What Actually Works in Facebook Ads Right Now (2026 Edition)

I just watched Ben Heath's latest Meta ads video and had to break it down — because what he's sharing is genuinely different from what most people are still doing in 2026.

Meta has changed. The strategies that crushed it 12 months ago are either outdated or just table stakes now. And if you're still running the same playbook, you're leaving real money on the table.

Here's what Ben covers in this video — and what I'd add from my own experience running ads for digital offers.

Strategy 1: Use Value Rules (Most People Skip This)

In the video, Ben explains a feature called value rules that most advertisers completely ignore. The idea is elegant: instead of hard-targeting a specific audience (which limits your reach), you tell Meta that certain people are worth more to your business.

Here's how it works in practice. Say you've analyzed your customer data and figured out that people over 35 are more likely to buy your higher-ticket offer, stay subscribed longer, or become repeat customers. You go into Meta's advertising settings, create a value rule for that age group, and tell Meta: "These people are 30% more valuable to me."

Meta keeps advertising broadly — it doesn't restrict your audience — but it's willing to bid more aggressively to reach the people you've flagged as high-value.

The result? You get open targeting flexibility AND directed targeting intent. Best of both worlds.

What I love about this is it respects what Meta is actually good at: using massive data to find buyers. You're not fighting the algorithm with narrow audience boxes. You're coaching it.

Strategy 2: Define Your Audience Segments

Ben makes the point that Meta breaks your audience into three buckets: new audience, engaged audience, and existing customers. Most advertisers never formally define these — and they're missing out on key insights.

In the video, he shows how to set this up in advertising settings. You upload your customer list, define your warm audience (website visitors, email list non-buyers, social engagers), and then Meta can start allocating budget more intelligently across cold, warm, and hot traffic.

The extra benefit: you can now see in your breakdown data exactly where your results are coming from. How much of your cost per lead is coming from cold audiences versus people who already know you? That data alone is worth the 10 minutes to set it up.

Strategy 3: Run 20+ Ad Creatives Per Ad Set

This one surprised people when Ben mentioned it. The old recommendation was 6 creatives per ad set. Post-Andromeda update, Meta now recommends 20.

In the video, Ben explains the reasoning: the Andromeda algorithm update fundamentally changed how Meta uses creative diversity. Instead of picking your "best" ad and hammering it to everyone, Meta now personalizes ad delivery at the individual level. One person gets your video ad in the morning, a different person gets your static image ad, another gets a testimonial. Meta has the data to make these calls — but only if you give it enough material to work with.

Two practical benefits here:

1. Better personalization — Meta can match your messaging to what different segments actually respond to
2. Slower fatigue — with 20 creatives rotating, your audience doesn't see the same ad seven times in three days and tune out

The creative diversity needs to be real, not just slight variations on one thing. Different formats (video, static, carousel), different hooks, different visual styles — that's what unlocks the Andromeda benefit.

What I'd Add: Know What Conversion Event You're Optimizing For

Something that jumped out at me watching this is a mistake I used to make when I first started running ads for online offers. I was optimizing for the wrong thing — running traffic campaigns when I should have been running conversion campaigns.

Meta gives you what you ask for. If you ask for link clicks, you get link clickers — not buyers. The audience that's most likely to click is different from the audience that's most likely to purchase. Facebook groups people by behavioral history, and those groups don't overlap as much as you'd think.

The lesson I learned (the expensive way): always optimize for the action that matters to your business. For a course or digital product, that means purchase conversions — even though they're more expensive per event. The quality of the audience you reach is worth the higher CPM.

Strategy 4: Broad Targeting Is Back — But Smarter

Ben makes the point that Meta's AI has gotten good enough that broad targeting often outperforms interest-based targeting. This is a big mindset shift from 3-4 years ago when you had to craft precise audience stacks.

The advice: combine broad targeting with value rules and properly defined audience segments. You let Meta's algorithm do the heavy lifting on who to reach, but you give it your business intelligence about who's actually valuable. The algorithm plus your data = better results than either alone.

The Bottom Line

If you're still running Facebook ads the old way — tight audience targeting, 4-6 creative variations, no audience segment definitions — you're fighting the algorithm instead of working with it. Ben's video is a solid reminder that Meta rewards advertisers who give the system good inputs and let it do what it's built to do.

The moves that matter most right now: set up value rules, define your audience segments, and give Meta creative diversity to work with. Do those three things and you'll be ahead of most people still clicking boost.