#paid-media
Thread
Hey Y'all -
Wanted to get your opinion on whether something is wrong with my account or something else. I am a protein bar brand () so this time of year is very strong for us. We are a small brand spending less than $8k / month so I don't think this is a case of bumping up against market size.
January 2025: Bid Caps, record spend, great results.
February 2025: Bid Caps, first half of the month spend dropped by 66% and even after raising my bid cap by 40% vs. January, spend was only 50% for the month. Seemed to be retargeting more than acquiring new customers.
March 2025: Starting on 2/28 I switched to Highest Volume from bidcap and Meta only spent about half the budget. This morning it has started out incredibly slow. The traffic has been dogshit too, low add to cart rate/not signing up for our email newsletter.
Has anyone else experienced performance changing on a dime like this?
And also low engagement/new followers starting in Feb.
What does your creative mix look like?
I think it is a good mix of different creatives.
Videos + statics (product photos, lifestyle shots).
Running CBO.
How long have your creatives been in market / how often are you refreshing?
Best creatives have been in market since Summer 2024. I try to add 5-10 pieces of creative per month.
So only thing I can think of is you're not expanding the top of the funnel enough. When you have a CC structure that previously worked and then stops spending (with high frequency to boot), it's because there's not enough TOFU "audience warming" happening. Either inside or outside the account.
Ash talked about this recently:
"First, let me set the stage: Our Meta account runs on cost caps, and about 95% of our ads were static images. This strategy worked for a long time because we had strong organic visibility driving top-of-funnel awareness through influencers.
So basically, we were using Meta to harvest the middle of the funnel.
Here's where things fell apart: During Q4, our influencer content slowed down. No viral moments. No major organic pushes.
It was safe to say, without that top-of-funnel content, we were tapping out audiences pretty quickly with our ads. Spend dropped dramatically when the calendar flipped.
It became clear we needed to shift from static to video, especially to content that felt authentic.
So we started whitelisting."
tl/dr they had a ton of awareness building happening outside their acct last year so Meta was optimized for MOFU content. When that went away, spend + traffic dropped like a stone.
Fix has been whitelisting creator/influencer content to warm the funnel in Meta".
This is getting a bit long, but I'll add another couple of points...
Thanks for the thoughts, definitely looking into this.
Quick question, what time frames do you evaluate frequencies on for a specific ador campaign? Example: Monthly frequency of X is good. Or Annual frequency of Y is good.
At your spend you probably shouldn't be hitting major frequency issues. But it mostly comes down to your addressable market and the goals of an ad set or campaign.
But, rule of thumb - If anything I put into market starts getting over 7 frequency, that's a problem. It means the ad/ad set is just hammering a tiny cohort of my audience. If the CBO is hitting 5+ frequency across ad sets, then again, you're retargeting heavy.
If you're running a major sale over a short period, take that into account because Meta will actively go after MOFU and BOFU audiences. That's fine during a short burst.
But if you have a high frequency over a month+, then you're going to need to either do more outside of the account to get more people in market (influencer seeding helps here), or get more TOFU oriented creative into your account.
Here's whats winning for us currently: UGC mashups -
This ad has relatively low frequency (just over 2), and a ROAS of 5 over hundreds of thousands of impressions in Q1 so far. It's CPA is about half our typical winners.
Some more tactics for you if this is a TOFU issue:
Thanks for helping me try to work through this! Seriously, it is a huge help
When you are looking at that frequency of >7...is that over a month? Or what time frame? Because my top ads are way below though and account for more than 90% of spend.
Which is why this whole thing has me puzzled, it is almost like something just broke in the system and stopped wanting to spend overnight.
Yeah none of these are in the red zone frequency wise.
On a lowest cost CBO, your account should be spending your whole budget within very small variations ever day. So if that's not happening there might be something foundational going on in the tech or ad account set-up.
Hey Michael
A few quick questions:
• Are you running BAU and excluding past purchasers? OR Adv+ full broad?
• Have you checked your landing page rate? (LPV / Outbound Clicks should be +80%)
• For any obvious errors, install Microsoft Clarity and see if anything stands out
• Agree with Kent - lowest cost should almost always spend
• Have you looked at your pixel health?
If you don't come right - happy to have a look through for you.
@Theo van Wyk thank you!
• Adv+ full broad but I exclude 30 Day Purchases
• Landing Page Rate: Yesterday was 75%, prior was 95%
• Microsoft Clarity: will give this a shot!
• Lowest Cost: Spent less than 20% of budget yesterday, looks bad today too.
• Pixel Health: No reported issues.
Less than 20% of budget on lowest cost? That's bonkers. Doesn't make any sense.
@Kent Wilson that is why I reached out because I know Facebook loves spending my money! Something definitely broke with my account in February, and I can't figure out what the issue is.
It is strange because I didn't make any changes that I'm aware of other than creating new ad sets with new creatives.
In the past I have had to duplicate campaigns to try to comb out weird technical issues. Never faced this one though.
@Kent Wilson when you have duplicated campaigns does that port over the same post ids/engagement? I haven't tried that yet but I could try to duplicate my campaign
No, I believe they basically start fresh with new IDs, unfortunately.
@Kent Wilson and @Theo van Wyk if you were me right now would duplication be the next thing you try?
@Michael de Lyon we had an issue where Meta decided to just stop spending for the rest of the day, which smelled off. Turns out they had lowered our daily spend limit from ~13k to literally $100. Agreed with the other folks who said that if you’re on highest volume and not spending everything, that’s just weird and sounds like something is going on.
FWIW on the cost control front: we started our cost controlled journey in August after 9+ months of inefficient spend on highest volume. Bid caps worked well but ended up stopping all spend (including when raising the cap madly) but moving to cost caps instead of bid caps + focusing on launching top of funnel creative is what got us out of that hole.
Update: I turned off a bunch of ads that had spent very little since march. The account spent 70% of the budget yesterday. So better.
@Laila Zouaki for the top of funnel creative, are you running a separate campaign for it? Or is it getting spend within the cost caps?
Also shoutout H-Town!
Great to hear it started spending. And yes. I would 100% duplicate. But if you build ads using post ids then it would retain comments. Do you know how to do that?
frequency over 7? we never get any frequency over 2
for the top of funnel creative, are you running a separate campaign for it? Or is it getting spend within the cost caps?
all in one campaign! it’s getting spend within the cost caps – the CPA at the ad level tends to be slightly higher but that’s to be expected (ads that are more bottom of funnel end up at a much lower CAC)
Logical next step for sure. Sucks to lose the SP but worth a test for sure.
Keep us updated if this campaign does spend?
This is so strange.
@Theo van Wyk and @Kent Wilson will let you know how it goes!
How long would you expect for it to start spending?
I mean, I don't have any experience with Meta where they wouldn't spend my budget on lowest cost. So I couldn't even guess.