Meta has advised marketers to set clear advertising goals and let campaigns collect enough data before making changes, warning that frequent adjustments can raise costs and make performance harder to assess.
Meta is encouraging businesses running holiday advertising campaigns to focus on clear objectives and consistent measurement rather than reacting to every change in performance.
In a new guide for the 2026 peak shopping season, the company said advertisers should carefully establish their campaign settings and give its advertising system enough time to identify audiences likely to deliver the desired results.
The advice comes as consumer spending patterns remain difficult to predict. Meta cited figures showing that 42% of shoppers expected to spend less during the previous holiday season, but spending ultimately increased by 4.2% year over year.
Meta Highlights the Cost of Frequent Campaign Changes
According to Meta, advertisers who repeatedly adjust campaigns in response to short-term fluctuations may interfere with the system’s ability to learn which targeting strategies work best.
The company explained that campaign performance can change for several reasons, including seasonal demand, competition, and creative fatigue. As a result, an improvement following an adjustment does not necessarily mean the change caused better results.
Meta recommends setting clear objectives at the beginning and allowing campaigns to run long enough to produce meaningful performance data before deciding whether further changes are necessary.
Company Recommends About 50 Conversions a Week
One of the guide’s central recommendations is to provide each ad set with enough conversion activity for the system to learn from.
Meta recommends aiming for roughly 50 conversions per ad set each week. The company said its analysis found that ad sets recording fewer conversions than this threshold had a cost per purchase that was approximately 28% higher.
The guide also encourages marketers to consider whether their advertising budgets can support the number of ad sets they operate. Dividing a budget across too many separate ad sets may leave each one with insufficient data to optimise effectively.
Advertisers Told to Align Campaigns With Business Goals
Meta said campaign performance depends partly on how advertisers configure three key areas:
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Optimisation goal: The result the campaign is designed to achieve, such as generating purchases or increasing conversion value.
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Bid strategy: How the system competes in the advertising auction to pursue the selected outcome.
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Attribution settings: How conversions and other results are credited to advertising activity.
The company said these decisions should reflect what a business actually values rather than focusing only on figures that are easy to measure.
For example, a campaign designed to maximise the number of purchases may produce different results from one optimised to attract customers who spend more. Meta said the selected objective influences which ads and potential customers its system prioritises.
Testing Can Help Marketers Assess Performance
Meta also recommended using A/B tests or Conversion Lift studies to determine whether campaign changes are producing measurable improvements.
These methods can help advertisers compare different approaches or assess the additional impact of their advertising. Without a clear objective and enough data, Meta warned, changing campaign settings may amount to guesswork.
The company’s guidance does not mean marketers should leave every campaign unchanged regardless of performance. Instead, it stresses the importance of making informed adjustments based on defined business goals and reliable evidence.
For businesses preparing for the holiday shopping rush, the advice is to review campaign objectives, budgets, and measurement settings before spending increases, then give the advertising system sufficient time to produce results that can be evaluated.
Source: Meta