This exact question has been making rounds for a full year now.
People love to blame meta or think that something is broken but the way meta works now is based on angles and variations.
If you are selling a pillow for example,
And your setup and ads just point out it's a pillow, good price, good quality it's not going to go anywhere, as you said it might pick up a handful of buyers in a super small sized audience but it will be impossible to scale outside that.
It's just how meta works now.
What you want to do instead:
Write down at least 4 different angles and variations and if you are using avatars make sure to switch them up.
Examples:
1: My skin has never looked better after 3 nights sleeping with this pillow (Skin care, acne angle)
2: I would always wake up still feeling tired but due to the XYZ fabric from Tibet, I finally wake up energized.
3: My anxiety almost completely vanished after a week sleeping with this pillow versus my Ikea ones, turns out the silk used blabla has effect on XYZ
4: Struggling to fall a sleep? Is your mind still raising, this pillow is for you.
What this does is allowed your campaigns and adsets to reach multiple audiences.
Anxiety, Skin care, Bad sleepers and so on.
Top, Mid and Bottom funnel should all be in one campaign.
People that are still not convinced should also be shown ads with for example proof.
So on top of the variations, show ads with reviews, ratings, social proof and so on.
I am NOT saying you can't sell pillows just based on them looking good and are nicely priced, it's just that meta wants ads that can resonate with a much broader audience before you can scale, and those ads just don't cut it anymore.
Avatars AKA the if you are running reels you might want to NOT just use a white older lady but mix it up with ages, race, possible a doctor of sorts as a young person might resonate so much more with someone closer to their age, or a older person might not resonate with someone younger and so on.
And with AI it's now easier than ever to get these angles, variations and in general all these ads together.
Meta now basically runs your entire funnel on their platform while before your entire funnel used to mostly be your landing page.
Provide meta what they want instead of going against it.
In most cases the reality = YOUR ADS SUCK & YOU ARE BEING LAZY.
Might sound harsh but it's just facts.
Start with ABO setups, and test as much as possible but don't touch touch and touch get some solid data first, move your winners to a new campaign (CBO) and start that with a much higher budget and keep scaling that while still adding new ads in your ABO (Prospecting is what I like to call it) and rinse and repeat,
Might sound like a lot of work but once you get the hang of it, it's honestly not at all.
You also don't need thousands of ads a month but at least keep adding 20 or up a month or so and base them of the angle and variations that are doing the best.
BUT obviously there are also still so much other things you can do such as using RULES, decreasing your spend on ages, placements, genders that don't work etc
Duplication still works, it's weird but still does.
Make sure you create custom audiences that you can exclude as soon as possible too.
SCALE.
