Creative Testing Tool Bugs – Jon Loomer Digital

Have you had issues with the creative testing tool? I’ve heard from several people now, so something is up.

The Problem

Advertisers are reporting a consistent problem. When testing multiple ads, Meta isn’t distributing budget evenly during the test. In fact, Meta’s barely spending anything at all on the test in some cases.

This, of course, wouldn’t be the expected behavior. The entire point of a creative test is to force budget to your ads to see what would happen when given impressions.

A Reasonable Explanation?

Initially, when I started hearing about this issue, I assumed user error. I went through a list of potential explanations like audience size, test start date, overall budget used, and more.

I’ve used the creative testing tool several times without problems. It distributes budget evenly between all ads in the test, as expected. Every time. It doesn’t matter how the ads are performing.

But enough advertisers have complained about this now that I can’t ignore it. Is there a specific setting or situation where this happens for some tests?

Is it just a bug? Because I have a hard time believing it’s by design.

Still New

The problem is that there isn’t official documentation on it yet to know if this is normal. And if it’s normal, why? This experience doesn’t make sense.

And if you’re wondering, Meta Support isn’t particularly helpful on this. They tend to be quick to share a definitive reason, but it’s almost always inconsistent with reality.

What are you seeing?