Scaling creative testing: 20 variations per week with a €100/day budget

Rodrigo Pinto · 2026-10-07

Structure

The campaign structure should be clearly defined to make creative testing easier. Follow this model:

  1. Campaign: Create a campaign with a specific objective (e.g., conversions, clicks).
  2. Ad sets: Separate ad sets by targeting. For example: cold and warm audiences. Each ad set will have 5 creative variations.
  3. Ads: Add 5 different creative variations to each ad set. That’s 20 variations per week total.

Budget per variation

With a daily budget of €100, allocate the spend as follows:

  1. Budget split: If you have 20 variations, allocate €5 per variation per day.
  2. Total per ad set: With 5 variations in each ad set, the daily spend per ad set will be €25.
  3. Test duration: Plan for a 7-day test, which comes to €175 per ad set.

24/48/72h cut criteria

Set clear criteria for deciding what stays and what goes:

  1. 24 hours: Evaluate the variations. If the CTR (click-through rate) is below 0.5%, consider cutting it.
  2. 48 hours: For variations that got impressions but no conversions, cut those with a cost per conversion above €50.
  3. 72 hours: Keep variations with a CTR above 1% and a cost per conversion below €30. Variations performing below these benchmarks should be paused.

Promoting winners to the scaling campaign

After identifying the winning variations:

  1. Increase the budget: Increase the budget by 20-30% on the ad sets that performed well.
  2. Duplication: Duplicate the ad sets with the best creatives, keeping the original budget to test new audiences.
  3. Retargeting: Create retargeting campaigns to re-engage users who interacted with the winning creatives.

Spreadsheet

Create a simple spreadsheet to track performance:

With this structure, you’ll be able to test creatives efficiently and identify what’s actually driving results.

How many variations do you usually test per week, and what’s your average budget?

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