The Best Meta Ads Account Structure In 2026

With the rollout of Meta's new Andromeda update earlier this year, and increased competition in the ad auction coming from AI-generated creative production as well as Meta's Advantage+ Campaign rollouts, having the right account structure has become more important than ever when launching Meta ad campaigns in 2026.

Essential Takeaways:

• Segmenting your account into "Test" and "Scale" campaigns is essential to allow for high creative testing velocity, without resetting your largest campaigns into the learning phase

• Meta can now handle a larger volume of ads per adset - your highest spending campaigns can handle more creative than ever before

• You don't need to segment ads by format (static and video) - simply consolidate your top performing ads together, and trust Meta's Advantage+ Targeting to build a cohesive funnel in a single adset with your creative

• Test a wide array of audience targeting including Advantage+, Broad, themed interest stacks, and varying Lookalike sources and sizes (1 to 3 percent tend to work best)

• Spend less on retargeting than you would assume

How To Test New Ads on Meta

You should be testing a large volume of ads each month on Meta, regardless of your size. The best way to do this without compromising performance is to start with a dedicated Creative Testing campaign. This campaign should have a lower budget than the rest of your campaigns (no more than 25% of daily ad spend), and you can think of this as your creative "sandbox".

We recommend grouping ad sets by distinct creative theme or format, so if you have 5 ad concepts and 5 iterations of each concept, you would group them into 5 adsets, similar to the below image:

Use Campaign Budget Optimization to let Meta fluidly allocate spend to the ad concepts that it thinks will perform best. If you are concerned about not getting enough spend on a particular concept, you can always apply a daily spend minimum to the adset to force it to spend, without compromising the overall performance of the campaign.

Once you have identified a top variant in each adset (typically this does not change after ~$20 in total spend per concept, regardless of your overall daily budget), you can start to scale them into a "Winners" campaign.

Scaling Your Creative Winners

Take the top spending variant of each concept you ran in your Test campaign and start to scale them into a dedicated "Winners" campaign, consolidating them all into a single adset. Note: you should scale ads using their original Post IDs, don't just duplicate them into the new adset. This allows them to retain their social proof and their high Estimated Action Rate in the ad auction.

The benefit of this campaign is that you are disrupting adset delivery FAR less often, since you don't launch brand new ads into these adsets, only proven winners, which is a lower volume of ads. Creative should be held relatively constant in this adset, while audience targeting becomes the variable.

Once you have your creative winners in a single adset, it's time to scale that adset across several different audience targeting methods to see which is most efficient for your business. We always recommend testing Broad targeting, Meta's Advantage+ targeting, the "Engaged Shoppers" interest cohort (anyone on Meta who has clicked a Shop Now button in the last week), and 1-2 different Lookalike audiences based on your customer activity. Lookalikes of website visitors, ad engagers, and 25%+ video viewers often perform well stacked together, as do Purchaser lookalikes in the 2-5% range for many brands.

You can make your original adset Broad, and duplicate it, changing only the targeting with each duplication. Let this run for at least a week before pausing your worst performing audiences and doubling down on your highest spender.

Identifying Winning Ads and Audiences

It's important to note that you should NOT LOOK exclusively at conversion volume or CPA when determining which ads to scale, and which audiences to pause or leave on. The reason for this is due to something called the Breakdown Effect. The Break Down Effect is when advertisers misinterpret data by focusing on individual ads, when in reality Meta strategically shifts spend to ads with higher scaling potential to hit a broader overall campaign goal. In simpler terms, it describes a phenomenon where one ad is spending a lot but has a higher CPA than lower spending ads much better CPAs. Pausing the top spending "bad" ad will actually collapse your performance in your entire account.

Testing Advantage+ Campaigns

As of the time of this writing, you can technically now run Advantage+ targeting adsets in the same campaigns as adsets using manual targeting (Broad, Lookalikes, etc). However, we still recommend breaking Advantage+ Targeting adsets out into their own campaigns, because they often serve a different purpose in the funnel. They tend to have the best CPA in your ad account, but can be slightly more middle-of-funnel than traditional Meta audiences, which may look worse in the ad account but be more incremental for your business.

Once you have identified a winning audience in your CBO campaign (meaning the highest spending, not necessarily the lowest CPA adset due to the breakdown effect described above), you should pause your poorer performing adsets. Move your winning ads into a dedicated Advantage+ Campaign using Meta's Advantage+ Targeting on the adset level. See how the CPA compares to your top performing audience campaign. Make sure to note the frequency of each campaign over a 7 day period, as your Advantage+ campaign may gravitate to more retargeting than your CBO campaign.

Summary

Keeping your test campaign separate from multiple higher-spending scale campaigns is the best way to manage a stable Meta ad account, while still allowing for constant creative testing. If you start to struggle with scaling your creative winners, you can always launch consolidated groups of promising ads into "challenger" adsets in your CBO campaign, just to reduce the risk of false negatives.

If you're looking for a best-in-class Meta advertising agency to assist with your Meta ads account structure and your creative strategy more broadly, consider getting in touch and booking a free call with us!