This tutorial assumes your pixel is installed and checked. If not, start with installing your Meta and TikTok pixels on Shopify.
Meta means Facebook, Instagram and their placements (feed, Stories, Reels). It's often a store's first paid channel, because it shows your product to people who weren't looking for it. It's also where many people lose their first budget: the wrong objective, ten ad sets on a shoestring, edits every day, conclusions drawn after 48 hours.
Here's how to launch a clean campaign that gives you answers. The Meta screens and rules quoted here were checked against Meta's help pages on September 23, 2026.
Before launching: three numbers and a page
Your maximum acquisition cost. What you can pay in ads for one sale without losing money: your margin per order, before ads. If your product sells for $31 and costs you $12 delivered, about $18 is left once payment fees are taken out: you can pay up to $18 per sale. If you charge VAT, take it out of the price first. Beyond that, every sale costs you money.
Your minimum ROAS. The same thing seen the other way: the revenue each dollar of ad spend must bring in. In the example, $31 ÷ $18 ≈ 1.72: each dollar of ads must bring in at least $1.72 in sales. The break-even ROAS calculator works it out with all your costs.
Your average order value. The higher it is, the more you can pay for a customer. If your maximum cost is too low for ads, work on it first with the average order value levers.
Your landing page. The ad sends people to the product page, not the homepage, and that page must continue the ad's promise exactly.
Step 1: the account
If you installed Meta's Facebook & Instagram app on Shopify, your business portfolio (the Meta space that groups your Facebook page, Instagram account and ad account), your ad account and your pixel are already linked. You still need to:
- Add a payment method to your ad account.
- Set your real constraints once in your ad account controls, if you have any: countries you don't ship to, a minimum age if your product can't be sold to minors. Meta says these controls don't turn Advantage+ off. It's also where you'll turn off Audience Network in step 3.
- Open Ads Manager.
Domain verification is no longer required to measure your purchases. Meta still recommends it: do it if Ads Manager suggests it.
Step 2: create the campaign with the Sales objective
In Ads Manager, click + Create, pick the Sales objective, then Continue. It's the only objective that asks Meta to find buyers. The Traffic or Engagement objectives find people who click or like, not people who buy: a "cheap" Traffic campaign often brings visitors who never buy.
Then, at the ad set level, choose:
- Conversion location: your website.
- The pixel (Meta also calls it a "dataset"): the one linked to your store.
- The event: Purchase.
Step 3: leave targeting open, turn down the Advantage+ extras
With the Sales objective, Meta opens its Advantage+ setup: budget, audience and placements are set so its system looks for buyers on its own. Let it handle that part: on a small budget with little data, slicing up targeting yourself doesn't help it.
Everything else, turn down. As you build the campaign, Meta switches on dozens of "+" options for your ads by default and offers you more on every screen. It pitches them as performance gains. Advertisers who test them one by one turn almost all of them off: "Tested extensively and they never seem to provide an uplift," one of them writes on r/FacebookAds; another turned "every single one of them" off and got "the best results for my account."
What you leave open
| Section | Setting | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | Campaign budget, as a daily budget | Meta shifts spend toward the ads that sell |
| Audience | Advantage+ audience: your country, no interests, Use as a suggestion ticked | Finding buyers is what Meta does best. Your real constraints (countries you ship to, minimum age) go in your account controls |
| Placements | Advantage+ placements, minus Audience Network (see below) | Meta picks between feeds, Stories and Reels based on where your ad works |
The structure that goes with it:
- One campaign, Sales objective.
- A single ad set, your country, ages and genders open unless your product is truly for a specific group.
- Three to five ads in that ad set, each testing a different idea.
Don't split your budget into ten small ad sets by age, interest or placement. Meta's help puts it plainly: "By combining similar ad sets, you also combine learnings."
What you turn down
1. Advantage+ creative enhancements. When you create each ad, in Set up creative, the Enhancements step shows several already on: text improvements, visual touch-ups, overlays, music, animation, and more. Meta says it plainly: "The media and text you upload may be adjusted." You wrote your copy and picked your image for a reason: turn them all off. One advertiser describes a static image that Meta turned into an AI video without notice: the budget moved to that version, and it didn't sell.
Two more places to check:
- some enhancements can only be turned off in Advanced preview: in the ad preview, click Expand, then the Advantage+ creative tab;
- the Review defaults button, next to advanced preview, lists everything Meta turned on by default, by category: translations, interactive experiences, related media, format display options, personalized destinations. Go through it before publishing.
2. Audience Network. These are apps and sites that partner with Meta, outside Facebook and Instagram. Meta cites a study where conversion rates were "8x higher among people who saw ads across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network than people who only saw the ads on Facebook." The comparison is with Facebook alone: it says nothing about what Audience Network adds on top of Instagram. Advertisers are blunt about it: click-through rates of 40% from accidental taps in mobile games, and "never once had 1 sale outside of feed, stories, reels."
To turn it off for your whole account: Advertising settings → Placement controls → turn on My business can only advertise on specific placements → untick Audience Network native, banner and interstitial and Audience Network rewarded videos. Your campaigns keep Advantage+ placements for everything else. Meta is rolling this option out gradually: if you don't have it yet, switch the ad set to manual placements and untick Audience Network.
3. Multi-advertiser ads. At the ad level, under Ad setup, the Multi-advertiser ads box is checked: your ad can then show up in the same unit as ads from other businesses, resized or cropped to fit. Uncheck it. Meta warns that multi-advertiser ads "may be turned on automatically for existing ads unless ads were explicitly opted out."
4. Testing new creative features. In Advertising settings → Creating ads → Creative features, uncheck Test new creative features if you see it. Otherwise, Meta can apply enhancements that are still in testing to your campaigns.
5. Recommendations and the score. Ads Manager rates your campaigns out of 100 (the opportunity score) and nudges you to apply its recommendations to raise it. Meta says it itself: the score "does not reflect your actual or future performance." It measures how many recommendations you followed, not how much you sell. Ignore them: a 60 with an ad selling below your maximum cost beats a 100.
Do all of this before launching: afterward, any change to your ad creative can restart learning (step 6). Once the ad is published, check it in the Ads tab → Edit: the Advantage+ creative section shows how many enhancements are on. You want zero.
If a toggle won't turn off: since late summer 2026, several advertisers report that the Advantage+ creative toggle stays stuck on. The workaround that works for them: publish the ad, then edit it while it's still in review and turn the enhancements off then (r/FacebookAds thread).
Step 4: three to five genuinely different ideas
What makes a Meta campaign work is the creative first. And testing the same video five times with a different button color teaches you nothing. Test different angles:
| Angle | Example for a laptop stand |
|---|---|
| The problem | "Sore neck by evening? Your screen is too low." |
| The demonstration | The stand unfolded and adjusted in ten seconds |
| The result | A clean desk, an upright posture, at the end of the day |
| The comparison | A stack of books versus the stand |
| The offer | Stand and desk mat bundle, free shipping |
Each ad has short copy that restates the problem and the result, a headline, and a "Shop now" button. Name each ad with its angle and version ("problem_video_v1"): in a week, you'll know exactly what worked. To produce these creatives, the article on creatives that work covers formats, hooks and shooting on your phone.
Get them all ready before launching. Adding an ad to an ad set is a significant edit that restarts learning: add new creatives in one batch, at most once a week, not as they come.
Add your UTM parameters in the field provided at the ad level, and check the mobile preview.
Step 5: what budget for your first Meta ads campaign?
There's no magic budget, but there is a logic: you work it out from your margin, and it must let Meta get purchases. Otherwise it learns nothing, and neither do you.
Our starting rule (not a Meta number): plan 2 to 3 times your maximum acquisition cost per ad you test, over seven days. That's what it takes to decide: an ad that has spent 2 to 3 times what you can pay for a sale, without making one, has given you its answer.
| Calculation | Example |
|---|---|
| Maximum acquisition cost | $18 |
| Ads tested | 4 |
| Budget over seven days (4 × 2 to 3 × $18) | $144 to $216 |
| Daily budget | about $20 to $30 |
You'll often read that you should start with $5 to $10 a day. With an $18 maximum cost, $10 a day for seven days allows fewer than four sales over the week, spread across four ads: you won't be able to compare anything.
Set this budget at the campaign level, as a daily budget, and think of it as the price of what you're about to learn. Meta requires a minimum budget that depends on factors such as country, currency and the optimization you choose: Ads Manager warns you if you're below it.
If you can't afford that budget, paid ads are probably premature: go back to first sales without paying.
Step 6: launch, then touch nothing during the learning phase
Meta reviews your ads before running them. "Most ads are reviewed within 24 hours," according to its help, and ads can be reviewed again while they run. Some categories (health, weight loss, supplements) have stricter ad rules: avoid promising results and before/after photos if you're in those areas.
Then comes the learning phase. While it lasts, the Delivery column in Ads Manager shows Learning, and results are unstable. According to Meta, an ad set exits it "usually after about 50 results in the week after the ad set's last significant edit." Its help lists these as significant edits:
- any change to targeting or ad creative;
- a change of optimization event or bid strategy;
- adding a new ad;
- pausing for 7 days or longer.
Budget changes depend on their size: going from $100 to $101 won't restart anything, going from $100 to $1,000 may restart learning. Hence the hardest rule: don't touch anything for seven days.
"Learning limited": normal for a first test
Run the numbers on the example: $30 a day and a cost per purchase around $20 means about ten purchases a week, far from 50. The Delivery column will show Learning limited. Meta says it itself: this status "isn't a penalty," it's a sign your budget isn't being spent as effectively as it could be with your current setup.
Meta suggests several ways out: combining ad sets, expanding your audience, raising your budget, or optimizing for a more frequent event such as add to cart. For a first campaign, our take: skip all of them. You already have a single ad set and a broad audience. Raising the budget just to hit 50 purchases a week means paying to please a column. And optimizing for add to cart makes Meta look for people who add to cart, not buyers. Keep Purchase, and judge each ad on its cost per purchase against your maximum cost.
Step 7: read your results (a worked example)
After three days, you don't judge sales yet. You check everything works:
- Ads are running and approved.
- People click: if an ad gets almost no clicks, its hook isn't working.
- Visitors add to cart: if nobody does, the product page or the price is the blocker.
- Purchases show up in Ads Manager and match your Shopify orders.
After seven days, you decide ad by ad, in the Ads tab.
With an $18 maximum cost, here's how to read that table:
| Ad | What the numbers say | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| problem_video_v1 | 6 purchases at $13.07, below $18 | Keep it, that's your winning angle. Prepare two variations of it |
| demo_video_v1 | 3 purchases at $20.40, above $18 | It sells, but at a loss. Cut it, or keep it one more week if you have nothing to replace it |
| comparison_image_v1 | $42.10 spent, more than twice $18, without a sale | Cut it |
| offer_carousel_v1 | 1 purchase at $28.30 | Meta gave it little budget, and its one purchase cost more than your $18. Cut it in favor of the winning variations |
Taken as a whole, the campaign is at $21 per purchase, above your $18: it's losing money. Ad by ad, it gave you an angle that makes money. That's exactly what a first campaign should give you. The following week, cut what loses, add the variations in a single batch (a single learning restart), and read the results again seven days later. Once an ad keeps selling below your maximum cost, scale your ads explains how to raise the budget without breaking it.
Two separate cases:
- Clicks and carts, but no purchases: the problem is after the ad, in checkout or shipping.
- Nothing works: rework the angles, or go back to the offer and the product page before adding budget.
Meta's purchases aren't your orders
Meta credits a purchase to your ad if it happens within a set time after someone saw or interacted with it. Its help describes three attribution settings:
| Setting | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Click-through | Purchases within 1 or 7 days after a link click on your ad |
| View-through | Purchases within 1 day after an impression of your ad |
| Engage-through | Purchases within 1 day after an interaction other than a link click: a share, a save, a video watched for 5 seconds |
On March 3, 2026, Meta announced that click-through would count link clicks only, with a gradual rollout starting that month. Before, a share or a save followed by a purchase also counted as a click; it now moves to engage-through. Meta's stated goal is to bring its numbers closer to tools like Google Analytics, with no change to billing. If your click-through purchases dropped since then while your sales didn't, that's why. Either way, keep your Shopify orders as the reference: the full diagnosis, symptom by symptom, is in reading your campaign numbers.
Costly mistakes
- The Traffic objective to "test cheaply".
- Leaving the defaults on: creative enhancements, Audience Network, multi-advertiser ads.
- Applying recommendations to raise the score.
- Launching a catalog ad because Meta recommends it: on a small store, advertisers mostly describe traffic that doesn't buy.
- Ten ad sets on a small budget.
- Adding an ad every other day: each one restarts learning.
- Raising the budget to get out of Learning limited, instead of judging cost per purchase.
- Judging after 48 hours.
- Trusting Meta's numbers without comparing them to Shopify: your real orders are in your admin.
- Sending people to the homepage instead of the product page.
Does your product show better on video than in photos? The TikTok Ads tutorial follows the same method, with the TikTok extras to turn down.
No store yet? You can generate it with Scale Ova from your product, look around and edit it for free, and only pay when you publish it to Shopify.
FAQ
How do I launch a Facebook Ads campaign for my store?
Advantage+ or a manual campaign for beginners?
How do I turn off Advantage+ creative enhancements?
Should I turn off Audience Network?
What budget for a first Meta campaign?
How much does a Facebook Ads campaign cost?
Is $5 a day enough for Facebook Ads?
What's the difference between a campaign, an ad set and an ad?
How long does the Meta ads learning phase last?
How long should a campaign run before judging it?
Why does my campaign get clicks but no sales?
Sources
- Create a campaign in the Advantage+ campaign experience, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- What turns Advantage+ on and Advantage+ off, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- About the learning phase, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- Significant edits and learning phase, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- About learning limited, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- Best practices for minimum budgets, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- About ads in review, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- About attribution models and attribution settings, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- Simplifying Ad Measurement for a Social-First World, Meta for Business, March 3, 2026, accessed September 23, 2026
- Turn off Advantage+ creative enhancements in Meta Ads Manager, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- About Advantage+ creative, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- Review default-on creative features in Meta Ads Manager, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- Set audience and placement controls for your ad account, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- About Meta Audience Network, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- About multi-advertiser ads, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- Opt in to or out of testing new creative features in Meta Ads Manager, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- About opportunity score in Meta Ads Manager, Meta Business Help Center, accessed September 23, 2026
- Are you guys using Meta's Creative Enhancements? Worth it?, r/FacebookAds thread (Reddit), accessed September 23, 2026
- Is advantage+ placements good anymore?, r/FacebookAds thread (Reddit), accessed September 23, 2026
- Turn off advantage plus audience and placements, r/FacebookAds thread (Reddit), accessed September 23, 2026
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