Some marketing agencies will completely burn down and rebuild your campaign every month. Honestly, I think they do this to justify their fees! But when you have a new campaign, Meta goes through a 14 day learning period. You could get lucky and get better results, or you could pay Meta to do testing and lose up to 2 weeks of new leads. Unless you have high spend and large audience, it’s generally not worth it. (Unless your campaign’s performance is awful, then you should create a new one!)
But! Meta loves new creative, so you’ve got to feed the beast. How do you know when to update the images, text and headlines in your ads? The two numbers you should use to make this decision are your Frequency and Cost Per Result.
Frequency is an estimated number of time that each account saw your ad in a given time span. As a rule, you want to look at your last 30 days of metrics, as it gives you the most amount of relevant data. Ideally, your frequency should be between 2.5 and 3.5 – enough that people see your ad to take action, but not so often that they get creative fatigue.
A frequency above 3.5 is an early indicator that your lead cost may go up, but it’s not a guarantee. Meta will always spend your budget. At first, it reads your ad, your IG and followers, and uses user behaviour to determine who’s most likely to respond. After that, it will either show the ad to them again if they’re online and other advertisers haven’t bought their way to the front. Then, it will show to people increasingly irrelevant to them. This is one of the reasons why spending more is not always the best solution.
If you’re cost per lead remains low and stable, and your frequency isn’t too high.
If your lead cost increases by more than 50% over a 14-28 day period, then you should update the creative. Take the lowest 2-3 images and replace them. Don’t just delete them. Meta will show your most popular image first, and if the user doesn’t stop scrolling to view it, Meta will show a different style of image.
Every campaign should have three type of images:
- Images only, no text
- Images will captions
- Text based images
Replace the bottom performing headline and primary text with a new option as well. Making incremental adjustments to your existing ads, rather than wholesale changes or a complete relaunch, avoids the learning phase. But you’ll still need to give it 2 weeks to measure the results of any changes.
TL/DR – Update your images about once a month to keep your ad fresh, but don’t go overboard.