be our goal rorowaz.

So we have our break even and we want to shoot for a goal rorowaz higher than just our break even. just being at a 1.7, it's profitable, but it's not that exciting. So, we're going to go for something that's greater than our actual break even, which we're going to set to a two. And maybe we're happy with scaling at a two because it's profitable enough for us to scale and we're making money. So, we're going to set that to a two rows.

And this is going to be greater than or equal to. We'll hit save. And then we're going to create another one which is in range. And this is going to be in the range of our break even. So, anything slightly above our break even, we're not super, you know, thrilled with, but it's still profitable. So, that way we know. And we'll do yellow. And then anything below less than or equal to our break even is going to be red because that means it's unprofitable.

And what this is going to allow us to see is our color coding of our return and ad spend. And as we go into our interest testing campaign, we can see what's, you know, performing in the profit range. And we'll notice that one is slightly above break even and not performing that well. So what we could do is this tells us we need to scale this back to around $50. And after a few days, if it starts to perform, we can then leave it alone and scale it back up.

Or if it continues to get worse, we might just turn this audience off. And so let's look at what it would be as we switch up some of these time frames just to get a full idea. And as you can see, that one's in the red. And so after we scale it back and see if it comes back to the green. If not, we're just turning that off. So you're going to scale based off of these conditional formatting rules. And so if we're looking at our retargeting audiences, we'll see that we have a very healthy rorowaz of a 6x.

So we would come back to that campaign and scale it to 100 daily because we're happy with that return ad spin. We want to scale up. And with our interest testing campaign, we're simply just going to rank it by rorowaz. And we're going to scale back what's underperforming and scale up what's overperforming. So since we're at a 5x here, we're spending less on an audience compared to this one. So we're going to bump this to $100.

We're going to then come down here. This one's at $85. We'll scale this up to 100 as well. And then this one is performing well. We'll leave this alone. And then this one's at a 4.5. will leave alone as well. If this one was still active, we would slightly scale back. So now on the ad level, whenever we look at these conditional formatting rules, what we're going to do is decide whether or not we keep or turn off an ad based off of these rules.

So here, these ads are performing, so we'll leave those alone. We then have this ad that is at a 1.49 with only four cells. This these ads are doing better. This one's doing better. We really don't have that many cells on this one. So let's look at last seven. and it's just not performing. So, we would turn this ad off based off of our rule. Everything else we would leave alone, we could see if this ad here maybe has spent $30, which is roughly two times our average cost per result.

So, in that case, we would likely turn this off as well. And so, that is essentially how you can optimize your ads based off conditional formatting rules and know when to scale your Facebook ads on your audience level and on your campaign level. So now I just went through a toz exactly how to set up, run, and scale Facebook ads in 2026, even after the Adromeda update. One of the most important steps when running Facebook ads is actually not even the ads themselves.

It's the landing pages that you're running these ads to. In fact, if you do this right, you can 2x, 3x, even 10x your sales without spending a single extra penny on paid ads. And I put exactly how to do this in this next video for you here. I'll see you on the inside.