The 2026 Meta Reality Check

23:03Jon Loomer:Well, the answer to some of my questions so we can wrap up that. No, I'm just kidding. So I was going to ask you some follow-up questions related to what you said about one, the business needs, such as, you know, promoting multiple products and the one about testing by, you know, you said the creative testing tool. Are you referring to the meta testing tool that the one that you can test up to five creatives within an ad or an external tool?

23:34Brian Roisentul:Yeah. So I think it's five now. There have been variations of it that's up to 10. I had that for a while and then it went away. So I think that was just like a test of the test. But yeah, and look, for bigger budgets, that can be a little restricting that it's only up to five. But I found it to be really helpful to be part of my process when I've got, okay, I've got this new set of ads. it could be as few as two ads because you can't test existing ads with this creative testing tool, which I don't completely understand. So that's another reason why I would do it from the start. So I duplicate a couple of ads, edit them.

24:15Brian Roisentul:These are going to be new ads and be part of the test. And then once the test is over, those ads keep running. But normally, because otherwise, if you want to test later, you got to duplicate them. And then that all defeats the purpose because you're duplicating them. Now you've got competing ads that are the exact same and it doesn't even make sense. So yeah, I feel like I'm in the minority on people who love that tool, but that's a huge part of that process.

24:39Jon Loomer:Yeah, but the thing is, I mean, I'm talking about opening a real, you know, businesses we work with and not what I hear on the internet, right? And they have a clear need these days. are two type of, let's say, clients that we have had or currently have. Those who say, we don't have enough time, money, resources, or will to create new ad creatives. So work with the ad. And those that say, we have infinite. We can tell us. So now it's the same time. Play with it and test and tell me the winning ones. So the first one, again, not easy. not hard to please. It would be hard to get results or not, but it's what we have.

25:30Jon Loomer:I think that these days for the, let's say, between quotes, unlimited resources brands, they do want to push multiple products. They do want to find winning angles, not just because, because they want to replicate what works and try to do more of that and remove the fat between quotes. So a testing campaign is tricky and we have never been a fan of those. You test those, I don't know, ABO, whatever you want, and then you replicate that in the Nevergreen campaign. It doesn't work. But these days what we see is that we have, I don't know, a thousand ads literally running the same time, the same ad set.

26:09Jon Loomer:Three of them, literally three of them, and it's not because of budget constraint. Three of them will get spent. So they'll spend thousands of dollars each of them, and they won't get, they won't leave any room for the others to run. What do you do in those situations? Because I'm sure many people are in the same spot.

26:31Brian Roisentul:Yeah, it's funny because it really depends because sometimes not running is relative, right? So in most cases, all the ads get some impressions, right? So it might not be very many impressions, But what I see in that case is if it's getting impressions, then it's still contributing in some way. It doesn't matter whether it's being responsible for the conversions or not. It also helps prevent ad fatigue, creative fatigue, because you've got multiple combinations going. But I would say that when ads just stop, because basically if Meta stops showing an ad, after 14 days, they'll just turn it off.

27:14and when that happens that to me is a signal that yeah that ad wasn't good enough and uh i need to create more ads potentially i think the problem with like you you mentioned two completely opposite

27:27Brian Roisentul:sides right the one that doesn't really provide anything in some cases that could be helpful in the other other hand they want to keep cycling in new ads all the time you don't need to keep cycling in new ads all the time. The way I see it is if you're getting great results, just let it go. Like let it eat. Let those ads that are doing so well do their thing. Like you don't need to introduce new stuff. The main reason you'd be introducing new ads, it's to solve a problem that your results are okay, but you want them to be better. And so it's like, okay, well, what worked before? What could we do?

28:05Brian Roisentul:What didn't work? And again, we're going to look at what worked before and what didn't work is more of a general now. We're not looking at specific headlines so much and specific primary text and images. It's just like, in general, what has been working? What has met a kind of favored? And to do something along those lines to learn from that. And also maybe just as important, what wasn't getting shown at all? Let's avoid that. Let's new ads in the spirit of creative diversification should be very unique. Otherwise, in terms of visuals and whatnot, compared to what's running, because if they're not unique, that's also where Matt is going to say, why do we need these ads?

28:52Brian Roisentul:We don't need to show these ads. They're already running and they just won't run those. So I would say, yeah, the infinite resources can be a challenge because you don't need to constantly be running new ads. That's not necessarily helpful. We should be running new ads because it's helpful and to help improve ad, improve performance, but otherwise enjoy the ride if you're getting good results. Because the high budgets, as long as you got a bunch of ads in there and a bunch of options, you'll be fine for a while. They'll stop working eventually or as well, and then you can start adding too. Yeah, that's interesting.

29:31And I think about it the same way.

29:34Jon Loomer:Sometimes, you know, people are eager to doing more, testing more. Otherwise, you're not working, right? You're doing your job. Sometimes not doing is doing more than or less harm than if we do more.

29:49Brian Roisentul:Yeah. And I think the other thing, look, a lot of my advice ultimately comes from what Meta has said officially. Because otherwise you're just based in theory, sometimes conspiracy theories that aren't helpful. And one of the things that Meta really wants us to do is stop looking at the minutai. I've never used that word in my life. the things like that, the headlines, the primary text, the individual ads even. And like being obsessed over which ad is doing well, which ad is not, turning things off and whatnot. Meta wants us to be looking at the performance in aggregate. So if we've got 20 ads within an ad set, who cares about how each individual asset or ad is performing?

30:39Brian Roisentul:Are you getting good performance in aggregate? Great. Then don't touch anything. You don't need to turn off certain ads to force ads to run in all that business. If you got... You're saying...

30:50Jon Loomer:Yes, go ahead.

30:52Brian Roisentul:Well, then kind of the flip side, if you've got multiple ad sets and using CBO, don't obsess over how an individual ad set's doing. Is your campaign doing well? Right? So point of that is like the people usually who want us to be constantly testing, constantly testing creative and whatnot are those who are obsessed with the individual things that Meta doesn't really want us to obsess over. That's where the breakdown effect happens, that Meta says, where we make too much out of small samples and think it means more than it does and thinks we think we can outsmart the algorithm and we can't and we just make results worse.

31:30Brian Roisentul:So that's another adjustment I've been able to make over the last year or two is like, It's so much easier when you look at things in aggregate as opposed to, well, this ad got 10 impressions and got three conversions, so it must be amazing. Why isn't Meta showing it more? You know, obsessing over that kind of stuff, it's not.

31:47Jon Loomer:And so what you're saying, are you suggesting just to double check that as long as things are working fine overall, we shouldn't be turning off ads that are underperforming? Yeah. Yeah.

32:03Brian Roisentul:And look, the only reason I would turn off ads is like a last resort. Probably in the case of where you got a client who's, it's really hard to get new creative from. So they're not giving you new stuff. So it's like, okay, well, we'll try this. Am I just showing these ads? I'm obviously not getting good results in aggregate. They're not showing these. They've never really shown these. What would happen if Meta actually did show those? Turn them off. I wouldn't necessarily expect anything out of that. A couple things to remember. First, usually Meta shows ads or doesn't show ads for a reason. Second thing is what Meta is showing today isn't necessarily going to be what Meta shows tomorrow.

32:46Brian Roisentul:So turning off ads prevents that from happening, prevents that switch. And especially in the case of creative fatigue and whatnot, like if you've got 10 ads in there and Meta's favoring three, don't just turn off the other seven or even a couple of them because they may end up be increasing in usefulness later on, just not right now.

33:11Jon Loomer:About the period of time to look at, because I think it's another misconception, but I think different media buyers, different playbook, but in this case, I think there's a common mistake, right? Like the people may look at the period of time Yeah.

33:30Brian Roisentul:And look, this is something, it's kind of made more sense to me lately, especially if you're optimizing for a purchase. A couple of things happen. So whether you add new ads or you increase budget or whatever, advertisers freak out about a two to three day window. Like you're getting terrible results for two to three days or whatever it is. And that's when they start questioning everything they believe in and they turn things off. They're like, oh, why did I raise my budget? This is crashing and burning. I got to bring it back down. But when you understand technically what's actually happening.

34:08Brian Roisentul:So if you're selling something and you put new ads out there or you increase the budget. A bunch of people are going to be seeing these new ads for the first time. And some of those people may click on it the first time they see it. and convert. That's not normal user behavior. It's a process. There's a reason why purchase seven-day click, one-day view makes a lot of sense, right? It's a commitment. You might need to see an ad many times. You may need to talk to a business partner or spouse or whatever about making this commitment. You may need to be convinced through different types of ads about why this is a good fit for me.

34:52So when you've got either new ads or you start reaching a broader

34:58Brian Roisentul:group of people for the first time, you're restarting that cycle. And as a result, you should not be looking at those results for a one day period, two days. Look, I obsess over daily performance too. I know it's not healthy. It's just what we do. But ultimately, you should be looking at seven-day windows, if not more. And I know we're talking mainly about bigger budgets, but even with bigger budgets, depending on the price point and your cost per acquisition on those, you might not be dealing with huge numbers. So you could have a large range of what's good and what's bad or what seems to be good and bad.

35:43Brian Roisentul:One of the most important things I think it's important for the advertisers need to understand. Meta's main job is showing your ad to people most likely to convert. After that, people are not robots. Meta is not capable of forcing someone to purchase. So if your results go down for a few days, it might have nothing to do with anything different that Meta was doing or that you did. Now, there's competition. there are other things that are happening in the background too, it just may have reached people at a bad time or that group of people at a bad time. Obsessing over a couple days is crazy. I mean, I went through this myself recently on a new ad set that I created, and it was not doing well.

36:38Brian Roisentul:I mean, it didn't make any sense that it wasn't doing well because it was based on stuff that had been working well. And I stuck it out. And after a week, it started getting a little bit better. It's been about two weeks now. And now all of a sudden it's the best it's been. It's really easy to abandon it before that happens. But I think that, yeah, it's a common mistake. We obsess over those small windows and we need to give it time.

37:04Jon Loomer:What do you think about or where do you stand in 2026? Because things change, of course. cost caps, cost per result, results or cost per target results or target ROAS, let's say. Where do you stand there? Because I know it's a good practice on Google. Let's say you start running a campaign and then you want to set a target cost per result or a target ROAS, but a meta, it has never been the case, at least passively adopted. There are many people who use that, but where do you stand there on that now in 2026?

37:38Brian Roisentul:So here's the way I look at it. When you optimize for a conversion, or the performance goal is maximize number of conversions. Meta's goal is to get you as many conversions as possible within your budget. So Meta's already trying to get you the cheapest possible conversions. The thought is by using a cost per result goal or big cap. And by the way, am I the only one who missed the definition of big cap changed. Did you know this? So like this is going to be an aside here, but Meta either changed the way it works or just describes it differently now. But Meta used to even discourage people from using big caps saying like, unless you have all this data to understand what to bid in the auction, then don't even bother with it.

38:29Brian Roisentul:So the way it read at least is like you were bidding on impressions. You weren't actually bidding on the action. The cost per result goal is different. Big cap. But now a big cap actually is a cost cap. So you're setting the most you want to pay for that action, not impression. And is very clear about that in the definition. So maybe I'm the only one who didn't know that, but that's changed. That's changed. So point being, now you got cost cap, cost per result goal. They're both very similar things. One's more of an average, one's an actual cap. So the danger is what you're basically trying to do is outsmart the algorithm, right?

39:06Brian Roisentul:You're saying don't spend more than X on a purchase or conversion, whatever that conversion is, or don't spend more than on average, more than this amount. I don't use it. I'm not, look, there are people out there who swear by it. I think it is certainly risky because what is ultimately likely to happen is you're going to throttle it because it's like, look, I'm trying, Meta's like, I'm trying to get you the cheapest conversions possible. You're telling me to get me even cheaper. I'm spending like 20 % of your budget now. It's not working. And now slowly but surely, it just stops delivering entirely.

39:43Brian Roisentul:Now, could there potentially be a strategy out there where you increase your budget to a crazy amount, set a cost per result goal or big cap, and maybe it works. I mean, I guess, but I know there's some people swear by it. It seems kind of counterintuitive to me because Meta's already trying to get you the cheapest possible conversions.

40:06Jon Loomer:I gotta say I'm not a fan of that. I have tried that in the past and we currently have some of those running, even though it's not something that we want. And we do acknowledge that first sometimes we work with, It works well. Some campaigns work well, some don't. What you said, a high budget, astronomically high, it doesn't spend always, but when it spends, it's an extra thing. But for some other clients that we try the same, it will spend, even if it's not getting to that target ROAS result, pick up, whatever, and it will spend all the money at once with that high budget. And it was like, what did you spend that?

40:49Jon Loomer:But if we had, we set a very low, like, so, but the theory behind what people say or what people that who use these say is that meta will look, as you said, for the lowest cost per conversion. And sometimes that could result in a lower AOV than if either be the higher. So with a higher bid, it might get a higher AOV purchase as well. So again, I know I'm always a fan of saying, you know, you do you. I wanted to get a sense of whether it's something that maybe you're using now because maybe it can change. I know Meta added some controls or some signals for telling Meta which customer segments or by demographic, I think it's ages, gender or so.

41:36Jon Loomer:Value rules. Are your top spenders. So have you tried any of those? Does it work?

41:44Brian Roisentul:I love value rules, but not for that purpose. So it wouldn't be in addition to bidding, I would use value rules to solve a problem, right? Again, it'd be because Meta doesn't know about customer lifetime value. It's information that you have that Meta doesn't have. And so in the case of purchases, it would be because you know that like, look, Meta's spending a lot of money trying to get the cheapest possible purchase. And so as a result, they're focusing on women age 65 and up. because they're making the most purchases. But you have backend info showing, yeah, they're buying, but they're only buying once.

42:28Brian Roisentul:So it's not about initial value. Otherwise you just optimize for value. It's about lifetime value. And meanwhile, you've got this age group that's 35 to 44 that when they buy, you've got them for life and they come back and they come back and they come back. Meta doesn't know that. So that's where you could use value rules to do one or the other. You could either increase your bid on that 35 to 44 or decrease your bid on that 65 and up where Meta was focusing there so they don't keep focusing. Absolutely, that is a great tool to use to increase the value of your results. So not just purchase. I use it for leads, especially because I use that 65 and up as an example.

43:20Brian Roisentul:But that's precisely what happens with my leads. Meta can get me all kinds of cheap leads from people 65 and up. But I don't think there are a lot. There are some 65 and up advertisers out there. There just aren't a ton. So Meta spending 30 % of my budget there doesn't make any sense. What happened in the past before value rules is I would eliminate 65 and up when that happened. But when I did that, Meta just moved all that budget that was going to 65 and up to 55 to 64. Again, an age group I'm fine targeting. I just don't want to dedicate a huge percentage of my budget there. But they were doing that because I could get cheap leads.

44:02Brian Roisentul:In the back end, I see they're cheap, but they're not necessarily as valuable as the sweet spot of 35 to 44 or 54. So again, that was counterproductive, but I had to just eliminate those ages. Now with value rules, what I do is I lower the bid on 65 and up by 50%, lower the bid on 55 and up by 20%, still spends on both of them. but it's like 3 % of my budget on 65 and up now, and I don't know, 10 % or so for 55 to 64. And it's just a much more natural curve that's representative of what I'm used to seeing that's reflected on the backend. So that's a prime example of using value rules to solve those kinds of problems.

44:49Brian Roisentul:You can also use it for things like placement. Now, this would normally not be if you're optimizing for a conversion, but if you optimize for link clicks, landing page views, which I wouldn't recommend, But obviously the audience network is a pile of garbage and you'll get a ton of clicks from audience network in that case. Typically, we just remove the placement. My goal now is like, let's just keep Advantage Plus on. Who knows what kind of magical fairy dust that adds by keeping Advantage Plus on all the time, but I'm not going to fight it if you can just lower the bid by 90 % on audience network in those cases.

45:22Brian Roisentul:So yeah, value rules is, It's funny that Meta brought value rules in at the same time they are taking all this targeting control away because there is a danger of misusing value rules when you don't need to use them and just driving up your costs. but that's why I continually stress use value rules to solve a problem a true problem you've proven exists based on data you have that meta doesn't that you otherwise would have solved by restricting the algorithm now you don't have to because you have value rules

45:56Jon Loomer:we are almost wrapping up I know we are I'm about to open the door to a very long and interesting topic but we have a lot of you know we cover a lot of interesting stuff that I think that are very relevant for today's, you know, media buying era, everyday tasks, what everyone is doing right now. And I speak with many of them, you speak with a thousand of them. And I guess that they all have similar questions, you know, they have so many options, so many tools, but we only need to stick to some best practices and that's what's working for everyone. So I wanted to make sure we covered those and we did.

46:34Jon Loomer:But one last question under a few minutes, which I know is hard because I cannot skip that in 2026 is how are you using AI for meta ads? Or how do you see some people you know you trust using meta ads? Is it for optimizing? Is it for getting ideas? Is it for reporting? What do you see out there these days?

46:59Brian Roisentul:I'm definitely using it. Look, I'm no AI expert. So like those out there who are, I know are doing some absolutely insane things with AI. I'm more of your novice in the area, but I use AI a lot. Not a lot in terms of like meta ads, processes and whatnot. Now, absolutely. It helps me with, I'll sit down with it to talk through strategies or when I say strategies, like messaging angles, coming up with rebranding of things. Like I had my weekly recaps, which is an email that goes out every week and it's like a stupid generic name. And I went through, again, I don't just accept everything that AI gives me, but it's about having a conversation about talking it through and telling it what I like and what I don't like.

47:45Brian Roisentul:And came up with that, that is now called The Loop. I came up with branding with it for it and everything that was talking through it with AI. I initially set up some API integration to create a dashboard using ClogCode. I just didn't find any value in it. I couldn't find a good way to surface more helpful information I wasn't getting from Meta's main interface because the API can be limited in some cases. So there's certain data that wasn't available to me in the API. So I was like, well, I mean, that was fun. That was cool. But don't use it. Messaging options. Like, look, it's not easy to come up with five primary texts, five headlines.

48:24Brian Roisentul:Generating some options, at least as a starting point. Again, talking through what I'm looking for, generating the starting point, making some edits and whatnot, helpful. What I use it most for, honestly, is on the more, excuse me. I can't get into all this stuff I've been doing with Cloud Code. Honestly, it blows my mind. It's solved a lot of problems related to, I'm not using Cloud or anything else to like publish new content for me, right? When I use it, it's either creating reports for me that I was doing manually or helping surface really important information that I had to dig for. Or it's helping create these more real-time, updated pieces of content that's clearly not written by me because it's in the third party saying, this is what John thinks about X.

49:16Brian Roisentul:and that's where man I know I'm just scratching the surface on this stuff but it's just it's really helped me on the the content planning and keeping things fresh side which is like the one of the biggest bottlenecks I think for me like I publish content five days a week in terms of blog posts videos and podcast episodes so whether it's like taking a transcript like the script that I have for a podcast and spitting out a readable transcript of it you know just little things like that AI is sprinkled all over what I do without taking it over by any means

49:55Jon Loomer:it's every conversation I have these days it's about the same thing you know whether it's for e-com or outside e-com it's uncertainty excitement overwhelm because everything is overwhelming right now and everything is uncertain and everything is exciting. So it's, we have all the like fear of missing out, like FOMO, it's like very real right now. I like download my automation for implementing a thousand ads in one click and this and like, wait, like it's too many.

50:28Brian Roisentul:I think that. There's, I've got two sides pulling at me, right? The utility of AI and how it can make my life better and easier. But also I see it in my feed every day. Like I don't want to be that guy. These dudes who every time I publish anything, I generated comment on there. Like, what are you doing? This isn't valuable. It's not useful. Or they're generating entire like courses and stuff based on AI. Then like they didn't do anything. It's not useful. So I don't want to be on that side. I still want to be human involved because I think I'm still an important part of this process. So, yeah, it's a tough place to be, though.

51:14John, I could keep going for hours, but I want to be respectful with your time.

51:19Jon Loomer:I want to thank you for coming on the podcast for the fourth time. It's always a pleasure to, you know, brainstorm ideas, to, you know, pick your brain, because I think you have a lot of, you know, like valuable nuggets to communicate and a lot of valuable lessons to teach. And in fact, correct me if I'm wrong, but you still do it, right? You have your power heaters club where it used to be. So why don't you tell people who are listening to this, what do you do about that and where they can find more information about it?

51:51Brian Roisentul:Yeah, so I've had my private community now for 12 years, I think. And what it's intended for, I think, has evolved quite a bit. So number one, if you need a community of like-minded advertisers with a wide variety of experiences and niches and expertise, and you just need someone to go to to ask questions, great place. Okay, so more than 200 advertisers to help you. But most important is the real-time stuff. Once a week, I host strategy sessions. usually about 25 or so show up anywhere from an hour to two hours we just talk so you've got a problem bring it to the group we'll talk it through help you find a solution my favorite time of the week beyond that I've got now which again I used AI to help consolidate all of my content which is really hard to consume because it's a lot because I said I published 250 pieces of content last year and I'll do the same thing this year, into an updated ad brief of what I believe in on 18 different topics that will remain updated.

53:02Brian Roisentul:They're only for elite members. And then my AI generated chat bot, if you just need a back and forth with somebody, somebody, a thing that's trained on my content, trained on those ad briefs to talk through strategy, great benefit. And you can book one-on-ones with me at a deep discount as as members so you can learn more about that at johnloomer.com

53:27Jon Loomer:slash elite and i mean amazing and i'm happy to hear that you're you still have that chatbot going on i saw the questions from last year episode that was there so he has it turned in turn one

53:41Brian Roisentul:did you do a birthday party or so yeah well no it i've had it for more than a couple years now So it started as just being on my main site on johnlimmer.com, but I made it a paid benefit because people were using it so much. Honestly, I could tell people were using it to do things I wasn't really comfortable with, like to run their business kind of thing, right? Like, this isn't great. So I made it as a paid benefit. I've still got one on johnlimmer.com. It's just way more limited. It's supposed to have short answers and it's not trained on as much. so but yeah it's that's been a fun thing too trying to constantly fine-tune it to make it as valuable as possible be as reflective of my kind of strategy and recommendations so yeah it's been a nice little benefit.

54:30Jon Loomer:John well thank you again for being here I had a blast I admire you and I always enjoy your conversations so thank you.

54:40Brian Roisentul:Thanks Brian looking forward to the the fifth year and coming back.