Winning on Meta: The Best Tools for Testing and Scaling Ads
How many times have you been asked to scale Meta ads without clear proof of what actually works?
Every day, UA teams launch new creatives, duplicate winning ad sets, and increase budgets only to watch performance drop without warning. What looked like a winning ad yesterday suddenly stops converting. The results? CPA spikes, ROAS slips, and no one can clearly explain why.
On Meta, scaling without the right testing and analysis tools doesn’t just slow growth, it quietly burns budget and confidence. This blog breaks down the best Meta ad tools to help you test ads properly, spot early performance signals, and scale creatives with clarity instead of guesswork.
Why the Right Tools Matter for Testing and Scaling
When you’re running user acquisition on Meta, testing and scaling aren’t optional; they decide whether you grow profitably or burn budget. Without the right tools, most scaling decisions are based on assumptions rather than evidence.
Here are the key reasons the right Meta ad tools make a real difference when you’re testing and scaling ads:
1. You test faster without losing learning
When you’re launching dozens of creatives across games, apps, or DTC products, messy tests slow everything down. The right tools help you structure tests clearly, compare results properly, and learn faster without constantly resetting Meta’s learning phase.
2. You know what to scale, not just what looks good
An ad might attract clicks, but fail to bring users who retain, purchase, or subscribe. The right tools break performance down to the creative element level, so you know why an ad works and can scale the elements that drive real outcomes like ROAS, CPI, and LTV, not just surface-level engagement.
If you are searching for a platform that offers creative element–level insights, Segwise can help. Once integrated with Meta, its tag-level performance optimization can instantly see which creative elements, themes, and formats drive results across all your campaigns and apps.
3. You catch creative fatigue before performance drops
On Meta, ads don’t fail overnight; they fade. The right tools help you spot early signs of fatigue across creatives and formats, so you can refresh or rotate ads before CPA spikes and spend gets wasted.
4. You turn testing data into better creative decisions
Testing is only useful if it improves the next creative. The right tools show patterns across hooks, visuals, formats, and messages, helping your creative and UA teams build smarter briefs instead of starting from scratch every time.
5. You reach more of the right people without breaking performance
Reaching more people on Meta isn’t just about increasing budget or broadening audiences. The right tools help you scale creatives that continue to perform as reach expands, so you don’t lose efficiency when your ads move beyond your initial high-intent audience.
With a clear understanding of why the right tools matter, the next step is to look at the Meta-native tools that form the foundation of most testing and scaling workflows.
Also Read: Creative Fatigue: Understanding and Managing Ad Performance
The Best Meta-Native Ad Tools
If you’re running user acquisition on Meta, native tools are where everything starts. They help you launch ads, track performance, and manage creative and campaigns at scale. For mobile games, DTC brands, subscription apps, and agencies, these tools form the foundation before you move to more advanced testing and scaling workflows.
Here are the key Meta-native tools you should be using for testing and scaling ads:
1. Meta Ads Manager
Meta Ads Manager is the core tool for running user acquisition campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. For UA managers and growth teams, Ads Manager is the starting point for every test and scaling decision.
It's an all-in-one tool for creating ads, managing when and where they run, and tracking how well your campaigns perform against your marketing goals.
Key features
Create brand-new ads: Select campaign parameters, such as the advertising objective, to align with your goals. You can also manage creative work: upload your ad creative, write ad copy, and review how your ads look on different devices.
Choose your audience: Define your audience for smarter ad targeting. Adjust your target audience to be as broad or well-defined as you like.
Set up and manage your ad budgets: Set an overall budget for your campaigns and determine whether it applies to each day or to a campaign's entire lifetime.
Improve performance with dynamic creative: Automatically deliver personalized ads with dynamic creative. Dynamic creative uses ad components such as images, videos, and text and combines them in ways that are ideal for your audiences.
Test which ads perform best: Create an A/B test to determine the best target audience, delivery optimisation, placements, creative, or product sets for each of your ad campaigns.
Tools included in Meta Ads Manager
Meta Ads Manager includes several built-in tools that support testing, tracking, and optimization during user acquisition.
Creative Hub: Creative Hub lets you preview, mock, and review ad creatives before launch. It helps UA and creative teams align faster by checking formats, placements, and visuals before spending budget.
Events Manager: Events Manager is where you manage and monitor conversion events. It helps ensure installs, purchases, and key actions are tracked correctly, which is essential for measuring acquisition performance.
Meta Pixel: The Meta Pixel tracks actions users take after clicking or viewing ads. For DTC brands and subscription apps, it helps connect ad engagement to on-site actions like purchases or sign-ups.
Conversions API (CAPI): Conversions API sends event data directly from your server to Meta. This improves data reliability and helps maintain performance measurement as tracking becomes more limited.
Ads Reporting & Insights: Reporting tools allow you to analyze campaign results, break down performance by placement or audience, and monitor trends over time as you scale spend.
2. Meta Ad Library
Meta Ad Library is a public transparency tool that lets you see active ads running across Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. It allows anyone to search and view ads from brands, apps, and businesses in real time.
For user acquisition teams, Meta Ad Library is mainly used for creative research. It helps you understand what types of ads, formats, and messages other advertisers are actively running before you test or scale your own campaigns.
Key features
Search any brand, app, or keyword: You can search ads by brand name, app name, page, or keyword. This helps you quickly explore how competitors and similar products position themselves on Meta.
View all active ads across Meta platforms: The Ad Library shows ads currently running on Facebook and Instagram. This gives you visibility into what creatives are being invested in right now, not outdated examples.
Access to branded and paid partnership ads: You can also see public branded content and influencer ads that include paid partnership labels. This is useful for understanding creator-led and influencer-style UA strategies.
Understand how long ads stay live: Ad Library shows when an ad started running, helping you identify creatives that are being sustained over time. For UA teams, longer-running ads often signal concepts or formats that are worth testing.
Download and analyze ad data (limited use): You can download Ad Library search results when logged in to Facebook. This helps agencies or analysts save ad examples for research, presentations, or creative inspiration.
What information is available in the Meta Ad Library?
When you view an ad in the Meta Ad Library, you can typically see:
Ad creatives (images, videos, and copy, where permitted)
Ad status (whether the ad is currently active)
Ad start date
Advertiser or Page name
Paid partnership or branded content labels, if applicable
Country-level delivery information for certain ad categories
Social issue, election, or political ad disclosures (where relevant)
3. Meta Business Suite
Meta Business Suite is a one-stop place where you can manage all of your marketing and advertising activities on Facebook and Instagram. It centralizes tools that help you connect with your customers on all apps and get better results.
Whether you’re using it on desktop or mobile, Meta Business Suite makes it easy to check notifications, respond to messages quickly, and stay on top of interactions coming from your ads. You can also create and schedule posts, stories, and ads while using built-in insights to understand what’s working and continuously optimize your efforts.
Key features
Manage messages and comments in one inbox: Meta Business Suite lets you read and reply to messages and comments from Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger in a single inbox. Faster responses help maintain trust and engagement when users interact with your ads or brand.
Create ads: You can create ads directly from Meta Business Suite or boost existing posts. This is useful when you want to quickly turn high-performing content into acquisition ads.
Track insights and performance trends: The platform shows insights into how your posts and ads are performing. These trends help you understand engagement patterns and support better decisions when planning new tests or scaling campaigns.
Access other Meta tools from one place: From Meta Business Suite, you can quickly access tools like Ads Manager, Business Settings, and Commerce Manager. This keeps your workflow organized, especially when managing multiple brands, ad accounts, or client assets.
These tools are essential for getting started on Meta, but they aren’t designed to answer every question that comes up as campaigns scale.
Also Read: How to Use Facebook Ad Library for Smarter Ad Strategies
Limitations of Meta Native Tools
Meta’s native tools are essential for launching and managing user acquisition campaigns. They give you control, visibility, and basic testing capabilities across Facebook and Instagram. But as spend increases and creative volume grows, these tools start to show gaps that slow down learning and scaling.
Here are the key limitations of Meta's native tools you’ll run into when testing and scaling ads:
Limited visibility into why creatives work: Meta tools show which ads are performing, but they don’t explain why. You can see results at the ad level, not at the creative element level. This makes it hard to understand which hooks, visuals, or messages are driving installs, purchases, or subscriptions.
Shallow creative testing insights: While Meta allows A/B tests, the insights are often surface-level. When you’re testing dozens of creatives, formats, or concepts, it becomes difficult to compare patterns across tests or learn what to replicate at scale.
No built-in creative fatigue detection: Meta doesn’t clearly tell you when a creative is starting to fatigue. Performance usually drops gradually, and by the time it’s obvious, CPA has already increased, and the budget has been wasted.
Operational tools don’t support strategic decisions: Meta Business Suite helps you manage posts, messages, and activity, but it doesn’t support deeper UA decisions. Testing strategies, creative optimization, and scaling logic still require additional tools and analysis.
Meta Ad Library lacks performance context: Meta Ad Library is useful for creative research, but it doesn’t explain which ads actually scale or why performance changes. That gap is where deeper testing and analytics tools become necessary.
For UA managers and creative leads, this means Meta native tools are best used as a starting point. Once you need deeper insights, faster learning, and more confidence in scaling decisions, third-party Meta ad tools become essential.
To overcome these gaps and gain deeper visibility into creative performance, many growth teams turn to advanced platforms built specifically for testing, analysis, and scalable decision-making.
Best Third-Party Meta Ad Tools for Testing and Scaling Ads
As your user acquisition efforts grow on Meta, native tools alone can’t keep up with faster testing cycles. Third-party tools help you go deeper, connecting creative decisions to performance, catching issues early, and scaling ads with more confidence.
Here are the best tools for testing and scaling ads:
1. Segwise
Segwise is an AI-powered platform that helps UA and performance marketing teams understand which creative elements drive performance, when creatives start fatiguing, and where budgets should shift before results drop.
Once integrated with your Meta accounts, Segwise connects creative elements (hooks, dialogs, visuals, formats, etc.) directly to business outcomes (ROAS, CPA/CPI, LTV, IPM, conversion rates), so teams stop guessing what works and start scaling creatives with data-backed confidence.
Key Features
AI Creative Tagging: Our powerful, multi-modal AI automatically identifies and tags creative elements like hook, characters, colors, and audio components across images, videos, text, and playable ads to reveal their impact on performance metrics like IPM, CTR, and ROAS.
Tag-Level Creative Element Mapping: See which specific creative elements drive performance. Discover patterns like "this hook dialog appears in 80% of top-performing creatives" with complete MMP attribution integration.
Custom Dashboards and Reporting: Build dashboards around your specific KPIs and stakeholder needs. Create automated reports that show how creative decisions impact ROAS across all your apps and campaigns.
Creative Fatigue Detection: You can catch fatigue before it impacts your budget allocation and campaign results.
Creative intelligence-driven generation: Auto-generate new ad creative variations using creative elements that drive performance, winning hooks, CTAs, visual styles, and characters identified through your creative insights.
In short, Segwise is the clear winner if you want to test and scale Meta ads with confidence. It connects creative elements directly to performance metrics and offers complete MMP integration. On top of that, Segwise is the only platform that tags playable ad elements and interactive components, helping you scale winning creative patterns and shift budgets before performance drops.
2. Madgicx
Madgicx is an AI-powered Meta ad optimization platform designed to help you manage, optimize, and scale Facebook and Instagram ads with less manual effort. It positions itself as a personal AI media buyer that analyzes your Meta Ads Manager data and guides optimization decisions. It focuses on simplifying Meta ad management by combining automation, creative tools, and analytics into one platform.
Key features
AI Campaign Optimization for Meta: Madgicx uses AI to analyze your Meta ad account and optimize campaigns. It helps reduce time spent inside Ads Manager by automating optimization tasks and highlighting where improvements can be made.
Automated Creative Generation for Facebook Ads: Madgicx includes tools to automatically generate Meta ad creatives. It helps you produce creatives faster instead of building every ad manually, which can speed up testing when launching new campaigns.
Meta Ad Intelligence & Analytics: The platform provides Meta-focused ad intelligence to help you understand where your budget is working and where it’s not. It cuts through Ads Manager data to surface insights that matter for optimization and scaling.
While Madgicx offers automation and optimization for Meta campaigns, it does not let you define custom success criteria to track when creatives start to decline. This means performance drop is often not noticed in advance.
3. Smartly.io
Smartly.io is a creative and media automation platform built to help teams scale campaigns by unifying creative production and reporting in one workflow. It focuses on helping teams move faster by automating the creation, personalization, launch, and management of ads.
Key features
Dynamic Creative Templates: Smartly helps you build standout Dynamic Ads from your product feed with templates that test, personalize, and convert.
Automated Creative Production at Scale: Auto-generate hundreds of creative variations at once to deliver relevant, personalized Facebook and Instagram ads that resonate with your audience.
Simplified Meta Ad Buying & Automation: Use your business data to launch targeted campaigns that update automatically. Scale faster with instant sync, automation, and smart workflows.
While the platform is strong at creative automation, but it doesn’t offer deep insights into tag-level creative element mapping to understand which creatives actually drive performance.
4. AdEspresso
AdEspresso is a Meta advertising tool by Hootsuite that helps marketers create, manage, and test Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns more easily. It is designed to simplify campaign creation and A/B testing through a user-friendly interface, making it easier to launch ads quickly without deep technical setup.
Key features
Simple and Effective A/B Testing: You can run split tests on different creative elements such as headlines, images, ad copy, and audiences. This helps you compare variations easily and understand which version performs better during early-stage testing.
Grid Composer for Bulk Ad Creation: The Grid Composer lets you create multiple ads at once using spreadsheet-style inputs. This is useful when you want to test combinations of headlines, images, and text across multiple ads without building each one manually.
Automatic Page Post Promotion: The platform can automatically promote organic posts based on performance rules you set. This helps you boost posts that gain traction without manually monitoring and launching ads for each post.
While AdEspresso simplifies campaign creation and A/B testing, its pricing can become costly as creative volume and account complexity increase, especially for teams running multiple tests. This makes it highly costly for teams that need continuous creative experimentation.
5. Bestever
Bestever is an AI-powered creative generation platform designed to quickly produce large volumes of ad creatives. It focuses on turning product catalogs, prompts, and concepts into ready-to-run image and video ads. The tool is mainly designed to speed up creative production and help brands launch more variations at scale.
Key features
Generate video ads for your product catalog at scale: Create ads for Meta, from any product link. Bestever automatically generates your catalog and produces ready-to-use ads in bulk.
Competitor Ad Analysis at Scale: Bestever pulls your competitors ads apart, understands their strategy, and based on what's working, uses data-driven AI ad maker to build variations using your own brand's look and feel.
Turn prompts into storyboards and videos: just paste your prompt and get a detailed storyboard along with a professional promotional video, all in a matter of minutes.
While it helps produce ads at scale, it does not offer playable ads tagging or analysis of interactive elements, which limits visibility into how interactive creatives actually perform.
Conclusion
Winning on Meta today isn’t about launching more ads; it’s about testing smarter and scaling with clarity. Successful user acquisition depends on understanding what actually works, catching creative fatigue early, and making scaling decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions. Meta’s native tools help you get started, but as creative volume and spend increase, deeper insights become critical to avoid wasted budget and stalled growth.
This is where Segwise fits naturally into a modern Meta growth stack. Segwise directly integrates with Meta with a few steps. You just need to go to Segwise Dashboard → Settings → Ad Networks → Connect under Meta → sign in → select your Ad Accounts for a complete creative analysis.
Segwise is a creative analytics and AI creative generation platform that connects creative elements (hooks, dialogs, visuals, formats, etc.) directly to business outcomes (ROAS, CPA/CPI, LTV, IPM, conversion rates), so teams stop guessing what works and start scaling creatives with data-backed confidence. It helps you understand why creatives work, track fatigue before results drop, and turn creative insights into repeatable scaling decisions, so testing leads to confident growth rather than wasted spend.
Here are the reasons why Segwise is the best tool for testing and scaling ads:
The only platform that goes beyond standard video and image ads by tagging interactive and playable components to provide deeper insights.
No-code integrations with Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and more. Setup takes 10-15 minutes with no engineering required.
Up to 90 days of historical data are imported automatically on setup, providing immediate insights from day one.
Build custom dashboards tailored to your workflow and reporting needs.
Every tag is automatically mapped to performance metrics so you can see exactly which creative elements drive installs, ROAS, retention, and other KPIs.
If a particular headline drives better ROAS, Segwise enables you to quickly add that winning element to other creatives and test them, accelerating your creative testing velocity.
So, why wait? Start your free trial today to scale Meta ads with data-backed confidence!
