Optimize Your Meta Ads NOW for Maximum Results

If you’ve ever looked at your Meta Ads results and thought, “Okay… now what?” this episode is for you.

We’re back with Stefan for the next part of our ads series: optimization. Not in a complicated, “secret hack” way. In the real way: how you take what the metrics are telling you and steadily move toward a cost that actually makes sense for your business.

As Stefan puts it, the goal is simple:

“The big goal is to obtain a good acquisition cost… something that you are comfortable with.”

Optimization is a process (and most ads won’t be winners)

One of the most important mindset shifts in this episode is accepting that optimization isn’t a one-time fix. It’s a cycle.

You launch ads, give them time to run, review performance, then make decisions. And yes, some of those decisions will be turning ads off.

Stefan was very honest about what this looks like in practice:

“Around 90% of the ads you’re going to launch are not going to perform and then like 10% of them… are going to perform.”

That’s not meant to discourage you. It’s meant to keep you from panicking when an ad spends money and doesn’t convert. That’s not failure, that’s the process doing what it does.

Step one: zoom out before you touch anything

Before you start changing creatives or rewriting copy, Stefan recommends getting a proper overview of what’s happening.

Instead of judging an ad off one day of performance, he looks at it across multiple time windows, typically 30 days, 14 days, 7 days, and sometimes even 3 days. The reason is simple: ads fluctuate. Some start strong, dip, then stabilize. If you only look at one snapshot, you can make a bad call.

The KPI that drives decisions: cost, not “number of purchases”

Even though we’re talking optimization, Stefan keeps coming back to the same core idea: conversions matter, but cost matters more.

An ad can bring in sales and still be a bad ad if the cost per purchase is too high for your margins. Another ad might bring fewer conversions, but at a cost your business can actually support.

He summed it up clearly:

“Conversions are important, but it’s actually more important at what cost you actually get the conversion.”

And there’s another reason to be careful: letting expensive ads keep running can train Meta in the wrong direction, you’re effectively telling it that this cost is acceptable.

When the cost is too high, the first optimization is… stopping the ad

A lot of people assume optimization means tweaking little settings. But the most common “optimization” is simply cutting what’s clearly not working.

When Stefan sees an ad spending at a cost he can’t justify, he turns it off and moves into analysis mode: what was wrong with the creative, the message, the offer, or the page?

It’s also helpful to reframe what that spend means. Instead of calling it wasted money, he treats it like paid learning:

“You can consider them just like part of a learning phase.”

Optimize creative first (and don’t change five things at once)

When it comes to what to optimize, Stefan starts with the creative most of the time. The video (or static) is what people actually experience first, so it tends to be where the biggest performance swings happen.

But he warns against the most common mistake: changing too many variables at once. If you change the creative, the copy, the headline, and the offer all at the same time, you’ll never know what caused the improvement (or the drop).

The rule is simple: change one thing, test again.

Reverse-engineer your ads: hook → body → CTA

This is the most actionable framework from the episode: treat each video like it’s built from parts.

If the hook is strong, keep it. If the body is weak, replace it. If the CTA is unclear, test a different one. You’re not “starting over” every time, you’re building better combinations.

Stefan gave a clear example of what he does when a hook performs, but conversions don’t:

“I cut the first three or four seconds… and I’m going to use this hook with other USPs.”

That’s the heart of optimization: keep what works, replace what doesn’t, and repeat until you find a combination that consistently hits your target cost.

The unsexy part: consistency and budget

The last big takeaway is that optimization only works if you’re consistent. If you spend one month and disappear the next, you don’t learn fast enough, and you reset momentum.

Stefan’s recommendation is to set a monthly ad budget you can sustain for several months, and stick to it. That budget often needs to cover both distribution (ad spend) and learning/testing (new creatives).

The takeaway

Optimization isn’t about perfect ads. It’s about running a structured process: zoom out, judge performance by cost, stop what’s clearly not working, reuse the parts that do work, and test small changes until you land on a repeatable winner.

And if you want a simple closing reminder from the episode:

“It is a process.”