I Thought More A/B Tests Meant Better Results. I Was Wrong.

"The month I tested 20 A/Bs and learned nothing" Most people running Meta ads want to keep control of targeting. I get it. But at a small budget that's usually the wrong thing to be protecting... Here's what happened that changed how I think about it. I had a client, restricted budget, and we were testing hard. 20 A/Bs a month. And we were stuck. Results wouldn't move. At some point I made a call: maybe we're not testing the angle, we're just drowning it. Too many variables, not enough spend behind any of them to ever get clean data. So we did the opposite of what felt right. We tested less. Cut it to about 20% of what we were doing and let Advantage+ take over the rest — let it develop, gather data, do the targeting. Two weeks later we doubled the previous month's results at a lower CPA. Less work. Better results. No brainer. Here's how I actually decide now, by budget: Under $5-10/day per ad set: don't expect to test anything. There's no data down there. If you just need your message in front of the right people, use detailed targeting and take what comes. Bigger, but under ~$3k/month: go Advantage+. Meta is strong enough today to get you real performance, and you don't have the volume to test targeting manually anyway. Spending more, with real funnel levels: now use your own data and custom audiences. Before that, there's a high chance you don't have enough data and it ends up all over the place. And when someone tells me they don't want to give Meta control? Meta wants you to spend money. To do that they trained a machine on billions of dollars of ad spend to limit your testing and find your buyers. On average it gets better results. Yes, sometimes it shows your ad to someone completely off. But it also shows it to people you'd never have targeted — buyers no manual detailed-targeting setup would ever have found. So why not give it a shot? Advantage+ won't test your placements for you. But it'll test your angle. And the angle is the first thing you need to get right before anything else matters. Curious where people land on this — are you still targeting manually, or have you handed it over?