Meta · Published 2026-05-07 · 3 min read
How much spend does a creative need to learn?
In the last post I wrote that it is hard to tell where a creative stops learning and starts burning out. To get at that, let us plot CPA against spend, broken down by day, week or month depending on how long the period is.
The picture shows real data from a project I joined three weeks ago. The first thing I did was build this chart.
📊 What the chart shows. For every creative, CPA falls until roughly $3k of cumulative spend — that is the learning phase. After $2k a steady rise in CPA begins — the slow burnout phase.
🔍 Where the project stands
- You can say precisely what state a creative is in right now: learning, working, or burning out.
- My project is stagnating — creatives are slowly burning out and there are no new ones.
- The learning threshold on this project is around $3k. That is the vertical line from the previous post. We can wait for CPA to fall up to that line. And the odds are good that CPA will rise after it.
🔵 The blue creative held out to $13k. For the rest burnout started around $4k.
🟢 Look at the green creative. CPA fell until $4k — the creative was learning — and from $4k it started to climb. The creative was good for $4k, after which it began to burn out.
These are exactly the micro-audiences we target when we launch campaigns, the ones Dmitry Gursky of Flo talked about in his interview for Adapty. Meta finds a narrow quality segment for a creative, and when it is exhausted, CPA rises.
📌 Conclusions. The era when you could quickly find one working creative and run it profitably is over. I am not saying it is impossible — with enough experiments you may well hit a creative that spends tens or hundreds of thousands. But at the start of a project your chart will most likely look like this one.
With neural networks around, creatives are made in bulk, they compete with each other and burn out fast. If you are running all your traffic through a single top performer, the odds are it is already showing a worsening CPA.
🔥 What to do about it
- Build a pipeline for producing new creatives. New creatives should move through the quadrants. You have to produce, scale and switch them off quickly. How to generate creatives at volume and how to handle them inside campaigns is what I cover in detail on the course.
- Analytics that show exactly where the learning and burnout lines fall. We will look at how to build that chart with a neural network.
By the way, if you have already spent money, you can build this chart for your own account right now and say precisely how much spend a creative needs to learn.
Course UA Manager 2026: META & Google Ads at full tilt. 📅 Starts 15 May. 📅 Ends 15 July. 🔗 Registration 🔗 Details
or just write to me — @SiberianPaaanda