Meta advertising best practices today look nothing like what they did a few years ago. It’s obvious that most agencies and advertisers have struggled to keep up.
In some cases, it’s because they’re trying to apply strategies that were relevant years ago but aren’t now. In others, they’re confused because of conflicting information shouted on the internet. More often than not, they’re doing things that make results worse.
I’ve seen so many troubled ad accounts and campaigns. While every account is unique, there are seven common mistakes that I see over and over again. They’re so common that when I know results are suboptimal, I look for these things first.
Here are the seven most common mistakes agencies and advertisers make. Their bad setup and old strategies are only hurting their clients.
1. Incorrect Access to Account Assets
While the mistakes listed below can all impact performance, this first problem may be the most frustrating to business owners and the future agencies that manage them.
When setting up an agency’s access to assets, it’s critical that it happens like this…
1. The client has a business portfolio (previously known as a business manager).
2. The agency has a separate business portfolio.
3. The client owns all related assets (ad account, datasets, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts).
4. The agency is added to the client’s business portfolio as a partner.
5. The agency is granted relevant access to each asset.
When set up this way, the client owns their assets and the agency gets access to what they need in order to manage the ads. When the relationship ends (it will), the agency is simply removed as a partner. The new agency takes their place.
One of the most common mistakes that agencies make here is that they’ll own some of the most critical assets, like a Facebook page. When the relationship ends, that agency goes silent. And then the client is unable to manage that page on their own or give access to another agency.
This is hell for the client and their future agency partner. Do not do this. It doesn’t matter if it’s easier to set everything up yourself. The client needs ownership.
While an argument can be made for the agency setting up a separate ad account for a client that the agency owns, it’s typically motivated by an irrational feeling that strategy and results are proprietary. Hiding the ad account from clients buries deeper issues in your process.
Can the client simply pick up where you left off and get the same results? Could another agency do the same? If you think this, you’re putting far too much value in campaign construction and strategy. Your value, if you offer any, is found in how you adjust to day-to-day problems as they happen.
2. Audience Segments Not Defined or Incomplete
This is the first thing I like to look at. What an agency or advertiser has already done will say a whole lot about their quality of work.
If I go to Advertising Settings and see this for Audience Segments, I know we’re in trouble…
This means that Audience Segments weren’t defined. And if Audience Segments weren’t defined, it means that the business has no idea how much remarketing happens by default when running a Sales campaign.
The most obvious result is that we’ll see a heavy emphasis on remarketing strategies (see the next item below). But the reality is that the breakdown by Audience Segments can also highlight a delivery problem, where Meta dedicates too much of your budget to remarketing using algorithmic targeting. If you don’t know that, you can’t adjust for it.
Even if Audience Segments are defined, I often see that they’re defined incorrectly. There is no indication that these definitions impact delivery (they’re for reporting transparency). But we’ll often see advertisers use random audiences to define the Engaged Audience group in particular, thinking that this will help direct delivery to that group.
I recommend being as thorough as possible when defining Audience Segments.
Engaged Audience: All Website Visitors (180 Days), Entire Email List, Lead Form Custom Audiences (90 Days), etc. (whatever else is applicable)
Existing Customers: All Purchase Events (730 Days), All Segmented Purchases From Email List, etc. (whatever else is applicable)
Limiting these segments to only recent website visitors or your most valuable customers won’t change how your ads are delivered. All it does is mislead you into believing that there’s less remarketing happening by default.
3. Heavy Lean on Remarketing
Numbers 2 and 3 on this list are often connected, but they don’t need to be.
If you don’t know that remarketing happens automatically through algorithmic targeting, you’re likely to believe that Meta needs you to isolate your remarketing audiences to get the best results. And those results will make you believe that you’re making the right decision (more on that in a moment).
There are rare exceptions when remarketing makes sense. The most obvious examples…
Selling High-Ticket Products: You aren’t spending enough to exit the learning phase, or get even close. You’re not getting results by targeting broadly. But you can isolate a small group who are deep in your funnel with ads to reinforce messages they are also getting via email.
When using this approach, though, you understand that your ads aren’t working alone. High-ticket sales require reinforcement, so your ads are making your email messaging more effective while your email messaging will make your ads more effective.
Optimizing for Top-of-Funnel Actions: I don’t generally recommend ad sets optimized for link clicks, landing page views, ThruPlay views, or any other engagement-level action. Since Meta’s delivery algorithm is only focused on getting you as many of those actions as possible, there’s no consideration for getting quality results.
So if you’re going to optimize for this type of action, remarketing can make sense — particularly if it’s restricted to your email list or engaged website visitors. This helps prevent spend that results in empty actions.
But these two are exceptions and should be used sparingly. If I see a heavy emphasis on remarketing, it’s likely doing a bad job of driving incremental results.
4. Inflated Conversion Results
And that takes us here.
You want an agency that obsesses over generating high-quality, meaningful results. They’re not looking to impress clients with inflated results that don’t reflect reality.
Use the Breakdown by Attribution Settings to see what percentage of the reported conversions are 1-day click versus 1-day view, 1-day engage-through, or even 7-day click. The 1-day click results are those we can most confidently say reflected the impact of our ads. While customers clicked an ad for 7-day click results, there was likely a secondary marketing effort that closed it.
But 1-day view and 1-day engage-through are lowest on the impact scale. View-through requires only that an impression was served before a conversion happened within a day. Engage-through requires some sort of engagement or click other than a click on the link. In either case, they may not have looked at your ad at all.
This is where remarketing can inflate your results. You’re showing ads to people who are getting emails from you. While we can’t say for sure that the ad didn’t drive the conversion, we do know that they didn’t click through to your website. And if that didn’t happen, it’s questionable how much your ad did.
You should also use the Breakdown by Conversion Count. This will help you get a better sense of unique customers versus total conversions. And if you have deduplication issues, you’re likely to see a doubling of results.
Does the agency care more about results that look good or results that are actually good? Those who care will use these breakdowns. If they uncover these types of problems, they will make adjustments that will lead to incremental conversions.
5. Demographic and Placement Restrictions
Demographic and placement restrictions tend to be a sign that the agency is applying unnecessary control that could hurt performance.
I’m not suggesting that delivery is always perfect or that there aren’t very real problems that can happen related to demographic and placement delivery. But we shouldn’t approach either of these in a universal manner.
There is one exception. If you promote age-restricted goods, you should restrict by age. There’s no reason to take any other approach.
But if you’re running a Sales campaign optimized for purchases, there’s rarely a reason to restrict by age, gender, or placement. Many advertisers assume they need to restrict by age or gender to match their ideal customer. “People under 25 don’t buy from me.” If that’s true, Meta likely knows it.
The same tends to be the case with placements. Audience Network is a common source of low-quality traffic, but that’s usually when you’re optimizing for a link click or landing page view. Meta thinks you want clicks. But if you optimize for a purchase, you’re likely to see delivery to that placement disappear.
Sometimes, you have information that Meta doesn’t. Here are examples:
1. The performance goal is “maximize number of conversions” where the conversion event is a purchase. You get a high volume of purchases from people under 30, but these customers represent a much lower customer lifetime value.
2. The performance goal is “maximize number of conversions” where the conversion event is a lead. You get a high volume of leads from people over the age of 65, but they’re low quality.
3. The performance goal is “maximize number of ThruPlay views.” You get a high volume of ThruPlay views from the Audience Network Rewarded Video placement because people are incentivized to watch your video in exchange for virtual currency.
4. The performance goal is “maximize number of post engagements.” You get a high volume of post engagements from men, even though 99% of your customers are women. The men who engage don’t buy from you.
These are all examples of a weakness related to Meta’s ad delivery algorithm being “literal.” You said you want a specific action, and Meta knows that you can get lots of those actions from a specific group or placement. You actually want people who will end up buying from you, but Meta doesn’t know that.
You have information that Meta doesn’t. In those cases, the instinct may be to restrict by age, gender, or placement. Instead, use a value rule to lower the bid on that problematic segment.
Remember that these segments aren’t problematic universally. It depends on the situation, your performance goal, and whether you can get a high volume of cheap and low-quality actions that satisfy that performance goal.
Prioritize avoiding restrictions whenever possible. Use value rules to keep Advantage+ settings on.
If you or your agency restrict by age, gender, or placement often and don’t use value rules, I know that it’s likely that performance will suffer.
6. Complicated Campaign Construction
The more budget that’s available to you, the more flexibility I give for this one.
If you’re spending $50 per day and have three active campaigns, each with multiple ad sets, you are seriously watering down your results. None of those ad sets is able to perform optimally.
Most of the reasons for additional ad sets are misguided. You should rarely create separate ad sets for different detailed targeting or lookalike audiences because those inputs are almost always used as suggestions now. You’re going to create multiple ad sets that can reach the same people.
Your priority should be running a campaign for sales in most cases. If you can’t get the results from sales, focus on leads. For low-budget businesses, you should concentrate as much of that budget as possible to a single goal.
Within the campaign for that single goal, you should limit unnecessary ad sets. You know that each time you create a new ad set, less spend can go to each one. You’re spreading a $50 or $100 or $200 budget across four ad sets, rather than focusing it entirely on one.
Exiting the learning phase isn’t a requirement, but it should be a goal. If you’re able to get 50 conversions in a week for an ad set, Meta believes delivery is stable and predictable. Less than that, and expect the unexpected.
I’m not saying that every business should use only a single campaign with a single ad set. But it’s a great place to start for the vast majority of them. It consolidates your budget, prevents auction overlap, and gives you the best opportunity to get good results.
Make sure you have a good business reason for each new campaign and ad set you create. Will pulling budget from your most important ad set be worthwhile?
Higher budget businesses have more flexibility here. They can split up their budget across multiple campaigns and ad sets and still exit the learning phase in all of them. They can create Awareness and Engagement campaigns and not pull money from the campaigns focused on conversions.
But even then, it doesn’t mean that it’s advisable. Big or small budget, your ultra-complicated campaign structure may be making your results worse. It rarely makes them better, and it also makes it difficult to figure out what’s working and what’s not.
When an account is struggling, a complicated campaign structure is common, regardless of available ad spend. It becomes so complex that no one is sure where to start to fix it. The first step, in most cases, is scrapping the complicated approach and starting simple.
7. Obsession With Ad Copy and Creative Control
A simplified campaign construction is recommended now. While all of the various levers and settings could have been the secret to performance a decade ago, they aren’t now. And that puts the weight of performance on your ads themselves.
If you’re not getting the results you want, start with the ads. Your ads aren’t good enough, and they could always be better.
But the way many agencies approach ad creation can be counterproductive. You can’t look at ad components in 2026 through the same lens we used five and 10 years ago.
There was a time when finding the winning combination of ad copy and creative made sense. One ad was once defined as a single primary text block, one headline, and one image or video. When one ad performed well and one didn’t, it was obvious which components contributed to those results.
You shouldn’t be creating ads this way now, though. One ad should consist of up to five primary text blocks, five headlines, and as many as 10 initial images and videos. But this is truly just getting started.
One ad can also consist of AI-generated text, images, and videos. Different cropped variations. Versions that are changed with Advantage+ enhancements. If you have the new creative workflow, you can even customize the landing page by creative.
You can’t look at ads the same now. A single ad behaves more like the old ad set once did. It consists of thousands and thousands (if not millions) of possible combinations of ad copy and creative.
And yet, some agencies still obsess over finding winning combinations. They create ads that only consist of a single primary text, headline, and creative, like it was 10 years ago. They create separate testing ad sets just for these ads, often optimize for clicks, and then move the “winners” over to the main ad set.
And then they’re surprised when that winning ad doesn’t perform the way they expected. So they turn off other ads and try to force budget to the winner.
You no longer have control. Forcing your control over ads is not a sustainable strategy to get better results. You’re only looking busy for the sake of trying to appear valuable.
You should know what’s working and what’s not, at least to the best of your ability. You should learn from that information so that you can create new ads that leverage the strengths of the old ones.
But those who are obsessed with creative control, particularly at modest budgets, are often making results worse. And far too many agencies are doing exactly that.
Get Your Account Audited
These are the first problems I’ll look for when auditing an account.
My Strategic Meta Ads Audit isn’t for everyone. If you or a client spend at least $10,000 per month on ads and need a second opinion to help isolate your current performance problems, you’re a likely fit.
Learn more about how my Strategic Audits work here.
Your Turn
Are there any other common mistakes I didn’t list here?
Let me know in the comments below!
