You don't need more ads. You need more signals.

A lot of teams think they have a creative volume problem. They don't. They have a creative diversity problem.

The usual ways teams create more "creative" — same video with a different headline, same UGC with a different CTA, same product shot on a different background — are easy to produce because you're changing the surface of the ad. You're not changing the underlying idea.

That distinction matters even more after Andromeda. The direction the industry has moved in is clear: creative itself is becoming a much bigger part of the audience signal. So the goal isn't to keep feeding the account more files. The goal is to keep feeding it meaningfully different signals — and that's a research problem, not a production problem.

You've probably seen people talk about Entity ID in this context, so one clarification first: Entity ID is not an official Meta term. There is no "Entity ID" field in Ads Manager. It's a concept advertisers use to describe an observed behavior in Meta's system — you can create 30 different Creative IDs, but that doesn't mean Meta treats all 30 as independent ideas.

The exact mechanics aren't public, so don't treat Entity ID as a literal number you can find in your account. The useful takeaway is much simpler: two ads can have different IDs and still be very similar from the system's point of view. Near-identical ads don't expand your delivery — they compete with each other for it.

Compare that with a studio product demo becoming a customer talking from her kitchen, or a rational product explanation becoming a personal story about why every previous solution failed. Those changes move the context, the narrative, the visual language, and often the audience the ad speaks to. That's what real creative diversity looks like.

There's no magic number, but a useful working range is 8–15 conceptually different ads in an ad set. The important word is conceptually, not literally.

The better question is not "do I have enough ads?" It's "does the next ad add new information?" If it does, make it. If it's another version of something you've already tested, that time is better spent developing a new concept. Ten genuinely different ideas can teach you more than thirty variations of one.

This is where creative teams get stuck. The request comes in as "we need 20 new hooks," the hooks become UGC scripts, a few CTAs and formats get added, and by the end there are 30 new ads. On paper the volume looks great. In reality the team may still be testing one idea.

Creative diversity starts further upstream. At the concept level you decide what you're actually saying: the angle, the trigger you're tapping, the problem you're solving, the mechanism that makes your solution different — and who the idea is actually for. That last one is your avatar, and it matters more than most teams realize. A beginner thinks "I don't know where to start." Someone who has already tried five solutions thinks "why is none of this working?" Same product — completely different problem, motivation, and message.

Only after the concept is clear do you get into execution: hook, format, script, visual treatment, CTA, landing page. Those matter, but they're downstream. If the underlying angle doesn't change, changing the hook five times doesn't give you five new ideas — you're optimizing inside the same concept. This is why teams can spend weeks "testing creative" without learning much: they keep changing the bottom layer while barely touching the top.

Here's where teams lose the signal a second time. You collect 100 customer quotes, sort them by upvotes — and now you're optimizing for popularity instead of insight. One viral thread can generate dozens of comments reacting to the same event, which makes your research look far more diverse than it is.

Instead, cluster the quotes by theme. "I don't know where to start." "There are too many options." "Every tutorial assumes I already know what I'm doing." Different sentences — same underlying problem: beginners feel overwhelmed before they start. That's an angle.

Then count independent conversations, not comments. Ten comments in one viral thread aren't ten signals. Ten people in ten different threads saying roughly the same thing — that's interesting. This is the moment customer research turns into creative strategy: each solid cluster hands you a trigger, a pain, or an avatar.

The other side of the system is the Meta Ad Library. There are thousands of ads in there, and most aren't worth studying. The ones that matter show two signals. Lifespan: the longer the window between when an ad first appeared and when it was last active, the more evidence the idea survived real spend. And variation: a brand running UGC, founder, and static executions around the same underlying concept isn't keeping one lucky ad alive — it's investing in the concept.

Don't save the ad. Deconstruct it. For each interesting ad, record the hook and its type, the problem being introduced, the mechanism that explains why the product works, the proof, the offer, the CTA, and the persona. Then read the structure as a whole: Hook → Problem → Mechanism → Proof → Offer → CTA.

Do this across 20, 30, 50 ads and patterns appear — different brands, actors, and visual styles running on the same underlying structure. Name the patterns and store them. Now your team has a library of proven ways to build ads instead of reinventing the structure every time a brief opens.

The old question was "how many ads did we make this month?" The better sequence: how many genuinely different concepts did we add? How many different avatars did we speak to? And only then — how many executions should we build from those concepts?

The order matters. Concept first, execution second. More ads don't automatically mean more learning; more genuinely different signals give you more opportunities to learn.